This is East Village Lofts in the Revitalization District of East 11th Street in Austin, Texas. The structure, designed by Bercy Chen Studio, makes a bold statement about the intersection of art and sustainability with a multifaceted facade of colorful steel panels. The panels, as you would imagine, double as a shade device and guardrails for condo balconies.
After the debut of PUMA City in Boston last year, PUMA redesigned the massive retail container space to create a new space in New York to coincide with FIFA World Cup 2010. The smaller space, PUMA City NY, features two separate shipping containers configured as a retail space by architects LOT-EK and buiders SG Blocks, maker of the Harbinger House.
Today, in Palmdale, California, Walmart (NYSE:WMT) flipped the switch on 17 small wind turbines in the parking lot of bulk retailer, Sam’s Club. Based upon estimates, Walmart and Sam’s Club believe the turbines will generate about 76,000 kWh of energy annually, which is enough to power more than six average homes over the same period of time.
Mark Meyer of Austin-based designSTUDIO recently pointed us to one of his newest projects, la Boite. La Boite is a green, environmentally sensitive cafe with locally baked goods, sandwiches, and coffee. It was built from an old shipping container, and if you're interested in details of the transformation, read more about it on designSTUDIO's blog. For the project, DesignSTUDIO used Rainwater HOG's for greywater collection, biobased spray foam insulation, and Forbo linoleum for the floor and one wall. You can find la Boite on 1700 South Lamar Boulevard in Austin, Texas. Looks fun, doesn't it?
There's a new, state-of-the-art green spa that just opened its doors in Albany, New York. Complexions Spa & Salon, owned by Denise Dubois, received LEED Gold certification in May 2009, and the owner shared her excitement on her blog, A Green Spa. Denise tells an interesting story. Rather than pay someone else (i.e., the consultants) to obtain certification, as a small business owner, she recruited her family to help pick the right strategies and to document the points. And despite the daunting amount of paperwork required, she was able to get it done, making it an enormously rewarding experience.
There are roughly 85,000 supermarkets in America. Generally speaking, they are artificially lit boxes surrounded by dark asphalt and contain row upon row of doorless display refrigerators. There is, to say the least, room for improvement. Hannaford, which has about 160 supermarkets in the northeast, decided to try something completely new and on July 25th opened the first LEED Platinum certified supermarket, which is located in Augusta, Maine. With Maine's governor, John Baldacci, in attendance, the plaque was personally awarded at the opening by Rick Fedrizzi, president of the USGBC.
Update 6/15/2010: Puma City Revised for World Cup 2010!
Realizing this site might be a little overweight in the container architecture department, I'm going to blog this and try to abstain in the next few weeks. But Puma City, like the Freitag Flagship Store in Zurich (only less banged up looking), is another illustration of industrial design and adaptive reuse combined. The 11,000 sf retail installation was designed by LOT-EK and uses three levels of forty-foot containers stacked four units wide to create an incredibly dynamic design.
How good would a chicken (or veggie, if that's your style) burrito bowl taste, knowing that it's been cooked by the power of on-site green energy? I haven't tried one yet, but I can only imagine ... Chipotle Mexican Grill will be opening a green restaurant in Gurnee, Illinois, which restaurant features a prominent six-kilowatt wind turbine. Although mostly a symbol for the company's efforts to create more environmentally friendly store designs, the turbine will generate ~10% of the store's power. The Gurnee Chipotle will have some of the following green features:
Mounting on the green building success of their previous stores, including the green Boulder REI we wrote about previously, REI today opens the doors to its second generation of green prototype store in Round Rock, Texas. The Texas store is projected to consume 48% less energy than a typical store and generate a portion of its power from a solar panel installation, building integrated photovoltaics, and a solar hot water system. After that, Round Rock will rely on Solatubes to displace a portion of articifial lighting and the purchase of green power generated from biomass digesters.
I just received an email about an interesting project on the cusp in Steamboat Springs, Colorado called Aviator. Aviator is a mixed-use, multifamily and storage units facility that's targeting LEED Gold certification. Seeking superior energy efficiency for the project, Olson Development retained EcoSteel to provide the structure. EcoSteel calculates that their company could contribute ~18 points towards overall certification of Aviator based upon energy efficiency (10), heat island effect reduction (1), and recycled, reused, and regional materials use (7).
