MetaFilter posts tagged with houses and buildings

Treehouses for grownups

madamjujujive — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 19:56:00 -0800

Whole Tree Architecture - if you'd like a house built by pioneering architect Roald Gundersen, your first step might be to hike in your nearby woods to choose some young, wind-bent, and diseased "Charlie Brown" trees. Small diameter round trees have 150% the strength of milled lumber and twice the strength of steel in tension. Besides structural and environmental advantages, whole trees make for some beautiful and naturally sculptured environments. From the NY Times article: "And when the trees are left whole, they sequester carbon. “For every ton of wood, a ton and a half of carbon dioxide is locked up,” he said, whereas producing a ton of steel releases two to five tons of carbon. So the more whole wood is used in place of steel, the less carbon is pumped into the air. These passive solar structures also need very little or no supplemental heat. Tom Spaulding, the executive director of Angelic Organics Learning Center, near Rockford, Ill., northwest of Chicago, knows about this because he commissioned Mr. Gundersen to build a 1,600-square-foot training center in 2003. He said: “In the middle of winter, on a 20-below day, we’re in shorts, with the windows and doors open. And we don’t burn a bit of petroleum."

Detroit schools urban exploration & reclamation.

Item — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 03:49:39 -0800

Urban exploration has been featured here once or twice before, but Jim Griffioen's site photo-documenting his discoveries in and around Detroit deserves a look. Griffioen was recently interviewed [direct mp3 link] on the American Public Media radio program The Story. Jim is most interested in schools. He's taken photos of trees growing through books and other things left behind. Recently Jim has gone beyond documenting what he sees and is reclaiming what he finds. He collects abandoned library books and other school supplies and gives them to community centers. Previously - blog post by Griffioen on Detroit's abandoned Belle Isle Zoo

100 Abandoned Houses in Detroit

dersins — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 12:33:51 -0800

100 Abandoned Houses. A photo essay from Detroit-based photographer Kevin Bauman.

Unusual Homes. Amazing Architecture. Strange Places. Fascinating People.

dersins — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 08:44:58 -0800

Unusual Life Dot Com: Unusual Homes. Amazing Architecture. Strange Places. Fascinating People.

Prague

plep — Fri, 18 Jul 2003 07:08:34 -0800

Stone inhabitants and extraordinary houses of Prague. More at the Praha experience.
If you like this, you might also like fifty doors of Paris and San Francisco.

Dream Houses And Great Architects

MiguelCardoso — Sat, 31 May 2003 19:31:37 -0800

I So Want This House It Hurts. Mies van der Rohe's Farnsworth House is up for sale. If price was no object and location wasn't a problem, where would you choose to really live? What architect, living or dead; what building, available or not, would you choose? [NYT reg. required for main link..]