100,000 Homes Campaign, an ambitious campaign to spark a ""national movement to house America's most vulnerable homeless people"" by reframing the issue as a health crisis and transcending entrenched mindsets to figure out how to effectively collaborate and how best to allocate existing financial resources.
The affordable Passive House Prototype (PHP) is a groundbreaking concept of affordable housing using renewable energy sources such as solar PV power, bio-gas from bio-digesters, harvested rainwater and bio-climatic design to achieve thermal cooling and natural ventilation. The buildings are constructed from locally available compressed earth blocks and bamboo components.
The fundamental idea is that anything very complex comes to be, or is engineered, in the way this happens in the physical world, where each new development is a causal derivation from some previous state. Causal derivations from simple initial states to complex final states are the logically possible way to secure consistent and manageable complex wholes.
Arctic Food Network is a series of strategically distributed shelters in Baffin Island, Nunavut (Canada). The network addresses food security, biological and wildlife species management, and provides a safe navigation system across the region. AFN is developed in partnership with the Department of Culture, Language, Elders and Youth in Nunavut.
Using Fuller’s Comprehensive Anticipatory Design Science (CADS) approach, our solution is to launch the first permanently manned scientific undersea colony in the oceans in a two phase plan.
The objective of this project is to replace the conventional steel reinforcement in structural concrete by newly developed bamboo composite materials. Steel production is pricey, energy consuming and only available in developed countries. Therefore, all developing countries have to rely on steel imports, which make building construction rather costly.
The Bamboo Project aims to integrate domestically grown lightweight materials into the Haitian construction industry by demonstrating the structural, aesthetic and ecologically resilient nature of bamboo. This creates a model which can be deployed in areas suffering from deforestation and threatened seismically and climatically worldwide.
The Galveston project explores conversion of oil rigs to repair coastal regions in two phases. Proto-One establishes community support with a sophisticated housing system utilizing hurricane waste. Proto-Two, a parallel protoCooperative initiative, uses a mineral extraction process to transform the oil and water-purification industries through the use of waste brine as a mineral source for a wide variety of uses.
Build Change is working in Colombia to create an environment wherein homeowners, government, and private sector, can easily work together to retrofit (strengthen) existing vulnerable homes, saving lives in the next earthquake, and contributing with safety and improved construction practice as former slums continue to develop into vibrant, urban neighborhoods.
The six-story, 50,000 square foot Bullitt Center opens a window into the future by showing how healthy, comfortable, ultra-efficient and sustainable an urban office building can be. It produces more energy from rooftop solar than it uses; meets its water needs from rain; creates no municipal sewage; and is toxic-free.
Buoyant Ecologies is a collaborative research platform that synthesizes architectural design, marine ecology, and digital fabrication to explore new approaches to constructing resilient waterfront structures. The project's ambition is to develop compelling strategies for designing and fabricating scalable resilient coastal structures that enhance the biodiversity of the surrounding ecology.
Founded by artist Mary Miss, City as Living Laboratory is building a replicable FRAMEWORK for innovative artists of all disciplines to lead collaborative teams that address the pressing environmental challenges of our time, activated through place-based experience to make sustainability personal, visceral, tangible, and encourages citizen and governmental action.
CITY SINK is a meta-park of dispersed landscape Infrastructure boosting carbon stocks in both short - term biomass storage and through formation of long- term sequestration reservoirs for soil organic carbon in New York City. Urban-landscape is reshaped into apparatus, empowering citizens to affect global ecologies through civic practice.
Cooperación Comunitaria has envisioned and is implementing a comprehensive model to radically improve these marginalized populations' living conditions by working with communities to rebuild their homes.
F.R.E.D. (Fostering Resilient Ecological Design) is a cross-disciplinary project that develops whole-systems approaches for re-building and strengthening neighborhoods within coastal communities on the eastern seaboard of the United States. The project asks, “Can we re-think how (and why) we build and live near the water?"
G-Pod is a building system, with each individual pod's being capable of functioning autonomously or able to be interlinked with others to form more consolidated structures. G-pods, in both single and multi pod configurations, are readily deployable and can be easily dismantled, restructured, reused and re-located with minimal environmental impact.
SUMMARY: We are developing the Global Village Construction Set (GVCS) - an advanced industrial economy-in-a-box that can be replicated inexpensively anywhere in the world. The GVCS is like a Lego set of modular building blocks which that work together for creating sustainable, regenerative, resilient communities.
SUMMARY: Haiti Onward (HO) embodies a design collaborative combining ancient wisdom with modern technologies to create new economies.
SUMMARY: The Informal Urban Communities Initiative (IUCI) integrates design activism, education and interdisciplinary research in the slums of Lima. It deploys innovative approaches to slum-upgrading that marry participatory design with adaptive, decentralized infrastructure.
The primary aim of this policy/systems design project is to develop an International Indigenous Design Charter. Its mission is to guide designers (indigenous and non-indigenes) on the appropriate use of Indigenous knowledge and culture in communication design and associated areas of design practice.