Photo: Orca Yapı Sistemleri

In Turkish, the word for a slum is gecekondu, meaning "settled overnight." A prefabricated house doesn't go up quite that quickly, but mass production can make homes--of both the conventional and ecofriendly type--available to more people at varying income levels.

photo/A+R
With retail sales down and expected to continue plummeting, will buyers eschew green products in favor of less-expensive fare? Not if retailers expand their definition of “eco-friendly,” said Andy Griffith, one-half of the team behind the wildly popular A + R stores in Los Angeles, CA.

Image source: KLTV

Warning! If you do not want to live in a straw bale house with a living roof and solar panels to power your satellite internet connectivity, DO NOT watch the video over the fold!

Solaleya makes highly efficient homes. They showed off their designs at West Coast Green last week. The thing is, they look a bit like landed UFOs. Not that dome houses are exactly new, but they also aren't the most common of house forms.

Integrity Block may be a brand new company, and Green Design Systems might be struggling to find funding to launch their Straw Wall, but the concept behind their products is as old as the human desire to build shelters.

Urban Re:Design is a San Francisco-based, internationally partnered sustainability group whose main focus is finding fresh ideas and ways to look at building and design, so that we can radically alter how we construct our world and make it sustainable and eco-friendly.

Thonet chairs are the classic and quintessential french cafe chair. We have been looking at them in french films, paintings and restaurants forever. Particularly the No.14--it was created in 1862, and by 1930 almost 50 million had been sold. Le Corbusier said "Never has anything been created more elegant and better in its conception, more precise in its execution, and more excellently functional."