BEVERLY HILLS, Calif., April 14 /PRNewswire/ — The CA Boom Design Show (www.caboomshow.com) is North America’s only multi-discipline non-traditional design trade fair exhibition combining the highest caliber of architects, designers and design manufacturers on the west coast. The show brings together the best of modern and contemporary design and architecture in a unique exhibit, conference, [...]

Palm Springs Calif. – The war was over, the economy was picking up and people were optimistic. A fearless sense of “Why not?” sparked creativity in the design world in the 1950s and ’60s. Why not build a house of steel? Why not make the walls curved?
The new ideas influenced everything from airport terminals to [...]

An NFL lineman turned visionary developer today is unveiling startlingly ambitious plans for a solar-powered city of tomorrow in southwest Florida’s outback, featuring the world’s largest photovoltaic solar plant, a truly smart power grid, recharging stations for electric vehicles and a variety of other green innovations. The community of Babcock Ranch is designed to break [...]

The magpie in all of us cannot help but love shiny new green goods and gadgets. They appeal to our desire for, and faith in, technological innovation, and companies and popular media tout their ability to alleviate the various ills and crises besieging our world. The more complicated the technology, the more effective we often [...]

Kris Adam takes pride in the energy-efficient lights, recycled-bottle countertop and soy-based paint that helped his Pizza Fusion restaurant in Weston earn certification from the U.S. Green Building Council.
But if he opens another pizzeria, he may skip the time, money and effort to get those eco-features approved under the Council’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental [...]

MICHIGAN CITY, Ind. — It’s not as if they were in the market for a second home. They already had one in sunny Hilton Head, S.C. So when Jim Coffou pulled the car over to ask his wife, “What would you think about selling the place in Hilton Head and building in Michigan City?” Sara [...]

Osaka, Mar 18, 2009 – (JCN Newswire) – Panasonic Corporation today announced its plan to open an eco-themed showroom called Eco Ideas House on the premises of Panasonic Center Tokyo, a corporate global communication platform of the Panasonic Group. The new facility combines Panasonic’s advanced technologies for saving, creating, and storing energy, and utilizes natural [...]

The Rincon 5 by Los Angeles firm Marmol Radziner recalls the pristine residential architecture of Mies van der Rohe, though this guest house may have more in common with the humble American mobile home.
The modular building exemplifies Marmol Radziner’s clean-lined contemporary design as applied to pragmatic, affordable prefab housing. It is one of a growing [...]

The Mall activities were split between putting up a frame for a ‘green’ home and a “Green Academy” in a neighboring tent. In the “Academy”, YouthBuild members and others had activities related to green building, green-collar jobs, green schools, energy responsibility, and environmental awareness.
The YouthBuild team will not be alone on the Mall. First Lady [...]

A RECENT Amazon.com search for “green home” pulled up more than 15,000 book titles. Who has time to read them all? So this week, The Green Home tracked down Eric Corey Freed, the author of “Green Building & Remodeling for Dummies,” and asked him to distill this growing cottage industry of green advice into five [...]

Modern architecture is no stranger to the greenhouse effect–the heat trapping ability of glass is what has often rendered so many modernist house by Mies van der Rohe and others extraordinarily expensive to cool.
But this house, designed by Verdickt & Verdickt, uses greenhouse warming to its advantage, to generate heat. Reflective panels on either end [...]

IT’S A NEW ERA for Seattle. Where once was Boeing, coffee, grunge and Microsoft, we now must include contemporary architecture. Because what you’re looking at on this page are the present-day Beatles of architectural design: Seattle’s Olson Sundberg Kundig Allen Architects.
…We owe our wealth of contemporary architecture to solving the Northwest conundrum: how to take [...]

LEED — Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design — is all the rage now. It is the go-to measuring stick for green building. It measures site sustainability, water efficiency, energy and atmosphere, materials and resources, indoor environmental quality and innovation and design process.
…Hurttienne sees the role of the architect as always having been to [...]

We’re big fans of architect Adam Kalkin for his quirky and fun home designs, such as the rapidly deploying Push-Button Home and the prefab Quick House. Now we’ve just spotted another fun Adam Kalkin masterpiece called Bunny Lane. A house within another, bigger house, this design is located on 3 acres of property in Kalkin’s [...]

AKRON, Ohio – Many in the building industry see the housing market’s troubles as a disaster.
Russell Versaci sees them as an opportunity.
Versaci, an architect from Middleburg, Va., thinks the economy is finally forcing a halt to the spread of bloated McMansions. He’s leading a movement toward smaller, well-built homes that honor our country’s architectural roots [...]

Like “jumbo shrimp” or “amicable divorce,” the term “eco-mansion” always struck me as a contradiction in terms. If someone really wanted to be green, would they build a mansion?
Frank McKinney, the showman developer and Realtor in Florida (he actually calls himself a “maverick daredevil real-estate artist,” and “superhero”) says he has built the real thing.
His [...]

Art Danielian has always wanted to design a “New American Home,” the iconic show house that serves as the centerpiece of the annual home builder convention. And this year, the architect, of Irvine (Orange County) not only got his wish, he also came up with a winner.
Over its 26-year history, the house has always been [...]

In Melbourne, long before city planning regulations were set into place, houses like this Victorian took advantage and built tall boundary walls. So when the owners of this house wanted to renovate their historic home, they were able to play off the non-standard wall on the north side and build a stunning addition to their [...]

Green building certification, which can boost the value and public presence of a project, is becoming increasingly popular. But with so many certification options available, from the U.S. Green Building Council’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design program to Portland General Electric’s Earth Advantage program, choosing the best one for a project can be a [...]

There are plenty of changes occurring in the homebuilding industry, and even if you aren’t planning on moving anytime soon, it pays (literally) to know what changes are in store for when you finally make that decision.
On the forefront of these changes are eco-friendly improvements and practices. In fact, the National Association of Home Builders [...]

SPOKANE, Wash. – Do you ever watch the sun hitting your house, or the feel the wind rushing at your windows, and wonder just how hard it would be to harness all that energy?
The timing has never been better for average consumers to start using alternative energy in their own homes. The technology is better [...]

Rain pelted down on the steel roof and dripped onto patio chairs built into the side of the house.
Inside, the home was warm and cozy. Sunflower yellow curtains framed floor-to-ceiling glass walls on the south side, matching encilia plants nestled into the side of the mountain.
Seafoam green curtains framed window walls on the north, complementing [...]

Medieval architecture has been employed to provide energy-efficient living in Kent, in a home that is to feature in Channel Four’s Grand Designs programme tonight.
The four-bedroom Crossway house in Staplehurst uses a large vault constructed out of clay tiles spanning 20m to create a structure with a low embodied energy and high thermal mass.
The basic [...]

As Palm Springs celebrates Modernism Week, visitors might wonder what qualifies a building as mid-century modern.
One hint is to find out who the architect is. Palm Springs has been home to mid-century architects John Porter Clark, William Cody, Albert Frey and Donald Wexler. The city boasts hundreds of examples of the architecture that continues to [...]

When a person thinks of a concrete building, they most likely imagine a drab, gray warehouse void of style and beauty. The word concrete itself carries a commercial connotation and doesn’t seem to fit into the vocabulary or imagery of an upscale residential neighborhood.
Not so at 1129 Oriole Road in the heart of Montecito. This [...]

For me, the mid-century modern home epitomizes the Californian lifestyle many of us aspire to and out-of-towners envy: lots of light, sunny interiors and lashings of indoor-outdoor living.
Which probably explains why this style, and its assorted accouterments, is so enduring — think of the ubiquitous Eames chairs and George Nelson lighting that feature on every [...]

The largest series of solar installations in history, more than 1,300 megawatts, is planned for the desert outside Los Angeles, according to a new deal between the utility Southern California Edison and solar power plant maker, BrightSource.
The momentous deal will deliver more electricity than even the largest nuclear plant, spread out among seven facilities, the [...]

Every year, Google Inc. invites a group of global A-listers to its own Davos-style conference to think big thoughts. The event, called Zeitgeist, tends to be as pretentious as its name—captains of industry, finance, and government chattering onstage in front of about 400 of Google’s friends and customers about the fate of the internet and [...]

NEW YORK, Feb 10 (Reuters) – A review of the 33 U.S. home builders generating more than $10 million in revenue found that more than 30 percent are in danger of filing for bankruptcy, according to a restructuring consultancy.
“It’s striking when you see just how much cash flow has continued to decline for the better [...]

FOR the last two years, Rachel Muston, a 32-year-old information-technology worker for the Canadian government in Ottawa, has been taking steps to reduce her carbon footprint — composting, line-drying clothes, installing an efficient furnace in her three-story house downtown.
About a year ago, though, she decided to “go big” in her effort to be more environmentally [...]

Buyers are losing interest in an energy-draining dream home that comes with high costs and wasteful space. The economy has swiftly changed us from seeking abundant to practical living. A real estate ad that sings praises about all of the space that a home has to offer, like this dream home described below in an [...]

The New American Home, a demonstration project in Las Vegas, rambles a bit at 8,800 square feet, but it boasts a number of energy-saving features. In this rear view of the four-level home, solar panels can be seen in the foreground. The showcase house was unveiled last month by the National Assn. of Home Builders, [...]

In an earlier published MHM Slide Show we profiled the University of Kansas School of Architecture’s program called Studio 804, and their prototype project in Greensburg Kansas built to help the town recover after a devastating tornado literally flattened the town.
Another Studio 804 project has been profiled by Natural Home Magazine. It’s an affordable and [...]

Environmentally conscious condo and apartment dwellers can’t be blamed for feeling a bit, well, green over those living in detached homes, free to make just about any Earth-friendly renovations they like.
Unless they live in a building with a homeowners association that has embraced the Earth-friendly way, condo owners are decidedly limited by comparison in the [...]

Imagine a world where microwave-beaming rovers cook dust into concrete landing pads … where your living quarters are dropped onto the land from above, then inflated like an inner tube … where the grit is so abrasive that even the robots have to wear protective coveralls.
It may sound like science fiction, but these are actually [...]

Even if you favor traditional franks ‘n’ beans over tofu hot dogs and edamame, soybeans are still likely to find their way into your home as more companies develop construction and home products with soy-based adhesives, coatings, and plastics.
“Building Better With Soy” is a slogan of the United Soybean Board (USB), a group of farmers [...]

Heating water for showers, loads of laundry and dishes, and other household needs can account for up to 25 percent of the average home’s total energy cost, according to the U.S. Department of Energy.
GE hopes that figure will persuade homeowners to upgrade from a conventional electric storage-tank water heater to its new heat-pump water heater, [...]

When the Park Columbus first came on the market a year ago, the marketing team introduced the building with a campaign that emphasized the conversion’s luxury, its high-end finishes and its amenities.
“It was the amenities-driven campaign you saw all over Manhattan over the past four years,” says Hunter Frick, project manager at Halstead Property Development [...]

IN the snowy woods of a valley west of this college town, John and Mary Beth Cook have taken up a version of mountain living amended for the modern world. Last year, they completed and moved into a house that looks like many others here in Big Sky Country, with exterior walls formed by logs [...]

Domino Magazine has done a nice slide show of the White House interior design from the Kennedy era. See the famous Blue Room and Yellow Room from the past.
The most recent talk is of redesigning the White House to fit more modern day styles.
Read story at Domino Magazine

White House Redux, a contest to build a fictional White House updated for 2008 sensibilities, announced the jury selections for its designs last week. But the jury is still out on who will win the popular vote, as is the prize that the winner will receive.
The original White House design, by James Hoban, was the [...]

The luxury layout will apparently include just a few exclusive villas, all with private pools and terraces as well as direct access to the beach.
Most importantly, however, the design of the hideaway – including the use of renewable energy sources – will respect the island’s wildlife and tropical surroundings.
Read story at Hello Magazine

A little over two years ago, when Donald Trump listed Maison de L’Amitié in Palm Beach, Fla., for $125 million, it was a sign of the times.
Real estate prices were on the rise, and even though it was $50 million more than the next-highest listing, there was a sense that Trump would get his price. [...]

From water-stingy toilets and electricity sparing appliances, to flooring and siding made from sustainable materials, the housing industry this week rolled out a trove of new, green products it hopes will lure homebuyers back into the market.
Despite visibly lower attendance at this year’s International Builders’ Show, a record 363 vendors were featuring green products, more [...]