from NYTimes article
” WAKING up in a strange hotel can be disorienting. Now imagine staying down the hall from 60 cows, 2 goats and a baby rabbit. Oh, and you’re sleeping on a pile of hay.
Leave it to the Germans to combine livestock with lodging. In the last decade, hundreds of farms throughout Germany have [...]
Slow Food Nation’s victory garden in front of San Francisco City Hall. (Courtesy of Scott Chernis/Scott Chernis Photography)
This is a great post from Allison Arieff’s NYTimes blog on design.
an excerpt:
“Edible landscape” seems to be going head to head with “staycation” as the most popular catch phrase of Summer 2008. Lawns may not be disappearing before [...]
“The whole proposal for the eco-boulevard in Vallecas can be defined as an urban recycling operation consisting of the following actions: insertion of an air tree-social dynamizer over an existing urbanization area, densification of existing alignment trees and reduction and asymmetric arrangement of wheeled traffic circulation. Superficial interventions reconfiguring the existing urbanization (perforations, fillings, paint, [...]
“The Darwin Centre Phase Two is designed around an iconic eight-storey “Cocoon”, encased within a glass atrium.
The temperature-controlled Cocoon will house 20 million of the museum’s 34 million plant and insect specimens, and laboratories for up to 200 researchers.
Visitors will watch these scientists in action cataloguing rare specimens, when the centre opens in September 2009. [...]
The Green Mountain Dairy farm in Sheldon, Vt., like all dairy farms, is in the business of producing milk. But the farm is also part of a growing alternative energy program that converts the methane gas from cow manure into electricity.
In the barn, a mechanical scraper sweeps the cows’ waste into a large drain.
Waste is [...]
Following are excerpts from a NYTimes article:
“Approximately 30,000 years after hunters took to adorning cave walls with their image of a deer, it occurred to them it might be more productive to consider the deer’s image of a hunter.
…
For now, thanks to decades of research into ungulate vision combined with the latest in military concealment [...]
“Aquaquest - The Marilyn Blusson Learning Centre - opened in November 2006 and is designed to LEED (Leadership in Energy & Environmental Design) Gold standards, and is slated be the first LEED Gold building in a zoo or aquarium anywhere. Some of its environmentally sustainable features include low-flush toilets, a rainwater harvesting system, an efficient [...]
This is a great precedent that thinks about creating a suitable space as well as a climate for the elephants:
“Research into the social patterns of elephants, together with a desire to bring a sense of light and openness to a building type traditionally characterised as closed, even fortified, provided powerful starting points. The tendency for [...]
A must-see film from 1989 produced by Aardman Animation.
http://www.atom.com/funny_videos/creature_comforts/