Here’s one way to make warm shelter without electricity or any conventional materials. Today let’s admire the clever engineering of the traditional igloo.
Environment
Design for Darkness: How Outdoor Lights Affect the Sky
Seeking starlight from Chicago, home of the orange glow, is hard. Here’s how you can help protect the night sky with your lighting choices.
Buildings and Climate Change: Good Design Can Help
We don’t want to belabor the often-depressing facts on climate change any more than necessary … but it does seem necessary to acknowledge the most recent report from the International Panel on Climate Change. Whether or not you’ve read anything about their findings you should be able to pass this pop quiz. Look, we know no […]
Resilient Responses to Storm Damage: What Chicago Can Learn From New York's Big U Project
This weekend’s damage to the Lakefront Trail only underlines the need for a more environmentally resilient plan to deal with our waterfront. New York is handling this better with their “Big U” coastal infrastructure project. What can we learn from their designs? And why aren’t we on top of this already? In case the nippy weather, obsessive […]
Spooky Architecture: Cemeteries to Welcome the Living
Cemeteries have a compelling history, transforming from unsanitary resting places to picturesque parks, before settling into plain, landscaped lawns, losing not a few bones along the way in the move. Knowing this, we may never look at those subterranean skeleton decorations in quite in the same way again. Our Tuesday post “Spooky Architecture: Cities […]
A Softer Alternative to Chicago’s Concrete Shoreline
Chicago has just proposed a new 6 acre extension to the shoreline park at Fullerton Avenue complete with new concrete revetment. Having recently combed the sand dunes of Indiana’s Lake Michigan shore, we wonder about softer shore styles they might have considered. Surely concrete barricades aren’t the only strategy for interfacing between land and water at the city’s edge … maybe […]
Cycling Sonoma and Designing Sustainable Wineries
With news that Sonoma County intends to become the first 100% sustainable wine region in the world, it seems only fitting that we explore it by bike. moss visited the region to explore some of the current sustainable practices and taste some of the wine, of course. This sparked some thoughts about how design and layout […]
Less is More: the Joy (and difficulty) of Minimalist Living
The problem of “stuff” is an American universal and no one is really in position to criticize. I’ve always had a lot of stuff; certainly I’ve had a lot more stuff than I need. I’ve dabbled in extreme minimalism while traveling over extended periods. Most recently, in 2012 I shook up my life by quitting […]
Chicago’s People Spots Here to Stay … Here’s Why
People Spots are tiny parks, right along Chicago’s neighborhood sidewalks. Good for business, good for neighborhoods, good for people! Here’s why:
Chicago Building Types: the Courtyard Apartment
What sets these courtyard apartment buildings apart from other types of apartment dwellings. The answer is in the organization.
Another One Bites the Dust: the Tiny Tragedy of Teardowns in Chicago Neighborhoods
Walking to work this morning I noted yet another pile of construction debris on the foundation of a former house just around the corner from moss HQ. Seeing an old house demolished always seems like a small tragedy. It’s true; some older buildings certainly HAVE outlived their useful lifespan, are in poor repair or structurally unsound. Sometimes the […]
50 Years On, the Wilderness Act Should Remind us that We Need to Value All Nature
Did you “get away” this weekend? Labor day weekend is traditionally celebrated outside – whether it be grilling in the back yard, picnicking in a city park, heading for a lakefront cabin in one of our neighbor states or aiming for a little slice of America’s wilderness preserved in our state and national parks and […]