Sustainable Portables by the Office of Mobile Design

If you’re into green prefab, browsing through OMD’s website is like being a kid in a candy store. Designer Jennifer Siegal has so many nifty projects—prototyped, planned, or built—that we want to tell you all about all of them all at once. But gorging ourselves at the aforementioned candy store taught us a lesson, so we’ll stick to just one (for now). And while we’re on the topic of childhood, we’ll make it Siegal’s Sustainable Portable classrooms.

The educational cousin of the trailer home, cheap and (theoretically) temporary portable classrooms have sprung up in droves round overcrowded schools. They’re usually pretty dingy, with tiny windows and ’70s-style faux wood paneling that adds nothing to the learning environment. Add inspired design, bamboo and cork floors, non-VOC paint, and other green goodies, and you’ve actually got a place to learn comfortably, healthily, and stylishly. At $200-$250 USD per square foot, a Sustainable Portable is roughly twice the typical cost of a trailer, but we’ve already seen that sustainable environments are effective teaching tools, as well. Can’t say that for your average modular classroom. ::Office of Mobile Design [by KK]

CORRECTION: A previous version of this post incorrectly stated that Jennifer Siegal is an architect.