Green roof invasion

Green roofs seem to be in every architects mind for the moment, judging not only from the ongoing exhibition “The Future of Architecture is Green” at Louisiana Museum outside Copenhagen. And of course green roofs do a lot of good, for the climate as well as for the people in the building, who get their own green spot. But are green roofs always for the better? Or are they being used as a form of "greenwrapping" to put buildings where they shouldn't be? Look at Treehugger under slideshows and judge for yourself.

Image: The building hiding under this green roof is the Nanyang University School of Art in Singapore.

House warming

The world’s first zero carbon emisson house lives in Denmark. The Active House, as it’s called, was developed to be a more comfortable and user-friendly response to the Passive House, which has set the standard for sustainable living in the last decade. Passive houses rely on incredibly effective insulation, plus a heat exchanger that warms fresh air on the way in during winter. A true Passive House has no conventional heating system because, in theory, it doesn't need one. In practice, owners tend to install back-up systems, because it's no fun even to risk being cold.
Rikke Lildholdt, project manager for the Active House, says "This is about living a comfortable life in a house that produces more energy than it uses."
Solar panels warm underfloor heating. Fifty square metres of solar cells generate electricity. Computer-controlled windows automatically regulate internal temperature.
British journalist Andrew Purcell doesn’t believe his eyes. In The Guardian he writes: “This is the last place you would expect to find the solar-powered home of the future. Lystrup, a suburb of Denmark's second city, Aarhus, is grey from street to sky. The spring sun, hidden behind a bank of clouds, barely seems strong enough to run a pocket calculator, let alone meet the energy needs of a family of four. But it is here that a dream of zero-carbon living is being realised.”

Flower Power

A lamp that “burst into blossom” when your energy comsumption has been low for some time, isn’t that a great way to increase energy awareness? The Flower Lamp, developed in the research project Static! at the Interactive Institute in collaboration with Front Design, is now included in the collections of Centre Pompidou, Paris, and will be exhibited at elles@centrepompidou until May 24 th 2010. Now all there’s missing is a producer.

What a waste

Students Petter Thörne’s och Anders Johnson’s easy chair Mold looks like a piece of art made by the Brasilian Campana brothers, but is actually ment to be massproduced in Sweden. Developed to be made out of veneer waste from different kinds of wood, it not only saves the waste from it’s usual destiny – that of being burnt despite it’s low energy value – but uses it in a much more constructive way: to make new furniture. By their work the designers have converted the disadvantage of the small format veneer-waste slivers into a constructive advantage that has facilitated the double-curved surface. And the variety of veneer in terms of wood type and format make each individual piece of furniture unique. Let's hope this chair will soon find its producer.

Made in the hood

There must be 1000 ways to work as a designer. Take the Finnish-Korean couple behind Helsinkibased designproducer Company for example. They chose a starting point very far from the usual international-designer-as-a-star-concept: they produce their own design and only work with local manufacturers. Aamu Song and Johan Olin talk about their ideas in terms of “seeds that make the local factories grow” and describe the “recipes” of 70 of their products in their “Company Cookbook”. Since 2008 they also run their own shop Salakauppa (the Secret Shop) close to the Kiasma museum of modern art in the center of Helsinki. The dancing shoes “Tanssitossut” for father and daughter are made of Finnish felt and rubber in Jämsä, Finland.

Puzzle furniture

By the way, “puzzle furniture” seem to be in every designer's mind for the moment. Here’s a Norwegian contributor: Petter Skogstad showed his all textile d i y-sofa "Hay" in Milan's young department Salone Satellite. And yes, it's inspired by hay piles. But the big question is: do people want to fit all the pieces together themselves? And do they prefer flexibility to commodity? After the age of 25, I'd say "No".

The question is "How?"

Nowadays it's not only the "What?", it's the "How?" that counts. How things are being produced luckily seem to become a hotter topic every week. Thanks to climate change YouTube can now add a new kind of film to their broad supply: production porn. In a few weeks time I’ve seen films about the production of the Danish chair Nobody, the Swedish chair Papuru and the Swedish stool Cow Stool. But production films are not always about high tech procedures. Form Us With Love’s “Man–size Mekano” is a kind of puzzle d i y-product with a production process you might as well visualize in a few images. But have a look anyway.