West Coast Green, October 1-3, San Francisco

West Coast Green is coming up October 1-3 in San Francisco at the Fort Mason Center. It’s a great opportunity to see the future of green build and get familiar with the products and services that will be an integral part of our landscape in the years to come.

A few of our clients have booths.

Check out ecostucco @ booth 477. We’re just finishing up their website. They offer interior, exterior, healthy, durable, and elegant lime plaster wall treatments.

K-tect Sustainable Building Systems @ booth 309. Light gage structural steel systems which integrate insulation and eliminate thermal bridging. DK Design has been helping them with marketing collateral and developing a consistent style for their outreach efforts.

Greener Printer @ booth 4.
Highest quality and most affordable eco-printing in the Bay Area.

Greener World Media@ booth 28.
Greener World Media is the business voice of the green economy.

Here’s a link to the West Coast Green site.

Skyscrapers as living organisms

This fresh, new, and fascinating approach to sustainability and human population growth is truly awe inspiring.

Belgian architect Vincent Callebaut has redefined the conventional skyscraper. His 132 story complex for the south edge of Roosevelt Island addresses the pressing need for environmental and ecological sustainability. This conceptual design focuses on creating a completely self-sustaining organism that not only utilizes solar, wind, and water energies, but also addresses the pending food shortage problem.

More here on archdaily.

Greensburg Kansas Update – 2 years after the tornado

Highway House

As a prototype for future Big Dig architecture, the structural system for this 3,400sf house is comprised of steel and concrete from Boston’s Big Dig, utilizing over 600,000 lbs of salvaged materials.

Although similar to a pre-fab system, subtle spatial arrangements were designed from highway components.

Highway components. An off-ramp to be specific.

Most importantly, the house demonstrates an untapped potential for the public realm: with strategic front-end planning, much needed community programs including schools, libraries, and housing could be constructed whenever infrastructure is deconstructed, saving valuable resources, embodied energy, and taxpayer dollars.

YTL Residence in Kuala Lumpur

The building includes nine bedrooms, two family rooms, a family kitchen and a private dining area, a family library, a game room, a study, a public reception area, a formal dining room, a ballroom, chapel, 21 bathrooms, a swimming pool, two guest suites plus indoor private and guest parking.

Is this for reals?

Check out more on the Coolhunter.

DK Design New Website LIVE!

Check out our new website!! It focuses on Green Build, Organic Foods, and Sustainability which are the projects and companies we target.

Jeff King & Company Website Live!

We’re very excited that the Jeff King & Company website went live today.

A great high-end builder out of San Francisco, this new website really shows off their exquisite design style and green certification standards.

Keep up with them on their news page here.

Kiltro House

This house just kicks ass.

West Coast Green, San Jose

West Coast Green concluded yesterday at the San Jose Convention Center. It’s the largest conference and expo on green innovation in green build.

Al Gore’s keynote speech yesterday focused on the lack of attention that the climate crisis is getting in comparison to the financial meltdown. He said that Americans are avoiding and/or ignoring the problems and the rest of the world is watching. They all point to the United States and say, “If the united states isn’t doing it, why should we?”

He proposed that in 10 years the US should get 100% of its electricity from renewable sources.

The crowed was moved by the speech, at times giving him a standing ovation.

In the exhibit itself there was a SG Blocks shipping container home which was made out of 5 containers. Apparently, the world has an abundance of these containers and using them can prove sound [they will stand thru hurricanes and earthquakes], inexpensive [$500-$200 per container], and green since they are being reused [as they like to call it Value-Cycling]. The home itself was beautiful. The 1700 sq ft home did not look like shipping containers but more like a modern pre-fab house. The interior and exterior were designed by several partners who took advantage of forward-thinking sustainable ideas and products like Ecofabulous and Modwalls.

Here’s more shots of the show on my Flickr site.

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Bubbletecture H, Shuhei Endo, Japan

Firm: Shuhei Endo Architect Institute

Website: www.paramodern.com

Location: Sayo-cho, Hyogo, Japan

Type: Institution and exhibition of earth environmental with a theater/lecture hall, a bookshop/galley and a workshop.

“We thought about creating the new environment architectural space that could share the point of contact with nature and environment providing a keyword called “the circulation” in a relation with nature for the request.”

More info here and here.