Open Architecture Network

Images by Joost van Brug In yet an other great example of combining functions to take up less space, Georg Bohle builds a piano into a dining table. For that matter, you can have music while you dine. "The pianotable offers a dinner with the accompaniment of a piano. The piano player takes a seat at the dining table."... Read the full story on TreeHugger

One of the virtues of standing desks is that they can take up a lot less space. Here is a neat tower that gives you a place to store your notebook, but also has all kinds of storage and features including a printer drawer, sockets and plugs for projectors and accessories and even a sound system.... Read the full story on TreeHugger

Image from Shanzai Cardboard is popping up everywhere. A strong and durable material, it is made from recycled paperboard and is itself recyclable when you get bored. It is long lasting, can be assembled easily, comes in a flat-pack and some say is softer and friendlier than wood or plastic. It certainly is cheaper.... Here are some new and novel ways that cardboard is being used in the furniture and restaura... Read the full story on TreeHugger

It may well be the ugliest house we have shown on TreeHugger, and it is made of garbage, too. But Ian McPherson of Welsh startup Affresol takes plastic waste, grinds it down to little granules. They then mix it with liquid resin and pour it like concrete into panels, which they call Thermo Poly Rock (TPR). ... Read the full story on TreeHugger

It used to be that rising tides due to climate change were just a far-off fear - now they're a present-day reality. But we all know that humans are a race of survivors, and some of the best designs come out of the necessity to adapt to environmental changes and challenges. So while we're working on actually mitigating global warming, architects, designers and visionaries are one step ahead, imagining homes, buildings and entire cities situated above or e... Read the full story on TreeHugger

images courtesy of Abitare It seems you can build just about anything out of cardboard. Fabrizio of the Italian design magazine Abitare shows us a 10 meter (33 foot) high tower, built by the Institut fuer Konstruktion und Gestaltung at Leopold Franzens University of Innsbruck, for an exhibition in Paris. ... Read the full story on TreeHugger

Photo: Digital Lumens A Bright Idea for the Lighting Industry According to the US Department of Energy, lighting represents about 12% of energy consumption for residential buildings and 25% for commercial ones (presumably because commercial buildings are kept much brighter than residential homes on average). That's a lot of energy, and despite recent improvements thanks to CFLs (Read the full story on TreeHugger

Brazilian Architect Felipe Campolina's Portable Housing does not appear to have made it to the finals of the Evolo 2010 skyscraper competition, but has shown up in Designboom. It is perhaps one of the most revolutionary; Your home becomes portable and you move it from place to place, plugging it into a form of vertical trailer park. ... Read the full story on TreeHugger

Images from WAN Architect Amir Sanei has a lovely garden in Suffolk in the UK, and enjoys building things in it. He discusses his lovely garden shed in World Architecture News: "I didn't set out to make a Wendy House, I set out to make something. It grew out of windows I found in a skip [dumpster] and thinking about how they might be arranged," he said, "The scale was door height to a child." ... Read the full story on TreeHugger

Image from Wallpaper It's a David and Goliath win. The folding plug, designed by a humble student from the Royal College of Art in London, has won the Brit Insurance Design of the Year 2010 overall prize at the Brit Insurance Design Awards this year. And TreeHugger called it, right from the st... Read the full story on TreeHugger

SFI certified clear cut; Steve Ringman, Seattle Times There is a major battle going on in the woods, in the courts and in the halls of the US Green Building Council, as the Sustainable Forestry Initiative (SFI) tries to get LEED changed to accept their certification. We have covered it before, but Monte Paulsen is doing an extensive five-parter in the Tyee that is a must-read. Part 1 describes how t... Read the full story on TreeHugger

Don Hogan Charles/The New York Times Der Scutt was not a famous name among architects, and his work does not pop out and inspire. Even his son is quoted in the New York Times as saying "My father was absolutely a developer's architect, and he prided himself on respecting the wishes and goals of the owner while injecting his own style and design expertise," and when that client is often Donald Trump, you are going to get a lot of garish gold buildings. But he did have an expertise that more architects are going to need: He was the master of the reclad, the removal of ... Read the full story on TreeHugger

Photos: Courtesy Nativas del Sur. Can you make super sleek furniture with wood from native ancient forests in a sustainable way? This project from Argentina that works with selective logging and super efficient use of wood suggests you can. More details inside.... Read the full story on TreeHugger

PSFK shows us Pocket Wall, a storage system from Polish Designer Maja Ganszyniec. She describes it: Look at the house as if it were a package: the room is like a package and the wallpaper is like wrapping paper. The project turns the purely decorative layer of wallpaper into storage. But it reminds me of Graham Hill and Petz Scholtus' Stuffbump, TreeHugger's one attempt at product design.... Read the full story on TreeHugger

Freefold Furniture is, as the above video indicates, a versatile shelving system. But the system can also serves as partition, screen, plinth or bench. Made of Xanita X-board (more below), which is 97% post consumer waste paper, the Freefold system can, at the end of its useful life be recycled alongside normal paper recycling. Yet until that day, the robust design by Melbourne (Australia) architect, Toby Horrocks, should g... Read the full story on TreeHugger

Daily Mirror For those that care, that is $5,061 per square foot of prime Knightsbridge real estate. And according to the Mirror, owner Ray Barker says it's perfect for his needs. He says: "I can do the cleaning while lying in my sofa bed. In fact, I can wash up, answer the door, make a cuppa and go to the loo all at the same time."... Read the full story on TreeHugger

Anshen + Allen via Metropolis Containers to Clinics is a non-profit founded by Elizabeth Sheehan to "develop a new model for heath service delivery"- they outfit shipping containers with the latest in equipment, medicine and staff and deliver them to underserved parts of the world to administer primary health care to women and children. Anshen + Allen are architects who have been reinventing and Greening the Hospital Room; Now they are working together on the design of container based clinics... Read the full story on TreeHugger

Photo: ClearLite Safer CFLs: Why Didn't Someone Think of This Sooner? By now just, about everybody knows that compact fluorescent lightbulbs (CFLs) contain some mercury (about 5 milligrams). It's still less mercury than would be emitted by a coal plant if you used energy-guzzling incandescent bulbs instead, and scientists from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory say that "the most extreme C.F.L. breakage scenario" measured in a Maine study "only equaled the approximate exposure from a sin... Read the full story on TreeHugger

Liquid crystal switching windows have been around for a while, and just last week Mike wrote about how Energy-Saving Dynamically Tinted Glass Could Make Most Buildings More Efficient. Now Dutch entrepreneurs Casper van Oosten and Teun Wagenaar have taken switchable glass one step further: their Smart Energy Glass collects solar energy and generates its own power. ... Read the full story on TreeHugger

French container ship in Vohemar, Madagascar, March 12. Photo Derek Schuurman There was a coup in Madagascar last March, and ever since there has been widespread poaching in the National Parks, for birds, lemurs and lumber. Rosewood is one of the world's most valuable tropical woods, ($ 5,000 per cubic meter) so $40 million of it was chopped (with permission of the new government, that needs the money) and was going to be shipped out in December. (see Read the full story on TreeHugger