The Wall Street Journal recently challenged architects to design a green house of the future. This morning, the paper unloaded the designs, that come from four firms: William McDonough, Rios Clemente Hale, Cook + Fox and Mouzon Design. Here they are:
The winner of a competition to design a new building for the China Insurance Group has just been announced, and the winning design is a truly futuristic-sounding creation. Shenzhen "4 Tower in 1," from Coop Himmelb(l)au will be a 49-storey solar-power-generating monster that has a multimedia projection outer layer.
Apparently, the idea of a green shopping mall isn't an utter absurdity. Sparch Architects has just finished designing a million-square-foot shopping mall for Kuala Lampur, and their vision is maximally green, and maximally livable. The building is to be an anchor for an urban revival.
William McDonough, the godfather of green design, has been hailed by everyone from Hollywood to Silicon Valley to the Chinese government as the environmental savior. His radical "cradle to cradle" idea -- in which every product, building, and city is designed in an infinite loop with zero waste -- has earned him the Presidential Design Award for Sustainable Development.
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