Nguyen La Chanh is a designer who incorporates living plants into household objects to enhance their utility. Here are three examples, including a living moss carpet for the bathroom which doesn't need to be washed, and a swing for the living room which provides aromatic therapy if planted with jasmine.
Ken Yeang is an extremely innovative architect who creates mostly skyscrapers with Bioclimatic design. Bioclimatic design is designing a building with hypersensitivity to local conditions in order to minimize the impact and energy usage. It also incorporates the idea of strengthening the local environment around it, rather than detracting from it.
"If the bioclimatic skyscraper's architecture is to be justified as a new genre of building type, it must transcend being a clever reorganization of external building forms and superficial changes to facades. Essentially, the skyscraper's design must create a new and significant form of internal life for its inhabitant that has not existed before in other genres of the same type."
In honor of earth day last weekend, here is a link to Carl Sagan's infamous episode of Cosmos Who Speak's for Earth? While he is mainly concerned with nuclear proliferation, still a pertinent threat today, his words can also be easily applied to the environmental crisis.
Nature through its infinite iterations over generations, provides us with an amazing knowledge of the most efficient outcomes in the face of certain environmental stimuli. It seems every time we seek to find the best solution to a problem, the answer has already been incorporated by an animal or plant in nature. Two examples of recent discoveries include the physical technologies of gecko's high friction feet and shark's self-cleaning antibacterial skin.
We have an unfathomable supercomputer of data that has been running a monte-carlo like simulation of the conditions in our world and still we destroy it little by little everyday and with increasing magnitude.
Algae is a small organism that can be grown quickly and efficiently for biofuel production. There has been a lot of research done in this field and it is becoming more economical as a means of fuel production for large industry. There is a specially interesting application in pairing the algae production facility with a carbon producing power plant, as algae generally consumes twice their weight in CO2 while growing, sometimes called Carbon Algae Recycling Systems (CARS). Humans seem to habitually produce CO2 in both life function and economic activity, so it is interesting to see research in reciprocal plant evolution.
The developed world can dramatically change their behaviors, and it still would not make a difference to the overall future of the planet. The economic activity that China and other developing countries stand to produce in the next 100 years will greatly outweigh any efforts made by the western world, and the method in which this economic activity is produced will largely decide the fate of the environment. The West and China are much like characters from Shakespeare's Hamlet, with the Western world as the Ghost of Hamlet's father and China as the center of the plot as Hamlet. The Ghost itself can only serve to warn Hamlet of the troubles in the future, and has no physical body to accomplish anything while Hamlet is left to manage the revenge of his father and treachery of his mother. The west can only serve to act as a model for the developing world, and transform itself into the model that it wishes the developing world to emulate, but doesn't really have the ability to impact the outcome of the planet. Hopefully the world will not end up like the conclusion of the play.
China: from Red to Green, great documentary about China and how it will affect the future of the world's environmental impact.
BAHAUS like modern home made from recycled materials, notably steel and cement slab from the elevated portion of the I-93 expressway. This is located in the Six Moon Hill neighborhood of Lexington, Mass. dedicated to the ideals of modernist architecture and living. Interesting how these projects come about.
