Bay Area designers have long had green outlook

Last month, I sat on a panel for the Luxury Marketing Council to discuss the issues of sustainability in the luxury market. The packed audience consisted of high end real estate agents, bankers, jewelers, and the like. I always love exposing these ideas to groups who do not normally come into contact with green that often.

They usually become incredibly excited at these ideas, a testament to the logic and need for sustainability.

On the panel with me was Mike Freed, owner of Passport Resorts the company that developed various Eco Resorts: such as Post Ranch Inn and Cavallo Point .


BTW, The Post Ranch Inn was designed by a mentor of mine, and fellow organic architect, Mickey Muennig .

Zahid Sardar, Architecture critic for the San Francisco Chronicle, wrote an article today about the success of Passports resorts as luxurious architecture.

Also on the panel with Mike and myself were:
* Kimberley Gardiner
Marketing manager for Lexus Hybrid

* Helge Hellberg
Marketing director of Marin Organic
(who, by the way, charmed everyone with his enthusiasm and personality!)


Full Story via SFGate.com

The Eliphante Art House

The Eliphante Art House

The Eliphante Art House is the home of artist Michael Kahn and his wife Leda Livant built from found materials. Located in Cornville, Arizona, it represents a fine example of folk art home building.

An excerpt:

ANY fool can hire an architect to draw up a plan for a house, but it takes a truly inspired fool — which is to say, an artist — to start building and see where the earth and driftwood and shards of broken pottery take him, and an equally impassioned fool — say, a woman in love — to go along and carry the rocks on her back.

The Eliphante Art House Website

My current TV Profile

I was just interviewed for Current TV (the Al Gore user created content channel). I hate the sound of my voice, so I couldn't watch the whole thing, but it is beautifully edited.

Please be sure to vote for it when you watch.

Watch now...

Malcolm Wells: Underground Organic Architect

This article on one of my mentors, Malcolm Wells, the father of underground building.

More on Malcolm here.

I first discovered Mac through this book in 1985. I wrote him a letter and we have been friends since. Beyond the ideas, his sketches are so evocative and extraordinary.

Biomimicry: the solution lies in Nature

Great article on Janine Benyus, author of Biomimicry.

Sensing that there were broader applications at the intersection of ecology, commerce, technology, and materials science, she cofounded the Biomimicry Guild in 1998 and developed models for applying biomimicry to industrial design and systems. Among her growing list of clients are Levi Strauss, NASA, Nike, Patagonia, Procter & Gamble, S.C. Johnson, and General Electric.

Buy the book now.

Vertical gardens of Patrick Blanc

Look at the beautiful vertical garden architecture of Patrick Blanc.

Plants don’t need soil in any situation because the soil is merely nothing more than a mechanic support. Only water and the many minerals dissolved in it are essential to plants, together with light and carbon dioxide to conduct photosynthesis. Wherever water is available all year long as in tropical forests or in temperate mountain forests, plants can grow on rocks, tree trunks, and slopes free-of-ground.

Edgar Tafel: Organic Architect

An old friend and mentor, Edgar Tafel, spoke recently at Cornel. A review of his talk is below. Based in New York, Edgar also wrote one of the best accounts of Mr, Wright entitled Apprentice to Genius.

Tafel touched on Wright’s distinct style, called organic architecture, which involves a harmonious consistency between his buildings and their natural environments - one that “proceeds, persists and creates according to the nature of man and his circumstances,” as Wright himself once described. Through the images featured in Tafel’s slideshow, the audience was able to gain knowledge and appreciation of this European, avant-garde structural technique and innovative design. The various pictures of the Fallingwater residence, which was built in 1935 for Edgar J. Kaufman in southwestern Pennsylvania, capture this style distinctly, as the house itself is constructed over a natural waterfall.

Full Story

Russ Lovegrove: Organic Form Designer

The incredible Ted Conference is an annual meeting of the global brain trust. They now have samples of some of the lectures given online. Here is one of them.

Ross Lovegrove is an industrial designer, best known for his work on the Sony Walkman and Apple iMac. In this highly visual presentation, he presents his recent work—from furniture to water bottles—which is organic in form and inspired by nature.

Watch his lecture

What Wright taught us. Are we listening?

You Can Own An American Home
A Frank Lloyd Wright exhibition makes us ask: What can we learn from Wright's ideas, and are we paying attention?

The recently opened "Frank Lloyd Wright and the House Beautiful" exhibition at Boise Art Museum (BAM) contains over 100 pieces--including furniture, fixtures, magazines, textiles, photos and rarely exhibited original drawings--organized around the theme of the "house beautiful" (Wright published a book by that title in 1897), or the idea that an interior's style improved the life of its inhabitants.



Full Story

Organic Paper Sculptures

22 year old British artist/designer, Richard Sweeny, creates incredible paper sculptures from folded paper. Richard says, “I'm highly influenced by natural form; structures in nature are very efficient, the maximum is achieved using the least material and energy possible. Growth patterns produce forms that appear very complex, yet have a basic underlying principle.”

via Inhabit

more images on Flikr

Richard Sweeny Website

Want to live in a shipping container?

Innovative architects turn used shipping containers into homes
In this era of scouring the earth for the magic bullet in home building, few ideas can compete with the weird, pragmatic beauty of the used shipping container. Cheap, strong and easily transportable by boat, truck or train, these big steel structures now litter the ports of America as mementos of our Asian-trade imbalance. (Many more full containers arrive on our shores than depart, so ports either ship them back empty -- to the tune of about $900 per -- or sell them.)

FULL STORY

Walter Thomas Brooks: organic architect

From the start, Walter Thomas Brooks has regarded each building as an experiment.

"Each building has a principle behind it, usually related to organic or natural form," Brooks says.

FULL STORY

Wal-Mart goes organic?

Wal-Mart, the nation's largest grocer, has decided to take organic food seriously. Beginning later this year, Wal-Mart plans to roll out a complete selection of organic foods - certified to have been grown without pesticides - in its nearly 4,000 stores.

The company says it will price all this organic food at only 10 percent more than the conventional kind. Organic food will soon be available to the tens of millions of Americans who now cannot afford it. That is the good news.

The bad news? Wal-Mart is notorious for exploiting every loophole, externalizing every cost, and treating everyone it deals with badly. Will they extort the organic farmers as they do the other manufacturers?

Full Story

Organic Architecture in Miami in the 60's

Lost & found: The mid-century modern houses of Chuck Reed Jr. still survive in Florida

Some unique sub-tropical interpretations of the Frank Lloyd Wright school of organic architecture.

FULL STORY

Design Competition Class at UC Berkeley

STARTING JUNE 3rd
Emerging Trends Design Competition Class

Study cutting edge design and get published.
Eric Corey Freed will be teaching this six-week course, where students participate in a real design competition as part of a team. Three to seven competitions available during the time frame of the course are preselected by the instructor. Participants discuss them and select one to pursue. Students learn how to work in a project team and how to set and meet deadlines, explore ideas, and build a portfolio.
ENROLL NOW
COST: $375

The Solar Jellyfish?

Here is the latest model of one of our current projects. it is an addition to a very small existing house. The walls are made from ICF's and have a super high insulation value of R-34. The building is oriented to the sun, not the street. The windows frame views. Of course, non-toxic finishes, paints and adhesives used throughout. The screen on the west side is a sun shade made of bamboo. Solar panels and a water catchment system are also included. Although it is not even started construction, it is already being featured in Innovative Home Magazine. Our client refers to it as a jellyfish (sometimes octapus) based on the shape of the floor plan.

Online Tools

Online Tools
We get dozens of requests for suggestions of Green Building software or online tools. Here is a list of the sites we use. Please contact us if you have additions.

The Sensor Placement + Optimization Tool or SPOT is intended to assist a designer in quantifying the existing or intended electric lighting and annual daylighting characteristics of a given space and to help establish the optimal photosensor placement for the space relative to annual performance and annual energy savings.

Eagle GeoCode will calculate the longitude and latitude of any street address. We use this information to calculate the angles of the sun.

Financial Incentives for Solar Energy lists the incentives and rebates in California for Solar Panels.

Sun Path Program creates sun charts for any latitude location.

The photovoltaic performance calculator , PVWatt, calculates typical performance of solar electric arrays for more than 200 locations in the National Solar Radiation Database.

The Database of State Incentives for Renewable Energy (DSIRE) is a comprehensive source of information on state, local, utility, and selected federal incentives that promote renewable energy. DSIRE now includes state and federal incentives for energy efficiency.

Building for Environmental and Economic Sustainability (BEES) 2.0K Software for measuring environmental and economic performance.

GreenerBuildings a free resource to help companies of all sizes and sectors understand and address building design, construction, and operation in a way that aligns environmental responsibility with business success.

All Tech Lighting offers this free online calculator to help building owners understand the financial impact of replacing or retrofitting their existing lighting to energy-efficient systems. Simply enter the number of fixtures, number of hours on per day, and cost per killowatt hour to calculate your savings.

Building Energy Software Tools Directory: More than 275 energy-related software tools for buildings, with an emphasis on using renewable energy and achieving energy efficiency.

EnergyPlus is a building energy simulation program for modeling building heating, cooling, lighting, ventilating, and other energy flows.

eVALUator Financial Analysis Software calculates life-cycle benefits of improved building design investments. The analysis considers a variety of factors over the life of a project, including energy costs, financing costs, operations and maintenance costs, and tax implications.

Watts Towers

A great little documentary on
Simon Rodilla and the building of the Watts Towers in south-central Los Angeles.

The Towers (1957)

While there, be sure to check out the rest of the Prelinger Archives

An Italian site dedicated to Organic Architecture:
The International Web Portal of Organic Architecture

Green and beautiful: Make design decisions that please the earth and the eye

Eric was quoted in an article about Frank Lloyd Wright and Green Buildings:
Rights and wrongs of a Wright renovation

Often, returning older houses to their original condition is enough, according to Eric Freed, a San Francisco-based architect whose sustainable designs are influenced by Wright's "organic" architecture. "A lot of these older buildings have an inherent sensitivity to the environment," he says. "They have operable windows. They recognise that the sun rises in the east and sets in the west. The postwar generation mostly ignored that."

Of course, he says, many "also have lead paint, asbestos and mould".

In fact, Wright's materials selection would stack up reasonably well by current green standards. He used cork flooring and oil-based products and plastics - in paints, insulation and flooring. Wherever possible, he avoided painting surfaces and he designed using the dimensions of building materials as units of measure, reducing waste. He also used stone and earth from his building sites. The latter, mixed with concrete, yielded a patina that matched the landscape, Freed notes.

Building new ideas
Free your mind and architectural concepts will follow

it's not just your workers who need to relax. Your buildings do, too. So sayeth today's prophets of organic architecture, an old movement with roots in ancient Greece, art nouveau and the work of Frank Lloyd Wright that is now experiencing a controversial revival.

LINK