SteamSHIFT

Houses of the Future: “The Cardboard House represents the reduction of technology and the simplification of needs. By demonstrating that we are able to recycle 100% of the building components at extremely low cost, the Cardboard House is a direct challenge to the housing industry to reduce housing and environmental costs.

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Contour Crafting- Global Prospects: “Contour Crafting (CC) is a layered fabrication technology developed by Dr. Behrokh Khoshnevis of the University of Southern California. Contour Crafting technology has great potential for automating the construction of whole structures as well as sub-components. Using this process, a single house or a colony of houses, each with possibly a different design, may be automatically constructed in a single run, embedded in each house all the conduits for electrical, plumbing and air-conditioning.”

A house powered by spinach: “Seattle architecture/design firm Mithun won first place in the C2C Home Competition with their design for a house powered by spinach. The house will be built this summer in Roanoke, Virginia, along with other contest winners.

The competition asked designers to work on work on cradle-to-cradle design principles and create objects and processes that replenish communities, using materials that can be recycled indefinitely.

Mithun’s house takes energy from the sun and uses spinach protein to generate electricity for neighbouring homes and street lighting infrastructure.

The house’s skylight brings in the sun’s rays, and the heat sink stabilizes temperatures, while a highly conductive material produces photosynthetic energy generated from the protein in spinach. The spinach proteins are sandwiched between the core’s glass walls; their chlorophyll converts the sun’s rays to fuel the home. Besides, a vegetated roof system collects and filters stormwater into the building core

More images.

Via WorldChanging and Treehugger < Gristmill.

Related: The search for sun-powered bio-computer.

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(Via we make money not art.)

shipping containers

COLANI Rotor House

William Crawford and Peter Brewin, inventors Inflatable Concrete , an inflatable pouch of cement-impregnated cloth, have been picking up a considerable amount of press for their ‘building in a bag’ concept. The idea has enormous potential for disaster relief situations. Let’s just hope their patent doesn’t impede it’s widespread implementation.

(Via Future Feeder.)