Soon, only professionals can fix houses

By 2016, houses in Britain will be zero carbon, which means producing enough clean energy to cover any power taken from traditional sources.

Each new home will be awarded an energy efficiency star rating, as part of the new Code for Sustainable Homes, which will be extended from social housing, as originally proposed, to cover every new house. Code compliance is expected to become mandatory by April 2008.

The house of 2080 will consist of glass and timber chunks, perched on stilts and topped by a roof clad in photovoltaic cells with an inverted pitch to collect rainwater, with car ports for battery-powered cars underneath -- a set of connecting self-contained boxes that can be added or removed to meet changing needs.

As more work from home, “towns will become less like dormitories, so local communities will become more vibrant”. One side-effect may be the death of DIY: the more high-tech our homes become, the less capable we will be of repairing them.

Window for dogs

Neat idea to help reduce "fence anxiety" for dogs. Might help reduce barking for some dogs. To reduce anxiety, Sunset Magazine once recommended placing a small window low in the wall for dogs left alone at home.

The PetPeek™ window is a durable, clear, hard plastic dome 9.5 inches in diameter, with a black trim-ring and all necessary hardware for easy do-it-yourself installation into your wooden fence.

Dogs are curious, they want to know what’s happening out there. Help satisfy their curiosity and make it possible for them to have a peek.
About $30

Veggie buildings

Transformed a skyscraper lately?

Ping Mag has a superb article entitled:
Vertical Garden: The art of organic architecture

From designer Patrick Blanc:

The Vertical Garden as it is known in English, is something closer to a living painting than to a garden. Actually I named it le mur vegetal, meaning vegetal wall. I’m a scientist, a botanist and the Vertical Garden is derived from many observations I made in natural places mostly in tropical areas for more than 30 years now…

How to Build a Cardboard Castle

Kelly's Tools blogged this site that helps make tough, low cost and fun items out of cardboard.

Find out how to get FREE cardboard boxes.

Plus a neat invention to attach cardboard panels that is more effective than duct tape: Mr. McGroovy's Box Rivets™

Stronger than traditional glass

"A crystal is like toy soldiers all lined up marching together," state researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. "A glass is a teenager's room, with stuff packed in everywhere."

When considered at the molecular level, most solid materials can be described as either crystals or glasses, explains lead author Mark Ediger, a UW-Madison chemistry professor. The difference lies in the degree of internal organization of their constituent molecules.

Conventional glasses are relatively disordered and molecularly unstable because of how they are made. Glass ingredients are melted, then cooled and allowed to harden. As the molten glass cools, Ediger says, "The molecules slow down, then get stuck. The question is, did they get stuck in an organized state or in an unorganized state?"

Normally, a piece of glass is allowed to cool all at once and the inner molecules, unable to move freely, tend to be trapped in disarray. Ediger and his team, in collaboration with researchers in the UW-Madison School of Pharmacy and the National Institute of Standards and Technology, designed a new technique that gives all the molecules a chance to arrange themselves a little more neatly.

Though the new glasses do not reach the precision of crystals, they are denser and far stronger than traditional glass. "We were just astonished..."

story at PhysOrg

Comfortable, healthy & efficient

Casaclima-Klimahaus is one of the best examples of how systemic change can lead to

high performance, comfortable, healthy hyper-efficient and carbon neutral buildings.

It is one of the most effective programs of this kind in the world today, as it is strongly accepted, adopted, and supported by the public, and it is generating a wave of imitation in a wide region in southern and central Europe.

more at worldchanging

Blog links

Pruned
Ostensibly, this is a blog about landscape architecture, but it actually illustrates how any discipline has complexity and hybridity behind it, usually by gathering all sorts of random pieces of visual culture. (See also: BLDG BLOG & Things Magazine.)

via fimoculous

Cold formed glass

This process allows for the bending of the shattered glass laminates, made from tempered glass, at room temperature.

The product can be bent on site around existing structures, such as stair railings, without the limitations and high cost of hot glass bending. It too can be cut to fit on site by a tradesman with a diamond blade equipped power saw.

Cold bent glass at Silastial can be used in molds for mass production of curved glass.

New metal shear wall could lower construction cost.

Engineers pushed a newly designed, metal shear wall to its limits at a Nov. 20 seismic test at the University of California, Berkeley's Structural Engineering Research Lab. The panel proved strong enough for use in California and other earthquake-prone regions throughout the world, researchers said. [link to story]