Villa Welpeloo in Enschede, the Netherlands, was designed by

Architects Jan Jongert and Jeroen Bergsma. It doesn’t look like a recycled building. The architects reversed the typical order of the design process (first home, then materials) and began scouting the local area for items to recycle. “Reused materials account for 60% of the structure” says Jongert. “And that goes up to as much as 90% when it comes to the interior.”

They created a ‘Harvest Map’ for an inventory of possible materials to use within a 9 mile radius. They even used Google Earth seeking abandoned buildings for telltale signs of defunct industry and possible scrap materials.

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Cornell University has installed a very innovative, yet very basic concept for cooling Ithaca High School and Cornell University. It is a closed loop system that exchanges the cool water from the depths of nearby Cayuga Lake, and expels the warm water into the shallow waters of the same lake. The water is drawn through an intake that comes from water about 2 miles out in water that is 250 feet deep, and the intake sits about 10 feet from the bottom of the lake where the temperature is about 39ºF year round.

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