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We’ve seen vertical gardens on the side of buildings before — but never one this, um, HUGE.

Architects and federal officials are planning a series of 250-foot-tall trellises designed to shade the west side of the remodeled Edith Green-Wendell Wyatt Federal Building. The added greenery is just part of a $135 million project that will also feature elevators that generate electricity on the way down, solar arrays on the roof, smart lighting systems that adjust to the daylight available, among other advances. From the article,

Eggleston’s firm, SERA Architects, is working on some questions that weekend gardeners never have to figure out: what plants will grow readily at more than 200 feet in the air and how to water, fertilize, weed and prune at that height. The pruning might be done in much the same way windows are washed, he said, with workers hoisted and lowered on platforms. Rainwater collected on the roof, supplemented by city water, will be piped for irrigating the green wall, he said.

Construction is expected to take 30 to 40 months.

This will truly be a stunning addition to the Portland cityscape if constructed as planned — and we’re thrilled to see other buildings adopt vertical gardens, as well as sustainable features. Check out the full article for more!

Photo credit: Scott Baumberge

Looking like something out of a science-fiction movie, the concept for a proposed algae farm and vertical garden on the outside of an old Boston historical building is drawing some big attention.

The pods, which are prefabricated and designed to be interlocking, contain algae-incubators on the inside and plants on the outside. The architects for the project would use the old Filene’s Basement site in Boston’s Downtown Crossing as a temporary home for research and biofuel production. The city planners, meanwhile, would have plenty of time to work through the red tape of zoning, financial, and legal webs for any permanent ideas. From the article,

The pods, which are used as incubators for growing algae for biofuel, can be configured in several ways depending on the needs of a given site. Individual pods can also be rented out by researchers for algae-based projects, according to Howeler Yoon. The spaces that form between the attached pods allow for planting and creating a vertical garden.

What do you think? Would you want something like this in your city? I think it’s a pretty wild project that might give us a glimpse of permanent vertical gardens in buildings years from now. For others, however, such a radical shift in architecture might be less than pleasing. Still, better to take advantage of something just sitting there, right?

We’ve all seen the terrible destruction caused by tornadoes — the homes, communities, and lives uprooted. In May of 2007, those images were played out on television screens worldwide when an estimate F5 tornado ripped through the town of Greensburg, Kansas leveling 95% of it. In the wake of this act of nature, the community resolved to rebuild green and become the first city in the nation to have all city buildings conform to LEED-Platinum specifications.

Of course, part of their “going green” also included ways to avoid future cataclysmic damage from tornadoes. Yesterday, a company called Armour Homes demonstrated how their Silo-Eco designs can withstand winds in excess of 200mph — the average force of an F5 tornado. To do this, they took a 1980 Honda Civic, strung it up 60ft above one of their new buildings in Greensburg, and dropped it. The 160 thousand pounds of impact force didn’t even put a dent in the building. From their website,

A round house has 15% less outside wall exposed to the elements than a box house per square foot. Wind passes around instead of building up pressure as on a straight wall, allowing for much higher wind ratings. The most important component is the roof. Traditional builders have improved construction methods of exterior walls, but still frame the roofs with lumber, which leads to the most common point of failure in fires and high winds. With our round design, we can achieve a concrete arched roof with no interior supports that completes a truly hardened, low maintenance exterior shell that any turtle would be proud of.

Sounds like a great building choice for anyone cosidering settling down in “Tornado Alley”. You can see more pictures and floor plans of their homes here.

via KSN.com

I was excited to get my hands on a copy of the first episode of This Old House – Season 28 Austin Edition. As has been reported on the green blogs, for this series, the team is taking on a “green” renovation.

Here is a preview of what topics the show will be covering, and a sneak peak of the house being renovated in Austin.

The house is beautiful to start with, a single level bungalow style home with many architectural details throughout. The homeowners are an environmentally conscious family who is looking to expand their home to house their growing family. Michael Klug and Michele Grieshaber are looking to incorporate green building principles sure as the use of materials which are recycled, durable and sustainable. They are keeping their expansion to 750 to 800 square feet of new living space, which the architect David Webber referred to as “refreshingly modest”. David talked about how as an architect, he was able to incorporate site orientation, sufficient overhangs and specified materials in the plans and construction of the addition.

The builder, Bill Moore, has been a central figure in Austin’s “Green Building Program”. He was on the Advisory Board when it was created in 1990, and his green building roots trace back to the 1970’s when as a carpenter he noticed the large amount of waste and inefficiency at his construction sites.

In this episode, to get us prepped for this project, Bill takes us through his Five Star Rated green home project from last year. Some of the aspects of this house include drought tolerant plants and grass landscaping, a large overhang on the home’s front door, and the use of MDF and wheat straw board materials in the renovated kitchen. Norm noted how the home had a large front porch with rockers on it, and how green building principles encourage people to interact with their neighbors.

Also included in the tour: Energy Star appliances, a roof with a reflective surface and 4″ of foam insulation to repel the sun’s heat, recessed fixtures in the kitchen with CFL bulbs, a large volume rainwater collection system with 16″ deep(!) gutters to collect the torrential rains that soak Austin. Staying with the “healthy home” aspect, no formaldehyde bearing products were used in the construction, low VOC paints, and natural linoleum and refinished wood floors were chosen in lieu of wall to wall carpets.

Finally this episode wrapped up with the unusual dumpster parked outside of this year’s project. “Green in more ways than one,” nothing in this building projects dumpster will reach the landfill. When it is full, it will be trucked out, dumped and hand sorted. By-products will be reused or recycled.

The next episode will focus on the “deconstruction” phase (normally termed the demolition phase), as materials will be carefully disassembled and removed to allow as much of the material to be reused as possible.

I have always been a big fan of This Old House, I feel it is one of PBS’ finest shows. The show’s website is now full of green tips for building and remodeling and is worth a visit. Find when this episode will be shown in your neck of the woods here (PBS schedules vary across the country.)

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Groovy Green hit Cornell University yesterday and took a tour of their winning entry in this year’s Solar Decathalon Competition in Washington, D.C. Jeffrey Gunther (’08) was kind enough to give us a tour of the home and provide some insights into what made this home stand-out from the competition. A beautiful home–and one that the CUSD team hopes might be mass produced to provide cheap, sustainable, enviro-friendly living for people throughout the world. (Beware wind gusts in this video–they sometimes distort audio. We’re working on improving this for future presentations.) CUSD open house tomorrow at 11am! Click the calendar to the right for more info.
Link: CUSD Website