Leeds based architects Garnett Netherwood have won an international competition to construct 12-meter high "wildlife towers" along the Leeds and Liverpool canal. The towers will be constructed from parts of demolished buildings.
Speaking in London yesterday, US energy secretary Steven Chu said that painting roofs and pavements white could help to mitigate global warming by reflecting sunlight back into space.
Mario Cucinella architects have produced an interesting theoretical prototype for a low cost sustainable home, dubbed 'Casa 100k'.
The Green Party has published its ten point cycling plan for Dublin. Among the key points are:
Writing on the BBC Website, Mark Mardell profiles Freiburg, perhaps the world's greenest city. Mardell writes:
What is missing is the constant low thrum of traffic in the background. It's not that cars are completely banned from the city, but most of the centre, rather than the odd street, is a pedestrian zone. You pedal or walk to trams or trains. Freiburg can lay claim to being the greenest city in the world, and it's all rather pleasant.
A group of students from the University of Michigan has won the $200,000 MIT Clean Energy grand prize for developing insulation panels from agricultural waste.
The May issue of National Geographic magazine features an in-depth article on green roofs. The full article can be read online here.
Spirit of Ireland have been getting a lot of publicity over the last month - check out the group's news page for a list of recent media articles. If you haven't heard, the group's proposals essentially involve storing wind energy in the form of pumped storage reservoirs along the coast.
Guardian green technology Alok Jha correspondent outlines his plans to reduce the energy demand of his terraced London Victorian home in this video.
Via Treehugger, architect Cameron Sinclair writes in the Huffington Post :
For the past twenty years the voice of the architecture profession has mainly been drowned out by the computer generated sky-piercing towers of luxury. Year after year the biggest names in architecture tried to out do each other in what is technically feasible...This constant craving to create jewels of desire in the urban fabric left the general public wondering what on earth we do. Now, with the global economy in tailspin, these exercises in object making have come to a crashing halt. For many of us, we couldn't be more thankful...For those of us that work in this arena we are being swamped with requests for help from the camps in the eastern Congo to the hoovervilles in southern California. The desire for well built, sustainable structures is immense and young professionals seeking meaning are finding themselves drawn to providing their expertise to these communities. There is immense opportunity for architects to work in the service of humanity rather awkwardly trying to define it or worse impose a solution on it.
The Japanese government is to spend 15 trillion yen (£100bn, or as I prefer to write it to really let it sink in, £102,000,000,000) on an economic stimulus package focused on green technologies such as electric cars, solar panels and energy saving building materials, according to an article
TreeHugger has posted an interesting slideshow on the best in green design and architecture, including Edouard Francois & Duncan Lewis designed French holidays homes (below) that are designed to fit seemlessly into the surrounding environment, and the green roof on the California Academy of Sciences (bottom).
A quick look through the summary of today's budget measures at budget.gov.ie reveals the following under the list of capital expenditure measures:
Communications, Energy & Natural Resources – €15 million savings, including a reduction of €13 million in the allocation for Sustainable Energy and Energy research programmes.
