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This weekend we get a special treat: we’ll be taking delivery of over 250 tropical plants and installing two indoor living walls. It’s the culminating step in a complete renovation of Area Yoga Studio in Downtown Brooklyn and promises to transform the character of the space.
Arranging and installing the plants presents [...] Check out this cool time lapse of the earth. It is such a delicate planet. The New York area has a lot of brownstones with backs yards. What a lot of people don’t know is that those back yards are contaminated. As a New York soil remediation company we’ve become pretty obsessed with this. It is alarming how many yards come up high in heavy metals, especially lead. Anything [...] You are invited to our Eco Brooklyn Show House this Saturday, May 19th. Sign up at Green Home NYC. It is a bike tour, so, uh, bring your bike. Google Sketchup is an architectural design tool. As a New York design/build firm we use it to show clients 3D renderings of our jobs. We’ve used it for all sorts of things – decks made out of salvaged glass sheets, natural pools, salvaged kitchen cabinet layouts, store layouts, green roofs, buildings…you name it. Sketchup has [...] In green construction, the largest monetary gain in energy saving over a buildings life-time is achieved with a relatively small investment in sealing the building envelope. As a green design and building firm, we try to adhere closely to Passive House Guidelines, creating extremely well-insulated, virtually air-tight buildings that protect the occupants the most from the outside environment. Even [...] As an ecological NY gardener we have to admit that the greenest gardening is gardening done by the client and not us. Here is a quick do it yourself activity that you can complete for your New York City green garden in a few hours that can have lasting ecological, aesthetic, and environmental benefits. [...] The main metaphor of Betty Smith’s novel “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn” is the hardy Tree of Heaven. The major inspirational theme that she used was that the Tree of Heaven’s persistence was like her character’s and families ability to overcome adversity and thrive. Little did she know that this plant is an invasive [...] Check out this song about fracking. As a New York green contractor we do a lot of eco kitchens because people want cabinets without formaldehyde, a cancer causing chemical. Fracking releases formaldehyde into the water, as well as Benzene, both very toxic and cancerous chemicals. We understand these chemicals and have made a conscious effort to remove [...] I was bidding on a green roof in lower Manhattan the other day and the architect threw out a price of $25-$35 per square foot as a typical price to install a green roof. He is correct that a green roof can cost $25-35/sq.ft. I have even seen really large jobs cost less. There [...] Here is a great graphic showing how green roof construction mimics in a few inches what normal soil does in a couple feet. Plants want water, but not too much. They want something to dig their roots into that also provides nourishment. Showing how the design of successful green-roof systems mimics earth’s natural [...] Spring gardening is upon us and as a New York soil remediation company we are getting a lot of calls from clients wanting to remove lead contaminated soil from their back yards. We just finished a job last week. The clients had a beautiful garden in the back yard of their brownstone in Bedford [...] I read the book Design Revolution, 100 Products That Empower People by Emily Pilloton to see if any of the designs could apply to a New York green contractor. The book is organized into eight sections: Education Enterprise Water Energy Mobility Food Well-being Play There were plenty of great ideas that could be applied to [...] The book Japan Style – architecture + interiors + design, by Geeta Mehta and Kimie Tada contains lush photographs by Noboru Murata and is an inspiring insight into how traditional Japanese buildings are deeply green. Green building is a symbiosis of many levels that forms a harmonious whole, and architecture in older societies like [...] Chrongram Magazine mentioned Eco Brooklyn in a recent article on green roofs. It is below: A close-up of the green roof installed at the Mohonk Preserve Visitor’s Center in Gardiner by Aurora Landscape Design. by Gregory Schoenfeld, April 27, 2012 When Shawn McCloskey returned home to his native Kingston in 2000, things were [...] Here are some spring photos from the Eco Brooklyn Green Show House roof. It is two years old now. We don’t water it. We just let it do its own thing. The soil has thinned out and is only about 2.5″ thick. But we have bushes and plants along with a thick canopy of [...] Most New York green roof installers look towards Europe for green roof plant varieties. Europe has the largest green roof industry and has spent many years testing different plants. Typically a New York green roof installer will specify a selection of sedum native to the high mountains and wild places across Europe, including the Balkan [...] We have a guest staying in the lower apartment of the Brooklyn Green Show House. She said I should check out her friend Jerome Osentowski, which I did, who turns out to be one of North Americas foremost Permaculture experts. Here is a great video of his garden. It is worth looking at from [...] As a New York green roof installer we get asked the same questions by clients considering installing a green roof on their condo building or brownstone. So we decided to answer them here. 1. What does a green roof entail? Pricing? Plant types? Go here for a great overview of general green roof installation [...] Dan Phillips uses mostly salvaged materials to build homes. The reasons he does this are very profound and inspiring. Eco Brooklyn takes guidance from his lead. Check Dan out here in this video: He mentions http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollonian_and_Dionysian [...] Eco Brooklyn is primarily a green contractor because we feel that route makes the largest impact on greening New York buildings, but a large part of our mission is outreach and education. A rigorous intern program is key to that goal. Our intern program is very intimate and only a handful of interns take part at [...] Eco Brooklyn does not want Wal-Mart in New York because we feel Walmart’s business model is not conducive to the small neighborhood shopping experience that makes New York and Brooklyn so special. We posted our opinion in this blog post on our site. Recently somebody called Keith Blackwell tried to leave a comment to that post and [...] A Little Book of Coincidence of the Solar System by John Martineau is one of those beauties of the universe that in one hour can make you realize how perfectly placed everything is, that everything is in perfect harmony with everything else and that there are wondrous mysteries to life that maybe we will never [...] Eco Brooklyn recently took on a new project for Area Yoga. This is Area Yoga’s second location which is right in the heart of Brooklyn Heights. The space consists of a large studio, two massage rooms, and a reception area. When designing the yoga studio, there were two ledges that would only collect dust [...] The book Handmade Houses, A Century of Earth-Friendly Home Design, by Richard Olsen is inspiration for any green builder. With a clear focus on Big Sur homes Olsen highlights homes that were built along the same style as the Slow Food Movement, where meaning, lifestyle and experience are just as important as the finished “product”, [...] Check out this dude. A real druid. A magical builder. Sunray Kelly [Building] is all about the human consciousness to me. Its about our evolution more than the buildings themselves. Sitting in NY city watching this fellow green builder in the woods of Washington, I can’t help but long for those sounds of birds [...] The book Humble Homes, Simple Shacks, Cozy Cottages, Ramshackle Retreats, Funky Forts: And Whatever the Heck Else We Could Squeeze in Here is a cross between Malcolm Wells and redneck literature. The author, Derek “Deek” Diedricksen, is a scrappy young guy who took his love for kid forts and turned it into a deep study of [...] Check out this filming of flowers. Life is beautiful. The Life of flowers (Жизнь цветов) from VOROBYOFF PRODUCTION on Vimeo. Here is a poignant 17 minute film about an old man on an isolated farm in Iceland. His wife dies and he buries himself with her instead of going to an old people’s home in the city. He cannot bear to live without his two loves: his wife and the nature around him. It is [...] A great new site just went live. It is called GreenUnite.com and helps bring funding to green business startups. The crowdfunding model has proven to be very successful and GreenUnite.com aims to create crowdfunding for green business. I was so inspired by their business model that I reached out and offered my support in [...] |
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