Hollywood Helpers

Hurricane Katrina in the Gulf of Mexico, in combination with the breaking of New Orlean's levees, devastated millions of lives in 2005. Even Brad Pitt's. After visiting the area, Pitt was inspired by the debris and destruction to rebuild the Lower Ninth Ward, a sector of New Orleans that sits along the river. In 2007, he hosted an architectural design competition with Global Green for rebuilding with sustainable design. There are a total of 13 different architects of local, national, and international founding to mix local culture with fresh ideas. The architects include:

Local
Billes Architects – New Orleans, LA
Eskew Dumez Ripple – New Orleans, LA
Concordia – New Orleans, LA
Trahan Architects – Baton Rouge, LA
John Williams Architects – New Orleans, LA

National
BNIM – Kansas City, MO
Kieran Timberlake - Philadelphia, PA
Morphosis – Santa Monica, CA
Pugh + Scarpa – Santa Monica, CA

International
Adjaye Architects – London, England
Constructs – Accra, Ghana
Graft – Berlin, Germany
MVRDV – Rotterdam, Holland
Shigeru Ban Architects – Tokyo, Japan

So far, 8 homes have been completed, out of 91 currently-sponsored homes, but a total of 150 homes are planned.

An artistic offset of the Make it Right organization is The Pink Project, in which 150 pink structures dominate the Lower Ninth Ward, representing the future of the neighborhood because of Make it Right.

MoMA

I went to MoMa, the Museum of Modern Art in NY, a few months ago and they had an architectural exhibit. They had sketches, plans, and, most of all, models. Here are my pictures from it:A particularly interesting design was Hotel Habitat (immediately above). A plaque read, "The design concept for Hotel Habitat is "your room in a tree". The building is encased in a steel "energy mesh," with each of the mesh's five thousand "leaves" comprising a photovoltaic cell, a battery, a processor, and an LED capable of emitting red, green, or blue light. During the day, the photovoltaic cells collect energy from the sun, charging the batteries, at night the LEDs emit a color, which varies according to the amount of energy the cells have collected. The stell skin- architecture as performance- then becomes a cloud of artificial light around the hotel, and a kind of thermometer."
In the model, the building is glowing neon green, but by the LED lights, they actually mean the slightly visible dots that make up the mesh netting.
Here's more techinical details.

In light of Earth Day...

There is green design, or sustainable design, which aims to minimize buildings' effects on the environment, and then there is biophilic design, which incorporates nature into the buildings. Biophilic design emerges from Edward O. Wilson's biophilia (literally meaning "love of life") theory that humans have an innate attraction to all things natural and living. It uses nature to instill feelings of peace and comfort, focusing more on the aesthetic aspects between nature and buildings. So, while green design recycles and conserves energy, biophilic design sprouts pretty plants.
The two are not mutually exclusive, though. For example, increasing natural lighting inside not only saves electric power, but also creates a biophilic environment. The Alice H. Cook House at Cornell University (where I will be this summer!), is a residential hall that meets both sustainable and biophilic requirements very well. Plants and grass grow on the roof, which also helps insulate the building. A lake provides chilled water, lowering the amount of energy needed for cooling. In addition, all materials are recycled, made locally, and use as few chemicals as possible.
Here are other examples of biophilic design:

Prisma building, Nuremberg, Germany

Greenhouse Nightclub, New York, New York

Kitchen-in-a-box

What if you had a lunchbox that could not only store your food but keep it cold? "That's nothing special," you think. What if you could cook your food with it, too? What if you could purchase your groceries from it?? Now you say there is no such thing.
The Electrolux Personal Mini Kitchen, however, is designed by Kai Yu to do all of the above. Along with a drink cooler, there are compartments for storing hot and cold foods, and utensils.
The innovation includes an electric cooking mat, too. Using different settings, you can fry, boil, or steam your food. It's a perfect solution to that luke-warm lunch you always bring to work.
Finally, the mini-kitchen even comes equipped with a touchscreen monitor. With it, you can use to search recipes, order groceries, or chat with other people, just in case you get lonely while you're eating. It's everything you need for a kitchen- in a box!

World's largest & smallest residences

In Mumbai, India, Mukesh Ambani, 2008's fifth richest man in the world, lives in a 27 story house, if you can call it that, costing almost $2 billion. In reality, it is more of a sky scraper, reaching 550 ft high (normally equal to 60 stories), with approximately 400,000 total sq ft. He and his family of a wife and three children originally lived in a 22-story home, but that's just not spacious enough. Impressed by the design of Mandarin Oriental Hotel in New York, they hired the same architecture firm and interior design company; Will and Perkins, and Hirsch Bedner Associations, respectively. They almost literally designed the building on the spot, making up floor plans and arrangements while construction went on. They must have had quite a flow of creative juice, though, because every floor is unique, even in their materials. In addition to that, the house boasts

• 3 helipads
• 3 floors worth of gardens (After all, you wouldn't want have to go down 27 stories to look at your tulips. However, the plants also absorb sunlight, keeping the house cooler.)
  
• 9 elevators
• parking lots on 6 stories
• 600 staff members
• ballroom with crystal chandelier ceiling
• pools, gyms, yoga studios, health clubs
• a room filled with man-made snow (air conditioning is so outdated)
• theaters- movie and stage
• multiple "safe" rooms
• bars
• silver-coated railings
• everything else you can imagine
  

Oh, the things you can do with money...
That's all grand and lovely, but what about those houses on the other end of the scale? How small can a house be while still being inhabitable?
Inspired by the billboard, Front Architects of Poland developed Single Hauz, prefabfricated structures that house single residents on a mere 290 sq ft. Because it mounts on a post, the Single Hauz can exist virtually anywhere on Earth, from cliffs, to the middle of the ocean (though I'm not sure why anyone would want to live there). The complex contains a kitchen & eating area, a living room, and a bathroom on the first floor. Upstairs is the bedroom, and access onto the roof. What more do you need, anyway?










 *note* The world's largest residence, at more than 2 million sq ft, is actually Istana Nurul Iman palace, where the Sultan of Brunei lives. However, it is also used as an administrative building and includes offices so I didn't count it.