sustainable architecture

See how 12 architects used low-cost, environmentally-friendly shipping containers as modern alternatives in home design and architecture.

Shipping containers meet a variety of requirements: Modern. Check. Low-cost. Check. Environmentally-friendly. Check.

See a selection of homes that make them work.

NASA's new Sustainability Base was designed by William McDonough + Partners to embody the spirit of NASA while fostering collaboration, supporting health and well-being, and exceeding the requirements of LEED® Platinum.

An exoskeleton approach provides for structural stability during seismic events, facilitates glare-free daylighting and shading, natural ventilation and connection to the outdoors, and flexibility of the workspace with its column-free interior.

Atop the two-story 50,000-square-foot building is a solid-oxide fuel cell and rooftop solar arrays, supplying the building with more energy than it requires and sending surplus back to the grid at Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California. Currently running on natural gas, the fuel cell is ready to be converted to landfill gas when a source is available...

Architex has completed a project in Auckland, New Zealand, consisting of a home that exhales transparency and seeks to establish a dialogue between the interior living space and the outdoor environment.

City House is a private oasis of relaxation. With the goal of creating a place that disconnects from a busy professional life, the standard wall configurations disappear, enhancing the feeling of breeziness and freedom. 

“Sliding glass panels disappear into pockets to create open balconies for living and sleeping, and focus on the central courtyard as their oasis. The street facade is particularly private with only a hint of the sophistication that lies beyond in the selection of colour and materials.”

View more images of this beutiful, contextual and modern at the article link...

California builder Simpatico Homes specializes in modern modular homes, and recently completed a prototype located in Emeryville, in Alameda County, California.

From Swatt | Miers Architects:

“The partnership with Simpatico Homes represents an opportunity for our firm to bring custom-quality architecture to a broader audience through the cost advantages of prefabrication.

The Krubiner Residence, the Simpatico Prototype, is located in Emeryville just a few blocks from our office.

The Simpatico Homes represent a unique opportunity to transform housing, by combining modern design with off-site prefabrication and LEED-certified sustainability.”

Like the iconic waterfront Sydney Opera House, the Wuxi Grand Theatre, built by Finland’s PES-Architects, benefits from its location.

Located on a manmade peninsula, the theater is highly visible from all directions- a prime spot that provided the opportunity to construct an eye-catching roof that places the building in a direct dialogue with the city’s weather. Eight massive steel wings stretch out from the roof 50 meters high, adding a distinct sculptural element while reflecting direct sunlight, sheltering interior spaces from excessive heat. The slanted roof also works to harvest rainwater, taking advantage of the local climate and reducing the building’s impact on the environment.

Thousands of LED lights illuminate the aluminum wings; inside, the Main Auditorium is covered by over 15,000 bamboo blocks, capturing the local character while infusing a distinctly Finnish element in its forms and materials.

One year after its opening, the theater has seamlessly integrated its green terraces and lakeside landscape into the urban context and local culture...

Conceived as a camp, this luxury family retreat was designed by Fearon Hay Architects as an arrangement of freestanding structures around a courtyard, set in a saddle above Matiatia Bay on Waiheke Island in New Zealand.

Care had to be taken to reduce exposure of the home to high winds; natural undulations of the saddle have been subtly emphasized to form a protective setting for three structures, comprising living, sleeping and studio areas. Retractable glass panels and perforated aluminium screens offer variations of enclosure to the living and sleeping spaces. The raw and robust materials are countered by the placement of fires, the invitation of leather cushioning around a sunken sitting area and the use of linen fabrics and oiled natural timber throughout the spaces.

An extraordinary off grid home built with local materials, that fits right into the rural Ontario landscape, the House on Limekiln Line is an extraordinary artifact, addressing a 220 year old heritage, with a modern aesthetic.

From the architects:

The House on Limekiln Line, a design-build off-grid house, is sited in a rich agricultural landscape.The house is understood as both a mediator to and a microcosm of its immediate cultural and climatic context. An “observation shed”, the house is composed of a series of scales of spaces, each with distinct vantage points, visual alignments, and framed vistas to the larger context beyond, facilitating stewardship of and respect for the productive landscape in which it sits...

A retreat designed by Hanrahan Meyers Architects reinforces the Buddhist mantras of simplicity and nature in upstate New York at this beautiful, simple and green meditation center.

Located in the Hudson River Valley, New York, the 22,000 sf project was under construction when Chung Ohun Lee, of the organization's leaders, attended the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen. She was so inspired by Obama's speech—in which he vowed to cut emissions by 8% over 40 years—that she asked the architects to switch from conventional building systems already ordered to such energy savers as geothermal heating and solar hot water.

While many of the building systems were changed after Lee's trip, the architecture itself needed few adjustments- wood framing (dimensional lumber and glulam beams) was used rather than steel, and interiors used locally harvested oak for flooring with furniture made of FSC-certified, formaldehyde-free apple plywood. LEED certification would have added $50,000 to the cost, so the client instead opted to spend the funds on green features. It helps, Hanrahan says, that "reducing their carbon footprint is part of their philosophy."

But the real lesson is that even the most advanced systems require the client's participation to achieve significant energy savings...

Beijing-based Decode Urbanism Office has designed a tower with a façade composed of multiple wind-driven generators.

Thousands of wind turbines will produce enough energy to power the entire building. At night, the diamond-shaped generators are lit with thousands of LED lights incorporated into the building envelope.

The 350-meter (1,150-foot) structure, in Taichung City, China, will house the city’s Department of Urban Development, as well as commercial activities.

The tower’s façade, inspired by the plum blossom — China and Taiwan's  national flower – reacts to changes in direction and intensity of the wind, creating a truly dynamic visual effect. Similarly, mechanical wind power generators have LEDs, illuminating the façade and producing a pulsating flow of light, whose intensity and color adjust to correspond to changes in temperature and season.

The wind harnessing capability, along with the lighting that responds to local atmospheric conditions, makes this conceptual tower a true “decoder of nature.”

Sky City in Changsha, China, will be 2750 feet tall, 220 stories, housing 30,000 people in 4450 apartments, with excavation and construction slated to begin in June, 2013.

Aiming to accommodate a growing population, the skyscraper is considered a "pragmatic" building, designed for efficiency, affordability, replicability.

The Sky City concept significantly reduces the per capita use of land, and the associated CO2 emissions generated, thus providing a means of large-scale development with a significantly lower impact on the environment.

As a result, a resident of Sky City will be using 1/100th the average land per person- learn more about this innovative building concept and its sustainable features at Treehugger.

Located in Martinborough, New Zealand, Cornege-Preston House cleverly mixes modern amenities with a peaceful rural environment atmosphere.

Envisioned by architectural firm Bonnifait + Giesen, the 2,153 square foot contemporary residence offers plenty of sustainable features, such as double-glazed windows and skylights for cross-room solar penetration and heat retention, water heating by solar hot water panel on roof topped up by thermostat-controlled electricity and two 25,000 litre tanks capturing rainwater...

The Buffalo School of Engineering and Applied Sciences was designed by Perkins+Will in New York, with an intriguing and innovative sustainable design.

The concept, characterised by an irregular folded-like structure wrapped in copper, aims to mark a new 'Front Door' for the School of Engineering. The building is organized around a multi-story gallery that allows students to circulate easily through the space. The intriguing learning space is vibrant and breezy; students can sit, discuss projects or share ideas over a cup of coffee in the multi-story student lounge.

Seeking LEED Gold, efficient strategies include improved building shell insulation, high-performance windows, energy efficient lighting design with occupancy and photo sensor control.

Sustainable architecture is a term that represents a broad range of concepts, processes and ideologies, and can be interpreted and realized in countless ways.

Sustainability represents a design process that accounts for the environment on both the micro and macro scales, serves the needs of the program with as minimal an impact on the planet as possible, and positively contributes to the community, not only aesthetically, but in social, economic and cultural realms, as well.

So, to celebrate Earth Week, here are a few of our favorite green buildings...

Designed by ZeroEnergy Design, this modern green home featuring a spectacular water and sunset view is located in Truro, Massachusetts.

The west-facing orientation for glazing isn’t ideal for energy performance, so the rest of the building envelope was designed to offset the expansive view windows. Double stud framing allows a continuous layer of foam insulation and a geothermal system, coupled with a radiant heating system, will supply all of the heating and cooling for the year. In addition to energy efficient appliances and water heaters, all of the spaces are well illuminated using energy efficient fixtures.

The roof sports a large solar electric array to offset energy usage through the use of net metering. A battery back-up and energy management system will store electricity from the solar array; the combination the energy efficient building envelope and systems will allow the home to produce nearly as much energy as it uses over the course of a year...

This small vacation house is designed as a stairway to the treetops.

Keeping the footprint to a minimum so as not to disturb the wooded site, each of the three floors has only one small bedroom and bath, each a tiny private suite. The fourth floor, which contains the living spaces, spreads out from the tower like the surrounding forest canopy, providing views of the lake and mountains in the distance, virtually the entire Catskill Mountain range. The glass-enclosed stair highlights the procession from forest floor to treetop aerie, while the dark green enameled exterior camouflages the house by reflecting the surrounding woods, and dematerializing its form...

This retreat in a small town in the northern Andes is located two hours north of Quito, at an orchard site 2470 meters above sea level, between the Imbabura and Cotacachi mountains.

This typological variation of the traditional courtyard type, through understanding the modern bi-nuclear house, combined with the properties of rammed earth construction and the layering of lighter complementary materials, strive towards a synthesis of the local and the universal, towards continuity through variation...

Located at the University of Calgary, the Energy Environment Experiential Learning (EEEL) building is a five-story teaching facility that allows students to learn in an experiential and hands-on environment.

WIth approximately 11,000 sm of teaching laboratories and 2,500 sm of classroom space, space is provided for up to 3,000 sm of future research labs. The structural module and arrangement of the building systems allows the university long-term flexibility to convert spaces efficiently from one use to another.

The project also incorporates a number of solar control strategies, such as sculpted aluminum spandrel panels and solar shutters that actively track the sun to provide fully daylit but glare-free interior spaces. Additional environmental strategies include the use of thermal mass, an efficient envelope, natural ventilation, earth tubes, and low-energy systems, which contribute to the project using 45% less energy compared to a conventional laboratory building.  Low-flow fixtures and use of captured rain water mixed with recycled process water for toilet flushing reduces potable water use by 64%.

Weiss/Manfredi unveils their winning design for the Kent State Design Loft, which is a fully transparent building topped with a terraced green roof.

The University picked Weiss/Manfredi as the winner of a design competition to build a new architecture building, and the winning proposal for the center is a transparent terraced building that is topped with a green roof. Sited at the crossroads between the city and the campus, the Design Loft is a gallery of ascending spaces that seamlessly connect studios, classrooms, meeting areas and critique areas, and it can evolve as modalities of education and design change over the years...