Eco-cute alert!

We are excited to announce our new line of Inhabitat eco baby tees and onesies. Featuring ‘Habby’, our favorite owly mascot, our super cute baby tees are made from 100% organic cotton and are hand-printed with water-based inks. The tagline (with some fond nostalgia for the 70’s US Forest Service Campaign), reads ‘I give a hoot’. If you have a tot in your life and you are a fan of Inhabitat, show us some love and order one today - proceeds go to support Inhabitots.

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The 9th ward in New Orleans has become a crazy quilt of architectural styles since the post-Katrina rebuild. In the overgrown fields of the neighborhood, traditionally built homes sit next to elevated solar powerhouses constructed by the Make It Right Foundation– making it clear that the solutions presented to address the needs of the still-recovering New Orleans community are very different from one another, logistically and culturally. Artist Marjetica Potrč’s solution is to revive a small, classic structure called the shotgun house which is native to the South. In collaboration with sustainable design firm Futureproof, she has created a simple and culturally powerful home and symbol.

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Last week, we covered the results of the White House Redux competition. The competition asked what the White House might look like if it was designed today. This week, we are visiting with activists Daniel Bowman Simon and Casey Gustowarow who already know what should be done with the president’s residence: they hope to grow organic food on the lawn. And how are they sending their message? The duo have planted the “roof” of their flipped-up double-bus with a garden and are currently touring the country with it. It used to be called the Topsy-Turvy Bus: now it’s on a mission to get the 44th president to turn the country’s food system on its head. With a new name, The White House Organic Farm Project, and the elections around the corner, Daniel and Casey are hoping to get enough people to sign their petition as they tour the country.

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Take prefabricated panels, add a dose of ingenuity, and a desire for an extremely green home and you get this half-prefab, half-custom Culver City home, designed by Sander Architects. Not only does the house play host to eco-friendly details that makes it sustainable inside and out– but its acoustically-tuned-to-concert-perfection interior provides owner Thomas Small the ability to play chamber music with perfect resonance. The 4,200-square-foot home uses a prefabricated structure that was assembled on-site and then outfitted with necessary trim, plumbing, and interior fixings for a grand total of $528,000, about a third of an architect-designed home in the Los Angeles area.

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We’ve been following LA-based Taalman Koch Architects and their development of a systematized method for building sustainable prefab houses for the past few years. Now, a completed itHouse has landed outside of Joshua Tree National Park in what is going to become a new planned community called Three Junipers. If you have been reading along with us, you would know that the house is off-grid and powered solely by photovoltaic and solar thermal technology. Not to mention, the modest home makes minimal disturbance to its site, has a small footprint (1,600 sq ft), and uses native plants in its landscaping. This high-desert version of the itHouse adds to their previous work with more efficient energy systems, and new furniture and accessories.

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We always love seeing hot designers come out with their next hit– and Michelle Kaufmann’s new mkHearth is the latest in must-have prefab design. The home pushes the principles of green building, as her previous green homes have always done, and combines it with some countryside nostalgia to produce a prefab farmhouse. Her new prefab is both contemporary and inviting, with a slightly more traditional aesthetic which will likely prove popular with the masses. Kaufmann is responsible for many advances in green building, as well as an updated gingerbread house. Although this house is larger than most of her other designs at 2,820 sq ft, it smartly fits many rooms into that area, and even provides some flexible space with a cozy and sunny loft.

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Drumroll please…. Its that time of year again for our annual Green Halloween costume contest! Halloween is one of our favorite holidays of the year, and one of the best parts of Halloween is seeing people get creative and resourceful with their costumes. Anyone can buy a plastic / spandex costume at a drugstore, but not only is that boring and generic — it is the opposite of environmentally friendly. We encourage you all to get inspired and resourceful this year and go green with your Halloween costumes! This could mean cobbling together a great DIY idea from items you already have around your house, or picking up some old items at the local charity shop to create your costume.

Enter your Green Halloween costume today!

Enter our costume contest below for a chance to win some a fabulous prizes, including hand-cranked lanterns and flashlights from Freeplay Energy, stylish Inhabitat T-shirts and bags, and of course all the fame and fortune that goes with having your winning photo published on Inhabitat.com!

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Tags: green, halloween, inhabitat, contest, costume, sustainable, green, design, freeplay, lantern, crank, energy, efficient, flashlight

Desert living has long been characterized as a lifestyle that requires considerable intervention to be sustainable. Still, at least one team of architects and designers believes that the secret to living comfortably in the desert is already there - in two unlikely sources: desert plants and prehistoric dwellings. Binary Design Studio, made up of Dale Clifford, Jason Vollen, M. Gindlesparger, and Eddie Hall, is a unique kind of architectural design firm that is looking critically at the conditions present in the desert and trying to create a site-specific methodology for building sustainable homes.

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Tags: binary, design, studio, dale, clifford, jason, vollen, gindlesparger, eddie, hall, local, materials, building, techniques, emerging, material, technologies

Dirt Devil is currently retailing a cordless, bagless, ENERGY STAR-certified vacuum cleaner called the AccuCharge. The product’s website urges you to “Clean with a conscience” and the video says, “Go green and get it clean.” Caveat emptor: “Green” and “clean” pair well in advertising jingles, but environmentally-conscious vacuum buyers should be wary. Read this interview with Michelle Kivlov, product manager for AccuCharge, before you rely on AccuCharge to let you “clean with a conscience.”

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Although this towering concrete treehouse isn’t really green, (unless tree imitation counts as ‘green’), we couldn’t help but be awestruck by its sheer craziness. We thought it worth a post, just for the picture alone. The Naha Harbor Diner in Okinawa, Japan is a life-size rendition of a banyan tree, also known as gajumaru. The aptly-named Banyan Town shopping center near the entrance of Onoyama Park features a twenty foot tall tree with a pan-Asian restaurant nestled amid its branches. Accessible by a spiral staircase around back and an in-trunk elevator, the restaurant specializes in locally grown and organic harvested foods fresh from the farm.

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