This competition provides an ideal platform for professional (and student) teams internationally to present their ideas and approaches to green hotel room interior design.

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City Dirt is a brilliant urban gardening blog. The founder will be publishing the book A Little Piece of Earth this coming winter. Don’t wait to start planting some seeds now and have fun experimenting with growing food in small spaces. It is truly possible!

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City roof gardens create a nice natural habitat for pollinators and migrating species, and additionally “they provide open green spaces for property owners and the public to enjoy.” Green roofs are known to improve air and water quality, lessen storm-water runoff, lower building energy consumption, and reduce urban heat island affect.

Green roofs are constructed as a series of layers including:

• a waterproof membrane
• a root barrier
• drainage mat
• an erosion control fabric
• lightweight engineered soil, and vegetation.

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The GreenRoofs.org “Green Roofs for Healthy Cities”  Conference is on the horizon in Atlanta this coming June 2009! It is just ideal for:

• those interested in creating Green Roofs.
• studying the future of Vertical Gardens/Green Walls.
• raising awareness for green roofs and living walls (vertical gardens).
• engineers, architects, landscape architects, landscape designers,  property managers, developers, roofing contractors, and students.
• anyone interested who wants a 2-day crash course in green roofs and all the beautiful benefits they bring to cities.
• creative city gardeners of all sorts.

“Green roofs are an important component of green infrastructure. They provide valuable public benefits related to stormwater management, reduction of the urban heat island, improvement of air quality (including removal of particulate matter), and general improvement of the quality of life in communities.”  ~GreenRoofs.org

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A project of SEA (Social Environmental Aesthetics) at Exit Art, “Vertical Gardens is an exhibition of architectural models, renderings, drawings, photographs and ephemera that depict or imagine a vertical farm, urban garden or green roof.” The exhibit features over 20 projects, both imaginary and real, by artists and architects envisioning solutions for building greener urban environments.

Details for the FREE two-day event (featuring eco architects, artists, professors, and poets) at Exit celebrating Earth Day 2009 are as follows:

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The Orchard represents San Francisco’s only hotel to earn this honor, the Orchard Hotel is the second hotel in California and fourth hotel in the world with this certification. The inspiration from these green hotels comes from its 85-year-old owner, Mrs. S.C. Huang, who has pushed her environmental agenda and created more environmentally safe and sustainable hotels after the untimely cancer-related deaths of three family members.

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My jaw dropped when I first watched this video tour of a beautiful owner-built green building construction project in Oregon. This particular green building is made entirely out of cob, a mixture of clay, sand, and straw.

Meka Bunch of Wolf Creek, Oregon built this stunning cob house over a four year period. Complete with hand-sculpted furniture, shelves and nooks built directly into the walls, arched windows, and a killer custom staircase, his cob building is a divine artistic achievement.

Check out the video and photos of Meka’s cob cottage for yourself:

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Green buildings have never been so popular, at least when it comes to public policy. Looking at the stimulus plan you see how a concept that until lately was relatively marginal suddenly becomes a significant policy tool, which is expected to stimulate the economy, lower energy consumption, create jobs and support the environment, all the same time.

But what does a green building or a green home actually means? well, for most of us it would be difficult to get into specifics as so few had the chance to experience it personally, but for Avrim and Vicki Topel know the answers.

They have built a green home (LEED Silver Certified) at Kennett Square, PA and they’re sharing their story in a new book entitled “Green Beginnings: The Story of How We Built Our Green & Sustainable Home“. This book is a valuable book for anyone interested in going green or building a green home. It is also part of a greater effort of the Topel’s experience to share their experience with others, which includes tours in the house and a documentary video. And last but not least, as we reported earlier, Eco-Libris is collaborating with the authors to plant trees for the copies sold of the book.

As we wanted to learn more about the authors’ experience and their book, we asked Avrim Topel to join us for an interview.

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While it is intentionally named, it “unintentionally looks like the Rafflesia, the largest flower in the world and a native to the rainforests of Malaysia. (Rafflesia used to be Malaysian national symbol, but it is now replaced by Petronas Towers.)

The Rafflesia develops from the bud into a flower over a period of nine months. The blossom is pollinated by flies attracted by its scent, which resembles that of the carcass. The flower lasts for only a few days. Rafflesia challenges traditional definitions of what a plant is because it lacks chlorophyll and is therefore incapable of photosynthesis. Rafflesia is a parasite. It did not begin its life as a parasite, but evolved this lifestyle. Biologists do not know what the Rafflesia’s function is in its ecosystem. This mystery incites one of the most elementary questions: What is the function of the humans in the world’s ecosystem?“

The award winning Rafflesia House shown above is a spectacular study of the human habitat evolving and becoming an integrated part of its tropical, urban, and site-specific ecosystem. The architects, designers and builders “searched and re-examined the ideas of the right balance between the connection of the building to the outside and the shelter the building provides from the outside elements: plants, creatures, rain, sun, wind, or heat.”

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In full bloom at the National Building Museum this year, is a Green Community exhibition. The interactive show shares detailed information on how the “health of our communities, our planet, and ourselves depend on how we plan, design, and construct the world between our buildings. Green Community explores the origins of our precarious ecological situation and introduces communities large and small where citizens, political leaders, planning and design professionals, developers, and government agencies are working together for a more sustainable future.”

The exhibit poses the question “What makes a community green?” and answers by stating “A green community conserves its land, offers multiple options for transportation, provides open space for recreation and cultivation, and uses its natural and cultural resources wisely.”

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Look up in the sky, it’s a bird, it’s a plane no it’s a living roof. Not just a Green roof with scattered plants but one covered with 1.7 million native plants. Architect Renzo Piano designed the roof as an homage to the hills of SF. Even more creative is how the plants keep from slip sliding off the hills. Rana Creek worked with Piano to use 50,000 porous, biodegradable trays (called a BioTray®), that they made from tree sap and coconut husks as containers for the vegetation to keep the little green guys in place.

In addition to the natural habitat created by the roof, the roof reduces the Urban Heat Island effect and reduces the building’s temperature by an average of 10 degrees versus a nasty old standard roof. Additionally, the roof’s cistern system will captures 90-98 percent rainwater, with 3.5 million gallons of rainwater per year expected to be absorbed by the roof.

With all the time we spent outside the museum it’s a wonder we didn’t get sunburned. But of course we used sustainably concocted sunscreen. Next museum post, we’ll take a green look at the interior.

The Cascadia Region Green Building Council will host a tour of green buildings on September 25th, 26th, and 28th in the Victoria, Vancouver, and Okanagan regions of British Columbia. British Columbia is the Canadian province with the most LEED-certified buildings per capita, and Cascadia’s Green Skyline tour will include over 25 green buildings. Both residential and commercial tours will be included. They will emphasize what constitutes green design and offer ways to incorporate it into a project, as well as detailing the costs and benefits of building green.

The tours are designed to be walkable, bikeable, and accessible by public transit. Several organized bike tours will also be offered. See the CRGBC website to register.

Photo: The University of Victoria Medical Sciences Building; provided by the University of Victoria

To read about green tours which will come to you, see:

• Sustainable Living Road Show: Be the Change Tour on EcoLocalizer
• See Sustainable Oregon… On a Bike on Sustainablog
• Green Road Tours Bring the Fun to You on Green Options

We get into quite a bit of detail below, but before you get into that here’s a very quick summary of geothermal heat pumps:

• Geothermal (or ground source) heat pumps can be incredibly efficient, delivering 3-6x as much energy for heating and cooling as you use to power the equipment;
• They are in some ways a renewable energy system, since they use the heat contained in the earth to provide heating / cooling;
• They do require extensive installation work, including excavation or drilling to install subsurface pipes; and
• They are more expensive than traditional heating/cooling equipment, but the payback period is less than five years almost everywhere in the country due to their greater efficiency.

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