y 9216's List: Architecture and Landscape

• "TreeHugger keeps away from big single family houses these days."
• It can mask a more serious aspect of the challenge: the diminished sustainability of low-density, residential subdivisions in suburbia where most free-standing houses of the future are likely to be situated.
• 
• No matter how green individual homes are, suburban sprawl is intrinsically anti-green. It generates infrastructure inefficiency; car dependency and rising fossil fuel demand; carbon-emitting, time-wasting road congestion; and, despite availability of inexpensive land at ever-greater distances from jobs, escalating development, construction and public service costs.
• I think the biggest, and most interesting design challenges will be found in metropolitan suburbs, where the task will be retrofitting the entire urban landscape — working in transit, figuring out how to make car-oriented spaces walkable, and learning how best to add density in places that weren’t designed for it.

3 more annotations...

• The Ring House by TNA Architects of Japan has a wide open theme with segmented rings as the main structure. The Ring House was designed as a retreat with a 360 degree view of the forest which meant planning the rings and windows at heights that would allow visual access to the outside, as well as hiding undesirable utilitarian features.
• 

  • Life with forest.
• 
• 
• 

  • Greatest morning resident can enjoy.

3 more annotations...