A solemn structure makes the case for a post-secular kind of design, and worship.

Several months back, The New York Times reported on a man named Tony Carnes who has taken on the Herculean task of mapping out all of New York City’s houses of worship. “Mr. Carnes is in search of every church, cathedral, synagogue, shtiebel, mosque, temple, zendo and ashram,” the story states. He posts his findings to his “public square,” nycreligion.info, where folks can find out about “the sizzle of religion in New York — the kosher sizzle! The halal sizzle!”

By the end of this year, Carnes and his group of volunteers will have driven down every last street in each and every borough of what he calls a “postsecular” city, meaning not quite a Jerusalem or a Mecca, but somewhere between secular and sacred.

A project in Finland, meanwhile, is making a solid (and solemn) case for a new breed of urban postsecular. A modern contrast to the stone and mortar rigidity of traditional houses of worship, the Chapel of Silence is a meant as a meditative refuge in the heart of Helsinki. A place to reflect and a space to be. Ostensibly, it’s a dogma free zone that, arguably, every city should have.

With its curved wood facade, the Chapel of Silence flows into the cityscape while its gently sloped interior beehives visitors from the bustle of city life outside.

Warmth and calm define the space, while wood provides the structure.

If not for the discrete crucifix on the façade, which might very well be a doorknocker shaped in the letter “t”, and another in the interior, architecturally-speaking the space is almost secularist. There is no apparent doctrine in the design, and minimalist simplicity trumps superstition. 

 Images: K2S Architects via ArchDaily; The New York Times

Looking for something to daydream about? These woodland hideaways blend scenery with inspired whimsy.

Some call them Hobbit homes, but let’s try on permaculture-minded, fairy-tale inspired woodland hideaways. Dug into a hillside or camouflaging with their natural environment, they could even be called latter-day Smurf dwellings.

What’s so appealing about a home tucked away in a hill or hidden amongst a cluster of trees is that it visually resonates with a kind of eco-idealism most of us can relate to or have read about in Tolkien tales. The homes I’m about to wax on about look like life as it’s meant to be lived, in harmony with the natural world and not geometrically opposed to it.

The most stunning example of a “Hobbit house” hideaway I’ve ever come across is this low-impact woodland home in Wales, United Kingdom. Excavated stone and mud was used to construct inner walls and the foundation. Straw bales in the floors and walls allow for insulation, while a mud/turf roof protects against the elements.

Japanese architect Kazunori Fujimoto designed this strikingly stark and minimalist home as a vacation hideaway, nestled into the few remaining trees adjacent to a heavily-traversed tourist road. Meant to provide privacy separated from their otherwise suburban-esque surroundings, it melds in rather than stands out. Though it is certainly unusual.

As one blog described it, it’s more of a sculpture than a house, “a concrete bunker obscured by the surrounding trees.”

Perhaps an obvious treatment of the wooded vacation home, I nevertheless can’t get enough of small houses like these, partially obscured by both design and the woodlands.

Finally, this prefab house in Adelaide, Australia spans a creek via a trussing system. That means the structure of the home is supported by those triangular units below, like a bridge of Madison County.

Or a moon over my river.

Images: A Low Impact Woodland Home; Kazunori Fujimoto; Mango and Ginger

If you’ve got a lake house, count yourself a sitting duck for company.

In the summertime, there is nothing more coveted than a summer lake house to escape from the heat, the traffic and to commune with nature. But why not up the ante with a sustainably designed lake house? We found six that catered to our varied need for serenity, silence and superior design in times of summer chaos.

Envision yourself in one of these if you don’t have one of your own.

Designed by architect Todd Saunders of Saunders Architecture, this boat-inspired home is cozy and minimalist. Moreover, it flawlessly melds interior and exterior deck space in what looks like one broad, lovely, clean stroke from the roof to the dock of the bay.

Don’t let the grandness fool you. This modern lake house in Omena, Michigan is a fully sustainable LEED Gold certified home. Conceptually, the house was built with the idea that everything should be worked with and used as a tool, meaning the builders took energy and material use into account, as well as the trajectory of the sun and wind.

This eco house (called the Cliff House) in the Muskoka Lakes area of northern Ontario is off the hook, and off the grid. Designed by Altius Architecture, the house has breathtaking views care of floor-to-ceiling glass walls and the natural wood floors keep it homey. As mentioned, it operates off the grid and also features solar hot water and photovoltaic solar panels and clean-burning fireplaces.

The Clingstone House, made entirely from timber, is well over a century old. Today, it is owned by architect Henry Wood and has been re-vamped with modern eco technology including roof-mounted solar panels and a wind turbine to generate electricity. It also has rainwater-recycling, seawater-filtration systems, and composting toilets.

Stone Creek Camp on the eastern shore of Flathead Lake in Bigfork, Montana is more of a lakeside complex than modest getaway. The property, designed by Andersson Wise Architects, covers more than 15 acres and includes a cabin that dates back to the 1940s, which was preserved and renovated. It now has a main residence, a lodge, guest house, large dock and lots of green features. Constructed mostly from local materials, the main residence features an energy efficient sod green roof. Radiant floor heating heats the rooms and high performance windows reduce heat dispersion.

This naturally luxe cottage was designed by BjarkoSerra Architects. Located on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington State, what is most appealing about this lakefront house is that it blends so seamlessly into its natural environs. Moreover, while building this rustic getaway, not a single tree was cut or disrupted.

Images: One of Those American Girls; Saunders Architecture; BusyBoo; Design Stories; Trendir; Live Green; Bjarkoserra

Occasionally short on space, A frames are forever rooted in boundless ingenuity.

Anyone who’s seen The Sweet Hereafter is likely to remember two things. Firstly, how heart-achingly depressed they felt afterwards. Secondly, that amazing A-frame house Wanda and Hartley Otto lived in. If not for all the snow and tragedy you, like me, might have thought “Hey, I could live there.”

Mountainous and beachy places are the most likely locales for A-frames, partly because of the low cost of constructing one – often as a second home – and from an eco-angle, their high ceilings provide excellent ventilation and allow plenty of natural light into the home. The characteristically steep sloping roof fares particularly well in extreme winter climates.

From Sagaponack to the Pyranees, here are seven famous – or almost famous – A-frames we think we could live in too.

The Reese House
Sagaponack, NY

Credited as being the house that capitalized the American A-frame housing boom from the mid-1950′s to the 1970′s, it was designed by the legendary architect Andrew Gellar in 1955.

Gassho-zukuri Houses
Shirakawa-gō and Gokayama

In Japan, the A-frame structure is referred to as “Prayer-hands construction.” The most famous cluster of gassho-zukuri houses can be seen in the UN World Heritage villages of Shirakawa-gō and Gokayama.

Al Purdy’s House
Ameliasburgh, ON

Known as one of Canada’s most important poets, Purdy’s pretty A-frame on Roblin Lake was constructed out of second-hand lumber and became the most famous writer’s house in the country.

The Weeks House
Louisville, Tennessee

Designed and constructed in 1950 by his father Paul Weeks, the son and his wife Jeannine renovated it with architect Brian Pittman. The house was gutted to its original structure and two years later resulted in a 3,200-square-foot renovation and expansion.

The Vanna Venturi House
Philadelphia, PA

This house, designed by architect Robert Venturi for his mother, is recognized as being one of the first prominent works of the postmodern architecture movement. It was constructed between 1962 -1964. It’s not very big, only about 30 feet tall, but architectural historian Vincent Scully called it “The biggest small building of the second half of the twentieth century.”

House at The Pyrenees
Aran Valley, Spain

This sexy house was commissioned by a father and son team who wanted to transform a dry stone house into a modern second residence in the Spanish Pyrenees. Built atop a vernacular dry stone house, architects Cadaval & Sola-Morales melded new design with old to create a sustainable home in this most extreme climate.

The Allandale House
Somewhere in the forest

This unusual A-frame was designed by William O’Brien Jr. who describes it as a “cabin of curiosities,” housing wines, rare books, stuffed birds and an elk mount. Another score for taxidermy chic.

A-frames can be short on space, but they are highly adaptable structures that allow for boundless creative collaboration between architects, designers and the residents themselves. Really, the roof’s the limit.

Images: Archifile, A|N Blog, Japan-i, Derek Shapton, Architectural Record; Chestnut Hill Historical Society, Cadaval & Sola-Morales, William O’Brien Jr.

A centuries-old mill gets back to work at last.

When you’re on an urban hike around your own neighborhood, you don’t expect to find a windmill being built in the middle of the road. Holgate Windmill was here before this area of York (England) was smothered in housing. Long before. This humble brick tower is older than the United States of America, and it milled grain into flour for a century and a half before a storm damaged its sails beyond repair and it was shut down for public safety.

Modern housing developers crept into the area, but by joining the ranks of Britain’s Grade II Listed buildings, Holgate Windmill successfully fought them off, forcing the builders to divert around it. Scarred and crumbling, it has stood derelict for 70 years as sign of a technological age we’ll never see again.

The windmill is not only a beautiful piece of historical architecture, it’s also a highly unusual one.

It had five sails, a design by John Smeaton of Eddystone Lighthouse fame. It’s the best choice for maximum efficiency of converting wind power to mechanical energy, yet rarely used because one broken sail could have shut the whole mill down. (Windmills need balanced sails: if the same happened to a four-sail windmill, it could be stripped down to two sails and still keep working). Coupled with the fan projecting backwards off the roof that kept it pointing into the wind at all times, you have a unique piece of engineering.

Because of recent efforts by The Holgate Windmill Preservation Society, this mill is being restored to working order. The walls have been repaired and rendered, the stone floor relaid, the ground floor machinery (above left) cleaned, repaired and reassembled, and locally-sourced materials have been used to replace perished materials including the millstones (below) and the windmill’s colossal upright shaft (above right).

By 2008 the Society had secured £250,000 in grants, prizes and donations – and in winning the People’s Millions award in November 2010, they finally have the money to rebuild the sails.

After decades of neglect, this mill will mill. Using locally produced grain, the Society will provide bakers with specialty flours milled in the traditional way, allowing them to make specialty breads with a 250-year-old heritage. Any profits will be reinvested in the mill so it pays for its upkeep by doing what it does best.

Factor in the educational value of a fully-functioning windmill (the last of York’s 20+ working grain mills), and the tourist-wowing sight of its white sails turning gorgeously against the skyline, and you have something very special indeed.

Images: Mike Sowden; Holgate Windmill Preservation Society

Know of a local restoration project that is rocking your community? We’d love to hear about it! Send us a note at tips@ecosalon.com.

Architects have clients and clients set the creative parameters for a project. But when an architect is his own client, all rules and artistic limitations disappear and the result is the ultimate self portrait.

Home is where the heart of an architect can fully and completely be expressed. We take a look into the hearts of six of the most renowned modern architects of our time – the homes built and inhabited by Aalto, Eames, Gehry, Neutra, Niemeyer and Lloyd Wright.

Alvar Aalto - The Finnish architect and designer Alvar Aalto built his home (above and below) in Helsinki in 1936. It is now a museum and open to the public. If you don’t recognize Aalto by his name or his buildings, you might know his furniture or glassware designs.

Charles and Ray Eames – Case Study #8 (above and below) was built in 1949 and is located in Pacific Palisades, California. In 1948, the Eames’ were commissioned to design and build an inexpensive and efficient home as part of the Case Study Housing program. Case Study #8 is considered one of the first “pre-fab” buildings and is open to public tours through the Eames Foundation.

Frank O. Gehry – Do you know the Guggenheim in Bilbao or the Disney Music Hall in Los Angeles? Yes, Gehry is that guy. In 1978, he built his Santa Monica, California home (above and below) in all its barbed wire, corrugated steel and asymmetrical glory. It caused quite a stir with the neighbors who were not accustomed to Gehry’s avant-garde sensibility.

Richard Neutra – In 1963 a fire destroyed Richard Neutra’s Silverlake, California home (image above) that he designed and built in 1932. The Austrian-born architect’s redesign, the VDL Research House II (image below), is a close interpretation of the first, with its bands of vertical glass windows and alternating horizontal planes of steel and white stucco.

Oscar Niemeyer – The Brazilian architect built his Casa Das Canoas (image above and below) in 1953 in Rio de Janeiro. Niemeyer is known for his revolutionary use of reinforced concrete and the curvaceous, sculptural quality of his buildings. His own home is no exception.

Frank Lloyd Wright – The American architect built his first home in Oak Park, Illinois (image above) in 1889, where he and his family lived while he developed his practice and the “Prairie Style” of architecture. But Lloyd Wright’s favorite residence was his masterpiece, Taliesin West (top image and image below), built in 1937 in Scottsdale, Arizona. It seems to sprout from the desert and is typical of the organic style architecture that the architect promoted in his later years.

Images: Alvar Aalto Foundation, DesignCrave, ArchDaily, Archined, Design You Trust, TheCoolist, Reference Library, Wikipedia, Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation.

Rooftops as sustainable, functional and gorgeous green spaces.

Around the globe, more focus is being put on utilizing the vast square footage of the roof. People are creating private, green havens of relaxation or gardens that provide fresh, pesticide-free fruits and vegetables.

Take, for example, the rooftop pictured below.

Add a little green and watch it grow into Eagle Street Farm, an organic rooftop vegetable farm (image below) created by Goode Green, a New York City green roof design firm.

In some European cities it’s required by law that any new, flat-roof building have a green roof. The image below was taken in Stuttgart, Germany.

Green roofs and roof gardens act as natural cooling systems and help improve air quality. Basically all you need is a strong, waterproof roof with a good drainage system and plants with shallow roots. The roof garden below is at the Crosby Street Hotel in New York City.

And if you thought something so functional and sustainable couldn’t be plush and pretty, you thought wrong. (Image below is Chris and Lisa Goode’s (of Goode Green) downtown New York City residence roof garden.)

Look at these further 10 beauties:

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Goode residence, New York City.

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Rooftop garden, downtown Singapore.

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Private residence, Fifth Avenue, New York City.

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City Hall, Chicago, Illinois.

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California Academy of Science, San Francisco.

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Goode residence, New York City.

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Hospital rooftop, Basel, Switzerland.

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Private residence, Milan, Italy.

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St. Luke’s International Hospital, Akashi, Tokyo.

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Goode residence, New York City.

Images: vinczha, National Geographic, Goode Green, New York Magazine, HenryLeongHimWoh, New York Magazine, tomvw, Ian Muttoo.

Note: Top image is the Gary Comer Youth Center Rooftop Garden in Chicago, Illinois.

The 36-year-old Danish architect Bjarke Ingels is the hottest topic on the tip of every avant-garde’s tongue. I’m glad he’s here, mostly because he uses words like symbiosis and spontaneous interaction; hybrid typology and harvest resources. There’s nothing sexier than a voracious vocabulary. And an architect.

Ingels and his Copenhagen-based firm, BIG (the Bjarke Ingels Group), have been busy in Denmark for years, although his foray into the U.S. has only just begun. On West 57th between 11th and 12th Avenues, New York, New York, to be exact. Or at least that’s the rumor.

Why am I so intrigued by a NY skyscraper, you ask? I’m pretty confident this building will be nothing remotely similar to anything we’ve seen before.

I can make such a courageous claim because I took a look at Ingel’s incredible 8 House (top image and below), his third housing project in Ørestad, a newer neighborhood in Copenhagen. To describe such a thing that almost surpasses words seems impossible, but I shall try.

Let’s start at the bottom, and stroll up. Easy enough via a sidewalk that loops from the street up to the 10th floor in the shape of an eight. Ingels says of the slope:

“…it lets you walk and bicycle along the row-house gardens all the way to the 10th-floor penthouse so you get this intimate, spontaneous social interaction on all levels – just like a public street.”

The 8 House is a mix of private and communal space, with office and retail making up the ground floor and almost 500 residential units on the remaining nine floors above. Inside the two courtyards (created by the loops of the figure eight), there are at least 5,300 square feet of public space including gardens and pathways. And two of the 8 House’s sloping roofs are green (image below).

Forward-thinking and boundary-pushing, the architect waxes poetic on his sloping buildings and design purpose and what it all means for New York:

“They’re buildings that look different because they perform differently. They harvest resources – daylight, views – in different ways. What we try to do is maximize possibilities. Before, you could choose a life in the city, and that would give you certain advantages, but it would be at the expense of parks and green spaces, fresh air and bicycle rides, or a private garden. And I think – with projects like the Mountain and 8 House we did in Copenhagen – we’re trying to offer some of the suburban advantages, like a house with a garden where your kids can go outside and hang around, and combine that with the services of a dense urban space.”

The plan for New York is an 80/20 mixed-income high-rise residential building. The rumors floating around describe it as an “…unusual, green-roofed triangle” with “terrace cut-outs and an interior courtyard.” The project caught my attention when I heard the terms sloping mountain, more rooms with views, and hybrid typology.

Hybrid typology? Again, the architect explains:

“I can vaguely say that what we’re trying to do in New York is to follow up the general trajectory the city has taken, integrating parks and recreation spaces, rejuvenating the waterfront, planting trees and creating bicycle paths. We’re trying to see if you can create a hybrid typology. What happens if you crossbreed the Copenhagen courtyard with the New York high-rise?”

Seems brilliant enough, no? I’m sufficiently intrigued by his pragmatic, practical approach and smitten by the edge he brings to such a sensible philosophy.

Plans for West 57th Street (image above) are still being finalized, but Ingels seems confident his high-rise will happen. So much so that he now calls New York his home, part-time, and has opened an office in the city.

We’ll keep you posted.

Images: Dwell, Fast Company, Curbed NY

We’ve always thought we had roofs covered. They had to be barren, hostile places the rain and the wildlife slid from before they could do any damage. Nature had no place on our roofs. Except – we couldn’t have been more wrong. A green roof may required a little extra engineering behind the scenes, but it’s far better than its non-living counterparts for regulating house temperature, filtering out pollutants, scrubbing the surrounding air, controlling stormwater run-off, absorbing sound and many more factors that impact our quality of life. A green roof is a healthy roof.

Green design is an enormously popular trend in modern architecture. Take a look at these 17 examples – some in place today, and others still on the drawing board. We may have got it wrong in the past, but we’re certainly making up for lost time.

ACROS Fukuoka, in Fukuoka City, Japan. 35,000 plants, 76 species – and the city’s best view from an office window.

Art and Exhibition Hall roof garden – Bonn, Germany.

Chicago City Hall – the coolest place to be, thanks to this $2.5 million rooftop garden (not open to the public – the 11-storey drop might have something to do with this).

California’s Academy of Sciences (SF) is covered in rolling hills – the perfect place for students to grab their lunch in the sun.

Looking like the ultimate vegan pizza, the Pennsylvania State University’s Center for Green Roof Research is a department that practices what it preaches.

Marriott Hotel, Victoria, BA. Keeping an underground car park cool in the summer, toasty-warm in the winter.

The forwarding link isn’t working, but this rooftop garden (wherever it is) found on This Girl’s Gone Green is an extraordinary achievement – it grows crops!

This design by architect Hoerr Shaudt graces the roof of 900 North Michigan Avenue, Chicago. A haven of natural tranquility, 10 floors up.

After a long, hard day in the School of Art Design and Media at Nanyang Technological University (Singapore), what more cathartic way to unwind than to walk all over it?

This idyllic spot may look terrestrial, but it’s a thing of the air, roofing Toronto’s Mountain Equipment Coop.

The Waldspirale in Darmstadt, Germany, is all about being unique. It doesn’t look like any building you’ve ever seen. Every one of its 1,000+ windows is different – ditto for all the doorhandles. And running along spiraling rooftop is a tree-lined garden (the wald or “wood” in its name).

Turfed roof near Gol, Norway. In days past, this sight would be grounds to condemn your neighbors as the laziest people on the planet. Now they’re obviously the cleverest (although we’re a little worried about that bowing roof).

Vancouver Public Library, Canada. Beautiful, useful, and definitely out of bounds – note the lack of protective barrier around the edge.

And now to more speculative matters. This proposed village for Heden, a sleepy cityblock in Sweden’s Gothenburg, has more than a touch of Hobbiton about it…

…as does this proposal by designer Friedenreich Hundertwasser.

Should green roofs be built to be scaled on foot? The designers of this proposal for the 2007 Fit City 2 conference in New York certainly think so – and there’s a good reason for thinking they’re right.

And finally – this example looks as speculative as they come. But it’s reality: the blueprint for the Vancouver Convention Center, currently expanding rapidly in time to host the 2010 Winter Olympic and Paralympic Games. The 6-acre living roof will house a whopping 400,000 varieties of native plant life – Inhabitat has a closer look here.

More information: Green Roofs (what else?)

Each week here at EcoSalon, the editors choose a post from the archives that we think you’ll love. The original post can be found here.

Images: hans s / metaefficient / Deutsche Telekom / NREL / California Academy of Sciences / Inhabitat / Treehugger / pnwra / food2gro / trendir / Nanyang Technological University / sookie / Hundertwasser / IGPOTY / Terri Meyer Boake / Kjellengren Kaminsky Architecture / Ecogeek / Archidose / Inhabitat.

What do we do with ugly, unused land in the hearts of our cities? You could camp there, of course – but the real challenge is to affordably fit new homes into the most awkward of spaces, and do it sustainably. In a world of custom-kit prefab housing, this is no pipe dream. Take a look at these 10 stunning examples of homes fitted beautifully into the tiniest spaces. Is one of these your dream home?