Green Options

I can’t stop drooling over these cozy, upcycled houses from Snugville!

Artist Amy Larson creates each little snug from scratch out of vintage materials. She says that she is drawn to materials that give her the opportunity to reduce, reuse, and recycle! All of that scavenging for just the right vintage bits and pieces gives each snug a unique personality and charm.

For several years, Professor Behrokh Khoshnevis at the University of Southern California has been working on systems for rapidly creating buildings with system that is essentially a very large 3-dimensional printer.  Called Contour Crafting, the equipment is able to rapidly build up walls.  Already, test runs have been able to produce six-foot high concrete walls.

One goal of the team developing this technology is to be able to build a house in a day, a goal that they hope to reach within the next few years.  There is some merit to this goal, and the benefits of being able to rapidly and inexpensively produce houses are obvious, though not without some attendant problems.