Lincoln Heights, Los Angeles. 

Master plan by Thomas DeVoss. 

Lincoln Heights is an emerging neighborhood at the confluence of the Arroyo Seco and Los Angeles Rivers. 

This master plan builds off the Cleantech corridor plan, the Perkins and Will plan, the Cornfields plan, and the LA Riverworks plans for river revitalization. This new plan aims to position Lincoln Heights for self-sustainability and enhanced connectivity to the rest of the city.  Primary goals: Unify the North and South sides of the river, create new pedestrian and bike paths, mend the break in the LA River bike path, add urban agriculture and leisure, and provide for healthy wetland habitat…

kmackay:

How Google Earth Revealed Chicago’s Hidden Farms

bloghunsonisgroovy:

Soleta ZeroEnergy One

mothernaturenetwork:

A DIY smart home fit for a tech legend
In a video tour that’s sure to make techies week at the knees, computer programmer Loren Amelang shows off his woodsy yet completely wired Mendocino County, Calif. smart home.

fuckyeahengineers:

Highway or Power Plant?

mothernaturenetwork:

Beijing’s incredible, inedible egg house
What’s an architect to do when he can’t afford to pay rent in one of the most expensive cities in the world? Erect a solar-powered, grass-clad, egg-shaped hut on the streets of Beijing, of course.

architizer:

Cornell and Technion have just been awarded a coveted city grant to build their SOM-designed applied science campus on Roosevelt Island.

mototerra:

sivales:

One day….

Here!

acidadebranca:

Black & White Plans

[384]  

THE SOLAR TEMPLE OF AMEN-RA AT KARNAK, EGYPT

via

mothernaturenetwork:

Building luxury underground bunkers seems to be all the rage these days, and there’s really no reason not to reserve a space in one. After all, paper currency is going to be useless in a post-apocalyptic world so you might as well spend your money now, right? Built in a former Atlas-F missile solo, Survival Condo extends 200 feet below the Earth’s surface and is powered by solar panels, a generator and its own wind turbine. You’ll even dine on a diet of organic produce and homegrown fish fresh from the facility’s state-of-the-art hydroponic and aquaculture center.

Check out our other suggestions for the best places in the U.S. to survive the apocalypse.

quantumaniac:

Scientists Develop Solar Panels that Work in the Dark

Researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory announced today (November 30th) that they have developed and confirmed the design for a new high-efficiency solar cell that utilizes nearly the entire solar spectrum, instead of simply visible light! This solar panel can generate electricity in the absence of direct sunlight, meaning that they can work in the dark! In the past, solar cells have used certain semiconductors to channel and utilize one part of the spectrum. However, this new design uses layers of various materials to make use of nearly the entire solar spectrum! 

As lavish birthday gifts go, it’s hard to top this one: Naomi Campbell received an island vacation home for her 41st birthday from her Russian billionaire boyfriend Vladislav Doronin, according to numerous online reports. It’s shaped like the Egyptian Eye of Horus on a location known as Cleopatra Island in Turkey’s Gulf of Gökova

mothernaturenetwork:

Fire up those photovoltaics, ladies and gents … the 2011 Solar Decathlon is upon us. Here’s a sneak peak of the innovative Solar Decathlon houses.

mothernaturenetwork:

Welcome to the sustainable future. These ‘grove’ parking lots not only shade cars during the day, but they also recharge the electric cars sitting below them with solar power.

annaovchinnikova:

I imagine myself rocking and rocking and rocking… while being green and sustainable :)

Clip-On Architecture

food-itecture:

http://urbanomnibus.net/main/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/Clip-On-Retrofit.jpg

sustainable-sam:

alexanderpf:

Earthships sound like they might just beam us beyond our current laws of reality, and they delightfully look like it too. Architect Mike Reynolds has been developing his Earthships for decades, traveling from their base in Taos, New Mexico to Haiti, China, and even the Lower East Side of Manhattan.

An Earthship derives its electricity from the sun and wind, its water from rain and snow, and its temperature regulation from the earth. An internal sewage treatment system means each drop of water is used four times, feeding lush wetlands of flowers and vegetables. The walls are literally made of trash: tires filled with dirt, glorious stained glass windows of old beer bottles. It doesn’t get much more radically self-sustainable than this, folks.

via unconsumption More: Hitching a Ride on an Earthship :: Etsy Blog

Jeffrey prefers the layout of these compared to just a little cob house, which is fine by me, they make so much more sense, and we can have a good yield of food indoors as well. I prefer the idea of having one long house instead of a few smaller buildings which is something we’ve also been looking at. No rush, we have to work on getting that land first :) 

A team of researchers from Boston College and MIT have developed a hybrid flat panel that is capable of producing electricity from the sun’s rays as well as hot water for thermal energy. The team’s new flat panel is eight times more efficient than previously developed solar thermoelectric generators and could make solar thermoelectric technology more cost effective on a wider scale. Solar Thermal energy is expensive and generally employed in large installations — like the one above — with this new flat panel, solar thermal energy could become a much more valuable investment. The team has increased the energy output without adding much to the dollar sign side of the equation.

In order to develop the panels the team used nanotechnology to combine spectrally-selective solar absorbers in a vacuum sealed chambers with high-performance thermoelectric materials. “Existing solar-thermal technologies do a good job generating hot water. For the new product, this will produce both hot water and electricity,” said Boston College professor of physics, Zhifeng Ren. “Because of the new ability to generate valuable electricity, the system promises to give users a quicker payback on their investment. This new technology can shorten the payback time by one third.”

The added materials doesn’t make the panel much more expensive than existing solar thermal technology — but increases the energy generation dramatically — which means this could be a big development in clean energy markets.”We have developed a flat panel that is a hybrid capable of generating hot water and electricity in the same system,” said Ren. “The ability to generate electricity by improving existing technology at minimal cost makes this type of power generation self-sustaining from a cost standpoint.”

Via PhysOrg

Read more: New Solar-Thermal Flat Panels Are Eight Times More Efficient than Existing Technology New Solar-Thermal Flat Panels Generate Electricity and Hot Water All at Once – Inhabitat - Green Design Will Save the World 

sfitzgerald:

Undercurrents video series about Ecovillages - an obsession with community and low impact living that began in Gower, Wales, traveled to Australia, Spain, Scotland and Ireland and returned full circle (or spiral) to where it began. People growing their own food, building their own homes and learning to be self sufficient.

Boston’s TREEPODS INIATIVE proposes to embody, and artificially enhance, the most important biological characteristic of natural trees: the capacity to clean the air, taking the CO² and releasing O².

Boston’s TREEPODS INIATIVE is a sustainable project leaded by Influx_Studio and ShiftBoston. The aim ff this collaboration is to allow the achievement of Boston’s global goals in terms of carbon reduction programs in the short time, giving us enough time to make the change from the present fossil fuel economy into a new Zero carbon energy economy.

The proposal could be define as a CO2-scrubbing living machine. Treepods may well redesign in an urban radical new way our polluted urban environment, interacting with natural trees, and enhancing its carbon absorption capacity. In that way, those artificial trees don’t replace the natural ones, but they act like small urban “air cleaning infrastructures”. Advanced technologies are actually already developed that allow the capture of the atmospheric carbon dioxide from ambient air in an efficient, economic and sustainable way. Developed by Dr Klaus Lackner, Director of the Lenfest Center for Sustainable Energy at Columbia University, this revolutionary process is based on the discovery of the ‘humidity swing,’ a technology that enables the energy-efficient capture of CO2 from air, allowing to close the carbon cycle and creating a valuable product for beneficial use.

Biomimicry

The aim of the project is create, using biomimicry, an air cleaning and CO² catcher integrated urban device. Looking at nature we can learn from one of the most unique trees in the world, the Dragon Blood Tree (Dracaena cinnabari). Its branches at maturity produce an umbrella shaped crown optimizing its form to create a canopy that provides a maximum of shading surface. The way that its canopy allows the wind flow is showing us an intelligent form like design. The TREEPOD will ne inspired by that, as well as by its branching structure in terms of storage and distribution of resources from ground to the canopy.

The TREEPOD takes the Dragon tree like form to create an important canopy surface that will provide shadow, and that will host a solar pv (sun tracker latest technology) to harvest the energy necessary to powered the air cleaning system and the urban lamp function. The canopy branching structure ends with a myriad of bulbs. They multiplies the contact points between air and the CO², serving as a filter. Working like as alveoli in a human lung, here is where the cleaning gaseous exchange takes place: an alkaline and environmentally friendly resin that reacts with air holding CO². When the CO² saturated resin reacts with water it release CO² for storage, and then it could be used again in the same process.

Structure

The tree will be made with a recycled and recyclable plastic. We propose to use the PET (Polyethylene terephthalate). It is the material commonly used for drink bottles. It presents several relevant advantages: it’s available in large quantities as recycled raw material, it can assume different colorations and degrees of transparency, it can be easily processed to obtain complex forms, it has good tensile resistance and mechanical properties. The entire TREEPOD structure is composed by modular elements, assembled as shown in the scheme.

Urban strategy

We suggest to create a network of TREEPODS system using this new technology, that will embraces the whole city of Boston. Based in its modular capacity, issued from a honeycomb hexagonal geometry, the prototype is able to reach tree different levels of assemblage and urban function: The basic isolated unit as urban furniture. Three assembled units forming a hexagon define the TREEPOD, with social functions that a natural tree had. And finally, a group of trees, creating a great urban canopy, defining places to be.

Social interaction

The TREEPOD will have a social role in the community. It could be an interactive interface, allowing people to interact with the tree and each other. People could play and learn about the ecological paradigm shift. At its basis the tree will host a playing device: a seesaw that harvests kinetic energy. It will allow people to be involved, displaying information in “augmented reality” about de-carbonization process, about sustainable behaviors etc, proposing depending the urban and social context, different ways to help people collaborate each other and to engage citizens in the green agenda.