Tag: sustainable architecture

greenhouse home in Sweden
Design, Sustainability

Passive-Solar Greenhouse-Wrapped Nature House in Sweden

youtu.be/30ghnDOFbNQ

In 1974, architect Bengt Warne designed the prototype for a greenhouse home to deal with the cold winters in Sweden. Rather than converting an existing structure and moving inside it, he built a normal house — and then encasing it in glass — a Nature House (or “Naturhus” ). Inspired by these designs, a family has created a home near Stockholm integrated with the elements of earth, water, air, and fire. The electricity bills have been cut in half, heated by an eco-friendly wood-burning oven and a hot water masonry heater. The greenhouse also shelters Mediterranean-style gardens that couldn’t survive the Swedish seasons — figs, kiwi, peaches, wine grapes, etc.

sonoma vineyards beauty in spring
Eco-Cultural-Travel

Wild Sonoma’s ‘Valley of the Moon’ – Living with the Land

The Sonoma Valley in Northern California is known for it’s world-class wine, gentle hills, and year-round temperate climate, where novelist-gentleman-farmer Jack London set up his ode to wild sustainability one hundred years before it became a thing. Flying over in a hot air balloon, hiking the protected hillsides to find a precious Pinot Noir at one of the 425 wineries, sailing off the coast, there are many ways to get lost in them hills.

Buckminster Fuller, Sustainability
Design

Buckminster Fuller’s World of Sustainable Design

youtu.be/YbBKRRB1E9U

Buckminster Fuller, architect, engineer, geometrician, philosopher, futurist, inventor of the famous geodesic dome, put forth an original form of sustainable living for humanity. He posited that systems thinking helps us understand our connectedness and dependence on our local biome. Watch the 1974 film “The World of R. Buckminster Fuller.”