Sustain Our Earth

There’s nothing wrong with “art for art’s sake,” the notion that works of art don’t require a justification or need to serve a higher purpose. But it’s also kind of cool when they do transcend that philosophy and send a specific message.

That’s certainly the case with artist Michael Jantzen’s design for his Eco-Seed Sowing Machines. The solar-powered structures would contain a large number of flower seeds that would be automatically released in small amounts whenever evidence of environmental degradation was observed around the machines.

Jantzen calls the project “a symbolic public art response to environmental degradation,” and he’d like to see the machines located in places around the world where environmental damage is the worst.

Everywhere, companies today receive bonus points for going green. In retrospect, is the going green fever in actuality harming the environment instead?

Take bio-fuels, for example. They are praised for being biodegradable; however, the use and production of these fuels release more CO2 than fossil fuels. The row crops grown to create bio-fuel lead to higher erosion rates than sod crops.

Building a green home, while increasingly popular in recent years, isn't a completely new concept, and the House in Regensburg by Thomas Herzog, built in 1977, still resonates today as a unique and beautiful example of thoughtful, site-responsive architecture.

Elegant in its simplicity, the design employs key sustainable principles, including passive heating and cooling, appropriate material selection and responsive building form, all of which enable the structure to have minimal development impact while maintaining a high degree of efficiency- the result of an integrated approach to site, technology, and design.

Herzog's House in Regensburg is not only a beautiful example of modern design, but also...

Art meets environment.... to make a poignant point !

http://www.shft.com/reading/da-vinci-work-recreated-on-melting-arctic-ice

http://goo.gl/AlSGY

A proposal imagines 300,000 housing units built into six hyper-energy efficient domes.

This year Istanbul Design Week goes back to the future with a very ambitious project: HavvAda, a cutting-edge net-positive-energy residential island conceptualized by New York-based Studio Dror.

HavvAda, will be built off the shore of Istanbul using excavated soil from a new massive canal planned between the Black Sea and the Sea of Marmara.