Designed by Mareines + Patalano, this great beach home outside of Rio de Janeiro stands as a beautiful compliment to nature and adds to the planet’s beauty and tranquility.

Except for a stunning architectural show, the Brazilian Leaf House packs many green features, a perfect combination of form with function. Designed as a giant tropical banana leaf and looking like a blossoming delight, the roof helps harvest rainwater for house use, and the whole design helps providing natural ventilation and cooling, thus reducing the need to rely on the grid. The interior is “just” as green, using locally harvested wood crafted in a sustainable fashion, stone and natural fabrics.

Most often constructions that crop up on the beaches, are costly real estate properties with lavish designs that does nothing beyond destroying the natural beaches and further degrade the ecosystem. This one really looks like a dream house, isn’t it? - via World Architecture News

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Living in a house boat is a very unique experience and when the boat is surrounded by a spectacular scenery that steals your heart, then it becomes even more special. Schwimmhaus is a modern house boat constructed by German architects at Confused-Directionthat, that provides the perfect holiday on still waters.

Designed to float and made of prefab, the house boat upholds eco-values that are cherished by every eco-head with its green roof and eco-friendly construction process. It’s a complete green dwelling.

Made from wood salvaged from an old farm house and other sustainable construction materials the Schwimmhaus is set for completion this spring. For now though, a float up of this boat house is riding the Hunte River to the North Sea. We will hopefully see the real one follow very soon indeed! - via Freshome

There is always the eternal question of who do we exactly dub as a genius and what is the scale to measure and tag someone as a genius. While views vary widely, one of the most accepted theory is that and man who thinks way ahead of his time in his methods and approach, can be called a genius.

Taking that into consideration, you could surely call Swedish architect Bengt Warne a genius in the field of environment. It was way back in 1976 that Bengt built a home in a greenhouse in an effort to grow vegetables around his own home. Though, three decades after the initial prototype, the idea seems to be a catching one.

Scandinavian winters can be cold and unforgiving and while people have a separate greenhouse to grow vegetables and plants, Bengt’s design calls for building a greenhouse around your own home. With this innovative technique one not only manages space better but energy is conserved enormously. Energy consumption in the form of electricity is reduced by 50% with this method as the vegetation offers a natural insulation to the house and thereby reduces the necessity for artificial heating.

The idea is really simple, easy to implement and for 1976- way ahead of its time. Surely, we can adopt it three decades down the line! Check out the gallery after the break. (more…)

It has to be a cultural thing, and one that I don’t get. Some guy in Ivory Coast built a house in the shape of a crocodile. I mean, I know the song “Crocodile Rock” but a house built out of rock shaped like a crocodile?!

Seriously, where do people come up with ideas like this?

“Hey, Kalo! Where you going?”

“I’m going home to be eaten.”

“You mean you are going home to eat?”

“Nope, I am going home to be eaten by a crocodile.”

“Huh!?”

Every night the builder of this house feeds his family to the crocodile he built for them to live in.

“And, here in the nose of the house we have a single bedroom. While back in this portion of the beast is the depository, if you get my meaning.”

There’s a guy in North Carolina, Amychelle Jones, who has been sharing his home with 60,000 bees. I wonder if he counted them. One bee, two bees … but back to the story.

(honey oozes out of the walls)

The knucklehead noticed something coming out of his walls and he realized it was honey after tasting the oozing liquid on the wall. Turns out there was a huge bee hive behind the wall. Don’t know about you, but I’m not tasting things that are coming out of my wall.

“I came over here and dipped my finger in it and tasted it. Sure enough, it was honey coming out of the wall,” Jones said.

The bees were removed with a vacuum. SSsssuuuuccckkkkk!!!

“There’s no hive,” beekeepers said. “There’s no queen bee, so they’ll find their way out.”

I guess Jones knew how not to get rid of bees but I really wonder does he know anything about animal rights ?

Source: Wyff4

Though they have their reasons, I can’t figure out why they’ve built such a big umbrella “house”. The project uses modified umbrellas and was put up by Kengo Kuma who did it for the Milan Triennale Museum of design.

The umbrellas are zipped together along their outer edges to form the modular shape you can see in the pictures, and each of them have two extra flaps hanging from the central segment which are used for different compositions. The Umbrella House has a kitchen area, a sleeping mat if you need a power nap and should be great for on-campus gatherings, don’t you think?

via DesignBoom