I was introduced to William McDonough and his book Cradle to Cradle by Jane while working with her on this project. It is a fantastic book that seems to aim to change the way the reader thinks more than teach a lesson.

I just listened to a talk he gave a few years back on the Social Innovation Conversations podcast that is an excellent introduction to his ideas and way of thinking. It’s definitely worth the hour listen.

I have been asked to show some work, here is a project called FAB TREE HAB: In congruence with ecology as the guiding principal, this living home is designed to be nearly entirely edible so as to provide food to some organism at each stage of its life cycle. While inhabited, the home’s gardens and exterior walls continually produce nutrients for people and animals. As a direct contributer to the ecosystem it supports an economy comprised of truly breathing products not reconstituted or processed materials. Imagine a society based on slow farming trees for housing structure instead of the industrial manufacture of felled timber.

see http://www.archinode.com/bienal.html

After implementing environmental standards, why does green architecture look so bland? Passive cooling, low flush toilets, and harvested lumber do not foreground evocative design. During the last two decades, the prevalent challenge for the sustainable design movement in the United States has been to sluggishly modify the behavior of the developers, architects, and planners responsible for the sizable majority of new projects. From this outlook, it’s not salient ensembles but uniform conventions that ought to stand as the peak objective for green advocates. I’ve considered such standardized aspirations as limiting and myopic. We need more “design” in green design and less limiting conventions.