Cars & Transportation

While subways in the world's developed countries are starting to look like the dinosaurs of urban infrastructure (with expansion delays and budget crises to boot), new metro systems continue to spread across the world. As emerging cities seek to answer the needs of booming populations -- or ease the traffic and environmental strains of private cars -- 11 municipalities have opened new underground and light-rail lines in the past two years. And instead of putting the damper on expansion projects, the global economic crisis has actually promised to spur further investment in public transit by governments eager to stimulate their economies. Over the next decade, some of these groundbreaking lines will become part of large metro networks that promise to make the world's reigning metro champions look downright ancient.

Design & Architecture

TreeHugger will be at Greenbuild in Phoenix, Arizona tomorrow to hear Al Gore give the keynote address. He will have a tough act to follow after last year's Van Jones' barnburner. The expo is also pretty spectacular, with a lot of green gizmos and gadgets, but also some simple, effective green building products. Some of the highlights of last year's Greenbuild:

Design & Architecture

Archpaper via Ponoko

Gramazio & Kohler of Zurich's ETH Faculty of Architecture have been in TreeHugger before with their bricklaying robot. Now they have come to America for the first time, and have digitally fabricated a wall on Pike Street in downtown Manhattan, with an exhibition running at the Storefront for Art and Architecture until November 14.

Design & Architecture

1. Harvesting water. Part of the prototype cloth is designed like a lotus leaf with microscopic spikes and depressions to make water bead, though letters absorb water so they appear. Photo via Filiz Klassen.

Architecture, says designer Filiz Klassen, is infatuated with "super materials" and gimmicks. Instead of building for the gee-whiz factor, however, Klassen wants to build with new incarnations of existing materials that, as she says, "make visible the effects of the weather," and in addition also use the weather's energy for practical, but also beautiful, effects.

"I was fascinated with all the material innovation taking place, but what made sense to me is that that's a tool to show the effects of the environment on a building...I was looking into materials that can harvest, transfer and release energy...that would change our perception of the buildings."

less is more

images by arch group via Dezeen

Ever have a couple of hours to kill between flights or trains? Rose at Dezeen shows us the Sleepbox, from Russian architects Arch Group. They envisage this tiny booth being installed in airports, train stations and shopping centers.They squeeze a lot into what looks like a four foot wide space- a two foot wide bed and a drop-down desk with storage under the bed. It is an interesting exercise in seeing how small a space one can comfortably live in, but one suspects that the opportunity for, um, misuse might keep this idea of the 15 minute hotel room from going mainstream.

Design & Architecture

Photo: Mikael from Copenhagenize

Not Sure How Well that Would Scale, Though
Mikeal from Copenhagenize has taken these pictures of a very cool bike parking at the W Hotel in San Francisco. Included in the price of a room is access to one of three Biomega bikes (I think the one on the pics is the "Copenhagen" model), and to get it you have to get it down from its unusual parking place.

kitchen

Wood fired stoves were very common houses a hundred years ago; the (Canadian) thanksgiving dinner I had a few weeks ago was cooked on one, in a house in the country where it heated both the room and the food.

Now Rüegg has brought the wood stove back into the kitchen, with a design that can work for cooking like a stove top, or open for barbecuing or just looking like a fireplace. Mocoloco calls it a an oven, a grill, and a heating system all-in-one.

Cars & Transportation

Photo: Flickr, CC

The Difference Between Snail Mail and Email
One of the benefits of smart grids that we too often overlook is the fact that they'll greatly reduce the need for power utilities to send trucks (and often big ones) out in the field to gather data and fix problems. The most obvious example of this is the remote reading of meters instead of having to send people to read meters, but it will also help with maintenance and repairs since the grid will tell trucks exactly where to go to solve problems, reducing the number of miles driven.