Icon Buzz - Designs & Arts

It’s nice to see contemporary green homes that look like, contemporary homes. It means that the materials have evolved, clients are cluing in and architects have embraced sustainability as simply another way of designing and specifying a house - without creative limits. Do green cars have to look like a Prius? Do houses have to look green? Not any more it appears. The book features 23 good looking projects including some we’ve mentioned here before; Kieran Timberlake’s Loblolly House, Michelle Kaufmann’s Glidehouse, Chicago’s Factor 10 House. You’ll find the usual photographs, floor plans and detailed drawings that illustrate sustainable features, but you’ll also find topics that include climate regulation, drainage systems, and regional planning. Hardcover, 192 pages, well illustrated, $23.10 at Amazon.

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Luflic had some amazing chairs at Toronto’s Interior Design Show this past weekend, really catching the collective eye with two pieces called In The Round. Both these production-ready chairs, designed by Brent Cordner, are named after the in-the-round knitting technique and over 50 feet of wool sleeve is used to cover the tubular steel frame for the felt version and 30 feet for the stitch version. The Snowshoe chair (after the jump) won an award at IDS for Best prototype and it is an incredibly light chair made from a composite of wood and Kevlar and based on the traditional snowshoe. The Meander chair is a continuous length of nickel-reinforced copper tubing that results in surprisingly comfortable sculptural seating.

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Kithaus recently installed one of their K3 Modernist modules in Big Sur, California. Designed by Tom Sandonato and Martin Wehmann, the K3 is a 9’ x 13’ pre-wired prefab module that is made of a lot of lightweight anodized aluminium that does not require heavy equipment to get it to the installation site. Interestingly, along with the Airstream CCD, the Kithaus K3 is available through DWR.

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