In December, JLC featured four advanced high-performance, super-insulated building designs. This week, we talked with homeowners who are living in some houses built following those designs to find out how the homes are coping with this year’s record cold.
Concrete is a problem from start to finish. The production of cement is responsible for at least 5% of the CO2 made by humans each year. That cement is mixed with aggregate that is carted out of huge earth-scarring gravel pits by giant trucks. It is then put in redi-mix trucks that race through…. Read more here
Made out of wood and formed chicken wire, “Daily Needs” is a one-stop gardening unit that allows gardeners to grow vegetables, raise chickens or other pets, and to close the cycle by composting any food scraps into more brown gold. Part of the structure can be modified to become a mini-greenhouse or coldframe, by using…. Read more here
Living in a one-room house with an ultra-minimalist aesthetic and two small children sounds more like the setup for a joke than something any reasonably sane person would attempt.
And yet that’s exactly what Takaaki and Christina Kawabata set out to do when they renovated an old house here. They were convinced that an open space with as few toys and material possessions as possible was a recipe not for disaster, but for domestic calm.
Still, living this way takes ….. Read More Here
From Patrick Creadon, director of WORDPLAY and I.O.U.S.A., comes a captivating look at a radically innovative approach to education. IF YOU BUILD IT follows designer-activists Emily Pilloton and Matthew Miller to rural Bertie county, the poorest in North Carolina, where they work with local high school students to transform both their community and their lives. Living on credit and grant money and fighting a change-resistant school board, Pilloton and Miller lead their students through a year-long, full-scale design and build project that does much more than just teach basic construction skills: it shows ten teenagers the power of design-thinking to help re-invent not just their town but their own sense of what’s possible.
Showing on February 14, 2014 at Landmark Midtown Art Cinema in Atlanta called IF YOU BUILD IT, about influential designer-activist Emily Pilloton.
