Last month we wrote about the Reburbia competition that challenged architects and urban planners to appropriate the soon-to-be vacant ruins of suburban sprawl (aka big box stores and mini-mansions) for more efficient uses. The grand prize went to Calvin Chiu’s Frog’s Dream: McMansions Turned into Biofilter Water Treatment Plants. It’s a design that turns bloated mini-mansions into wetlands, providing an organic filtration system for a nearby city.
Chiu explains the project:
In response to the anticipated future, the Frog’s Dream project attempts to re-establish a sustainable relationship between city and suburbia. It proposes to transform the vacant McMansions, at the periphery of [...]
August 27, 2009
Mini-Mansions Reclaimed as Wetlands
April 8, 2009
10 Ways To Protect the Economy From Black Swans
Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of the hit book The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, has shared ten principles with the Financial Times that he believes can help make our world more resistant to unexpected events. Taleb says using these guiding principals will make our economic world resemble a healthy, balanced biological environment, with “smaller companies, richer ecology, no leverage. A world in which entrepreneurs, not bankers, take the risks and companies are born and die every day without making the news.”
He begins:
1. What is fragile should break early while it is still small. Nothing should ever become [...]




