Humble Designs 18 Weird and Wonderful Places To Live: Churches, Bunkers, Water Towers and Caves Lars Tunbjork for The New York Times The New York Times Magazine did a photo spread of some rather extreme conversions of churches, shipping containers and water towers and even caves, like the happy family shown above with an umbrella over the pool table to control the sand. We do our own roundup of TreeHugger favourites: Churches Chapel Converted to Residence by ZECC Architects ZECC Architects, beloved of their conversion of a water tower into a residence, are at it again with this conversion of a Dutch chapel into a single family residence. Record Houses: A Modest Little Reno Christopher Wren's Christ Church was bombed out in WW2 and is now a roofless rose garden; its tower survived and got into private hands. Church House, Kyloe, England in New York Times One we missed: "Ian Bottomley and his partner, Sally Onions, take in the sun in the graveyard of their home, a converted 1792 church." Church Converted into Bookshop Next: Water Towers, Caves and Bunkers
BaseHabitat Natural Architecture: Home-Grown Artistic Tree Houses Patrick Dougherty is a builder and yet not an architect – he is perhaps best described as an artist and sculptor, a wood craftsman the likes of which most of us have never seen. Rather than cutting, planing, leveling and assembling rectilinear wood structures he shapes living trees into amazing natural tree buildings. What started as simple arbosculptures quickly become inhabitable spaces and entire built environments. Some of the results seem like churches or gazebos, religious or resting places deep in the forest, as shown in the pictures above. Others are more abstract and open for interpretation or mixed-use occupation, changing with seasonal conditions as shown below. Always temporary by necessity, he grows and shapes the constituent sapplings to create playful and interactive forms in all kinds of contexts (with over 150 installations worldwide to date).
Utopia 6 floor assembly and progress laundry utopia done for the day pulping for hybridobe more.... pulped paper waste from the Bemis nice. adding local clay and straw test bricks another fine solar cooked meal a groundhog with whom I share my small plot 'night all Windows and Vertical found PVC for windows wrapped bales for a storm Higher and higher spiking in the windows pounding down the bales the last bale Neighbors help with the roof bearing assembly Cutting found bamboo for the roof my bread recipe Solar baked bread, hard-boiled egg a-la-sol, and beans chicken wire Mudding the roof bamboo slats My hybridobe mix 40% paper pulp, 40% clay, 15% cement, 5% straw Metal Work putting up the roof storage and chicken coop photo cred. I found this very angry cement mixer to help with large batch hybridobe see the film
Gutter Gardens Grow Produce Without Taking Up Space If you’d love to do a little at-home gardening but don’t have much space to do your planting, a simple gutter garden might be the perfect option. Alaskan news site Juneau Empire features a smart, simple idea for planting a small vegetable garden with very little space: A windowbox garden built from gutters. In Alaska, this idea solves a few problems for the author: We live near the glacier, so the soil is cold and has very little organic matter, there are lots of big trees shading it, and we have all the slugs and root maggots anyone could want, with porcupines, cats, bears and ravens meandering to boot.There is only one side of our house that gets much sunshine, and, of course, that side of the house has the smallest yard. Even if your garden doesn’t face the same problems, the idea behind the gutter garden could be perfect if you’re low on space but would kill for some homegrown veggies. How does your garden grow?
House in a church | Ruud Visser. Architect. Along the river De Rotte in Rotterdam (The Netherlands) stands a wooden church from 1930. The 1930's church had ended its career as a religious sanctuary and was being used as a garage for fixing and selling cars. The church was totally covered with metal plates and looked like a hangar. With a volume of 3000 cube, the church is as big as six average family houses. Their starting point was to design a ‘luxurious house, of normal measurements’ for a family with two children. The last part of the church is the transept or cross-ship. Situated on the back of the church, directly behind the transept, a smaller volume was placed. Ruud Visser Architects replaced the church-choir with a new modern volume, with exactly the same form as the original choir, but shorter. By this, the new house in the church is opened to the beautiful landscape. Where possible, the architects brought back the front-façade and the side-facades in their original 1930’s state. Design team: Ruud Visser.
The LEAP (Living Ecological Alpine Pod), a Prefab Modular Hut for High Altitudes & Mountain Living. ShareThis A new modern bivuoac for mountain living. Designed in Italy by Luca Gentilcore and Stefano Testa, the Alpine huts are modular, highly sustainable and complete with a comfortable interior. The LEAP (an acronym for Living Ecological Alpine Pod) is a technologically sophisticated shelter, prefabricated and assembled offsite, that does not alter the environment in which it is placed. This type of installation represents an interesting form of support to trekking and mountaineering activities with a much lower environmental impact than the traditional mountain shelters. 3D models: Designed to resist the stresses of extreme altitudes the pod has photovoltaic film incorporated in the outer shell to provide the energy necessary to run the installed equipment: The Interior Space: Even if limited, the interior space is furnished for a pleasing and rewarding stay under all aspects. above: Entrance unit with thermally isolated inner door, storage/drying rack and rescue equipment compartment.