For those looking for an eco-friendly way to get around the city, without actually having to exert extra energy en route, there’s P.U.M.A. Designed by Segway — the company who developed the Segway— and General Motors, P.U.M.A., which stands for Personal Urban Mobility & Accessibility, may just be the solution for eco-conscious urbanites everywhere. Like the Segway, the P.U.M.A. features advanced sensing and dynamic stabilization with a zero turning radius. Unlike its older brother, it includes a domed weatherproof roof and seating for two. Suitable for both city roads and bike lanes, the P.U.M.A. can travel between 25 and 35 mph for twenty-five to thirty-five miles on a single battery charge — which take five to eight hours — making it an ideal vehicle for short commutes. Costing, approximately sixty cents in electricity per charge, and estimated to cost less than most current small cars, the P.U.M.A. is also highly cost-effective. With only one prototype in existence, and no plans to start selling the P.U.M.A. anytime soon, our hopes of owning the perfect clean transportation vehicle will just have to wait. In the meantime, you could always get a bike. We still think those are awesome.

One of the great things about being in college is that you’re not required to produce practical work. Your pseudo-intellectual essays might get a B- if the professor is generous. I was once given an A for a tedious, poorly researched paper on mid-20th century Irish folk music that will never benefit a single person. But some wholly unnecessary, unsolicited work can be great — especially in architecture schools. And double good if it makes it past the pipe-dream phase and is actually built. Case in point: Evolver, a spirally wooden structure near Lake Stelli in Zermatt, Switzerland. It was designed by the students in ALICE, an experimental architecture studio at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne. No one actually needed Evolver, but I think I’m glad it exists.
     It’s surrounded by some of the most Romantic nature in Europe. Altitude: 2,536 meters. Visitors are supposed to walk up and then down the ramp and experience different vistas through the wood slats. The idea being that the slats make you focus on one spot. It’s controlled nature-loving. Ideally the views are enhanced by Evolver: gazing at the nearby Matterhorn again and again from different angles should drop your jaw even lower. But will it? My initial impression was: What’s so awful about looking up at mountains from grass?
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The other day, walking down the street near my apartment in the Lower East Side, I came upon a trailer park, right on the corner of Stanton and Suffolk, which hadn’t been there before. By trailer park I mean a trailer, parked. Not an expansive terrain of trailers. But also, inside the tiny, silver Coachman Travel Trailer was a park — yes, growing plants, shrubs, and trees, a miniature cascading waterfall and pond, wood and concrete benches, and skylights to let in sunshine. I stepped in, and enjoyed the natural park setting, the sound of trickling water, the dappled sunlight on the outstretched plant leaves.
     Originally commissioned in 2006 for an exhibit at the Storefront for Art and Architecture, Kim Hollerman’s Trailer Park is not new. It’s been written about before, and some of our readers may have seen it when it first exhibited (parked?) back in ’06. But for me, it was a fresh slice of genius on a sunny fall day.

Currently parked at NY Studio Gallery, 154 Stanton Street.
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Photography by Sam Noonan

The Bridge House by architect Max Pritchard got a fair amount of press earlier this summer, so we’re a little late to the praise party. But in the interest of giving credit where credit is due, we’d like to gush over this ingenious living/working space that straddles a creek outside of Adelaide, South Australia. Let’s start with money. It only cost $177,000. That’s laughably lower than the average home being published today. Granted, with an area of 110 square meters, Bridge House is relatively small. But a price tag under $200k for such a thoughtfully designed home on a lot this challenging is inspiring: Hey, average non-millionaire, you too could have your house written about in fancy New York City magazines if you hire a clever architect like Mr. Pritchard. Oh, and if you’re ballsy enough to build over a creek’s deep waterhole.
     In Australia, they’d call that waterhole a billabong. The clients have a 10-acre site but they wanted their house to be on the bank overlooking the billabong. They didn’t want to significantly alter the gorgeous setting and destroy the billabong, so steel trusses were used to elevate the house. As a commenter on the Web site Archinet reminds us, it’s very reminiscent of an unbuilt project by Craig Ellwood, the influential, yet unlicensed, architect. The best artists always steal, right?

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Photography by James D. Griffioen

Perhaps you grew up in a tree-lined, middle-class suburb outside of Cleveland, tiptoeing past a dilapidated Gothic Revival on the way to the bus stop. Perhaps you came of age near New York’s BQE, eyeing weathered, unoccupied row houses with suspicion. Wherever you were, there was a good chance that an abandoned, spooky old house — its lawn gone to seed, its windows boarded — waited for you around the corner or at the end of the lane. Maybe you had the nerve to sneak in or perhaps you just watched sentimentally as the elements turned its walls and wood into something more fascinating and feral. Now imagine that house not being the exception in your ‘hood, but a growing norm.
     In cities across the country, the diving housing market and industrial downturn have had families on the run and leaving properties behind. In Flint, Michigan, Oakland, California, and even Brooklyn, rows of houses that have remained vacant since the mid-90s have welcomed new occupants – ivy, trees, and ruin. As GM and the other manufacturing giants slashed workforces over the last 20 years, the communities around these industrial centers have become eerie memento mori to bygone times when work was plenty, mortgages were cheap, and blue-collar communities thrived. Now the thriving in areas of Detroit and other cities is done by nature.
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Menswear from Izzy Lane's 2009 Ethical Fashion

Seven-plus days of champagne-soaked, Swarovski-studded Fashion Week opulence can leave your average “green” enthusiast feeling unconscionably wasteful. The daily arrival of extravagant fashion invitations printed on rubber or dusted in 14k gold can make the most cynical of eco-skeptics wonder: “what is the carbon footprint of chic?”
     Happily, a heroic few among the fashionable set have made going green a style priority for Spring/Summer 2010.  Located at Soho’s fittingly titled King of Green Street boutique, the GreenShows will host presentations by earth-friendly, fair-trade labels including Bodkin, Bahar Shahpar, Izzy Lane, Lara Miller, Mr. Larkin, and House of Organic over the course of two days.  Of course, runway beauty will be suitably “eco”, with John Masters Organics providing all hair-styling services. In addition, a kickoff party on opening night will aim to raise awareness about the Rainforest Action Network (RAN)—an organization that attempts to educate fashion and luxury brands who use custom paper packaging about the dangerous environmental side effects that come from farming tree pulp in tropical rainforests.
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Image courtesy of Kevin Cyr

These days, it seems there’s a new eco-invention every week. Maybe you’ve already heard of the solar-powered eco-camper, the vegetable oil-fueled bio-Trekker , or even the Emergency Response Studio. If you have, then there’s no need telling you that the RV no longer has to be that gas guzzler antipode of sustainable travel that it used to. If not – well, now you know. And there’s even more….
     Boston-based artist Kevin Cyr has created another type of green RV: the Camper Bike. Secured on a steady three-wheeler the camper is a human-driven sustainable RV that can be taken for a ride by a single pedaler. The inside is still under construction but once finished the Camper Bike will be equipped with the most necessary amenities for a few days on the road, making it a neat alternative holiday house — that is, if you don’t mind traveling solo. On his website Cyr describes the camper as a sculptural art piece, even if it is fully functioning. As such there might be little luck in wishing for one of your own anytime soon. But who knows, if Cyr gets a good response maybe he’ll put the camper into production.
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Photography courtesy of Santiago Vanegas

It’s been seven months since I returned from Antarctica and I still can’t fathom that I was there. It’s like going to another planet. Not that I’ve been to another planet, but I can imagine that this is the closest I’ll ever get to one. Ironically, being in Antarctica has probably been the closest I’ve felt to Earth. The experience of being there has generated a series of extreme opposing images. First, there’s the scale: massive landscape, tiny human. And then there’s the sobering inverse: towering human threat to nature, delicate and vulnerable, polar (global) ecology. There was also the unforgiving Drake Passage crossing, our 240-foot ship at the mercy of thirty- to fifty-foot waves. Life, death. The list goes on. It’s humbling. People ask me, “Why go to Antarctica?” There are many reasons. Some of which I have yet to discover. I wanted to go to Antarctica because soon it will be a different place. Just in the last few years, ice shelves the size of entire countries have broken off the continent and are melting into the ocean. Antarctica is dying. I had to go, absorb, and tell a story. And then, of course, there’s the magnificence of Antarctica. Such an unlikely and complex place. I guess you could say that my reasons for going are Death and Beauty.
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There are some inspirational, off-beat composers out there. Namely the Vienna Vegetable Orchestra — playing on carrot-flutes and radish-marimbas — and Joseph Bertolozzi, who turned the entire Franklin Delano Roosevelt Bridge into a gigantic percussion instrument. And then there was David Byrne’s installation last year, Playing the Building. Most recently, composer and sound designer Diego Stocco appeared on our radar. With an eminently creative mind, Stocco builds music out of ingenious objects like sand and burning pianos. For his latest project he turned to a sprawling old tree in his own backyard.
     “In the garden of my house there’s a tree with lots of randomly grown twigs,” he writes on his website. “It looks odd and nice at the same time. One day I asked myself if I could create a piece of music with it.”
     It turns out he could, so he did, and with no other means than a pencil sharpener, two microphones, and a customized stethoscope he made a track simply by thumbing and shaking the tree. The pencil sharpener was used to trim the twigs so that Stocco could tune them. Connected to a plastic pipe on one end and a microphone on the other, the stethoscope then transmitted the sounds Stocco created. The final version of the track has not been processed or digitally edited in any way. “All the sounds come from playing the tree, by bowing the twigs, shaking the leaves, playing rhythms on the cortex and so on,” Stocco explains.
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As we reported previously, a number of companies and consortiums are exploring the idea of urban, “vertical” farms – entire ecosystems of agricultural production contained in modern buildings right in the middle of the world’s busiest cities. Besides looking really cool, these agricultural factories have ingenious production cycles, capturing sunlight, rain, and wind as well as having floor-to-floor crop plans that increase efficiency and crop yield, and maximize resources.
     Many argue, and certainly the companies behind these “farms” do, that the world’s increasing population needs new solutions for future agriculture. With 80 percent of the world’s arable land already in use, the idea is to build up instead of out — and keep the distribution of food local — an approach that has led a growing number of vertical farm projects to surface. The verdict is still out as to whether these projects are truly as viable and environmentally sound as they claim. Much research and analysis will still need to be done, especially by qualified third parties. But for now we marvel at the inventiveness of the various plans we see springing up.
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