Archive for December 19th, 2007

Green Building For Dummies, Dummy

Wednesday, December 19th, 2007

Green Building For Dummies bookEric Corey Freed is an architect who became well known for green building design and consulting. He has earned a place in the green architecture elite and thus was chosen to write the official Green Building For Dummies book.

Green Building For Dummies, DummyCall it 8th grade humor, or just plain tipsy on cheap book-signing-wine, but upon looking at the signature table I couldn’t help to point out the admitted “dummies” all around, getting their Dummies book signed. Yes me included, but I ended up there by chance that night, I swear. It was held at my favorite club Temple.

It is typical that a green book signing would also take place in a club deemed to become the worlds first green nightclub. But they are not alone in this pursuit, a club in the Netherlands is making waves.

green dancefloorIt is the green nightclub race of the decade. Temple’s club’s sustainability director, Mike Zuckerman also has plans install a power generating dance floor next year. He feels confident that they have found the person to do it. In the meantime, he is starting with something a little less ambitious which he calls a vertical garden shown here:

hanging garden

Elsa Wenzel at Cnet.com, whom I met outside of this book signing beat me to this story because it is her full time job to do so. She deemed this club the Chia nightclub in her Cnet Crave blog story. Look at the future vision of Temple nightclub in her entry and it will make sense.

Plastikman (Richie Hawtin) @ Hard 1994 - photo by Miguel

This green night club business is great and all but it does nothing to offset the pollution created by those dj’s that fly millions of miles around the world year after year. Techno demi-god Richie Hawtin decided to do something about this problem and made an environmental pledge to his fans with this press release (PDF): Minimize Your Impact - by Richie Hawtin. I have not read any articles suggesting that others are following his footsteps, then again, Richie is always ahead of the curve on most things.

It is only a matter of time until we will all need to dance to keep the lights on.