The term Zero Brownstone is an idea I came up with during our experimentation of making the greenest brownstone renovation possible. The Zero Brownstone is based on two concepts during the deconstruction and renovation of the brownstone as well as in the finished home: Zero Waste and Zero Consumption During Construction: Zero Waste – During the deconstruction …
Here is a design our architect intern Matthew Pethley sketched up for a row house we are designing in Bed Stuy. it is not what we eventually designed for them on but I wanted to share it because the ideas are really cool. It would make for a beautiful space. It addresses the issue that …
Here are some of the latest earthship videos sent to me from the folks at earthship.com Comments on earthships and the Copenhagen summit. Here is another cool one: The one peeve I have with this last video is “What the world needs now is one Billion earthsips, immediately.” That sounds too much like old school …
I got an email recently with a funny title: Need Help Converting Husband. What fuel does he run on now?! The sender of the email, the wife, was not aware of the humor though. She was asking me for info to convince her husband, who from the sound of it seems like a lost case. …
Now that beekeeping is legal in NYC we are going to have a lot more bees! And that is a good thing. Here is a list of plants that bees like. If you ask me the list has pretty much all the plants in the world, but I didn’t make the list (USDA did) and …
Check out page six on this pdf “Health & Horticultural Therapy“, it mentions some studies concerning the restorative attributes of green roofs and living walls in hospitals and nursing homes. -Decreased patient healing times – Given that many hospitals are located in highly developed areas, green roofs are a good way to expose patients to …
You’ve got the efficiencies of building mounted wind turbines and then you’ve got the efficiencies of karma. In response to a recent Environmental Building News feature story about the inefficiencies of building-integrated wind turbines comes this subtly hilarious examination of the efficiencies of building-integrated prayer wheels. Now of course if you are a Tibetan Buddhist, …
Michael Reynolds is one of my favorite visionaries. He is doing what Eco Brooklyn aims to do with eco brownstone renovations in Brooklyn – Build net zero homes out of trash – only he does it with earth ships in the Midwest and beyond. Check it out. Really cool. These are the only justifiable new …
We are planting our front and back gardens at the Eco Brooklyn show house and welcome anyone who wants to be involved. The gardens are edible gardens as well as aesthetically beautiful. Drawing from horticulture, permaculture, feng shui, xeriscape, gray water and Biodynamic gardening we seek to redefine the definition of a Brooklyn brownstone garden. …
After conducting our own evaluations and consulting extensively with the many people who have expressed interest in the future of the Gowanus Canal and the surrounding area, we have determined that a Superfund designation is the best path to a cleanup of this heavily contaminated and long neglected urban waterway. These are the words of …
