Last week the Olympic Village in Beijing officially earned the LEED Gold award from the U.S. Green Building Council under its pilot LEED for Neighborhood Development program. Among the sustainable design features of the complex, as reported in Inhabitat: rainwater, graywater, and storm water collection systems, lots of green roofs and open space, drought-resistant and native plantings, and a network of bicycle and pedestrian paths.

Rob Goodspeed describes his vacation encounter with the “greenest gas station in America.” Located near Eugene, Oregon, on a restored brownfield site, it has a green roof, a vegetated bioswale, locally produced biofuels, and racks of organic foods instead of Slurpees and Moon Pies.

One blogger’s take on five plants that are inspiring sustainable high technology, including algae and the sacred lotus. (More like three — velcro, which was invented by George de Mestral after studying cockleburs, and biodegradable plastics derived from corn are neat but old news.) 

The July issue of Popular Science has a story on the megalopolis of the future. Hint: It looks nothing like smog-choked Mexico City or sprawling LA. Instead, picture things like pod cars, sidewalks that turn footsteps into electricity, an algae park with a super breed of algae engineered at UC Berkeley to generate energy, and 30-story hydroponic farms tended by robots. The interactive web feature is fun, but here’s hoping the ecotropolis of 2050 has better music. 

Check out Habitat 2020, a nature-inspired building that makes today’s LEED Platinum structures look about as cutting edge as Stonehenge. “The exterior has been designed as a living skin, rather than a system of inert materials” used only for protection, reports Inhabitat. In fact, the building’s walls look a lot like the surface of a leaf seen under a microscope, with countless stomata, the openings that regulate plant transpiration and exchange of gases with the atmosphere. Like a leaf, the architectural skin automatically positions itself to let in sunlight — no artificial lighting would be needed during the day — funnel air into the building for natural cooling, and harvest rain water. It can even absorb moisture from the air. The concept is being developed for housing in China. 

Can half-ton bags of soil lined up in abandoned lots help make cities more self-sufficient in food production? Architects Ulrike Steven and Gareth Morris of What if: Projects Ltd. think so. Working with an inner city neighborhood in London, they arranged 70 of them on concrete in a vacant lot where local residents are now growing an astonishing array of vegetables, fruits, and flowers. For the past two years these unusual containers have been transformed into a vibrant community garden.

One of the local residents describes how his initial investment of about $12 for seeds has yielded “200 lettuces, cucumbers, beetroots galore, spring onions”  —  so many that he and his neighbors are able to swap a portion of their harvests.

Currently, according to a report in The Times, 80 percent of London’s food comes from abroad and the rest is shipped in from other parts of the U.K. Only a minuscule amount is produced locally. However, a London Assembly member estimates that the city could produce as much as 25 percent of its food using Urban Grow Bags and other means. 

Something about the lilypad apparently appeals deeply to biomimics. Maybe the way they float through life with a kind of desultory beauty. Kind of like bobbing around a tropical lagoon with a mojito and a floppy hat.

A few weeks ago the eco-design community was wowed by the Solar Lilypad. Now comes Vincent Callebaut’s Lilypad. Designed to look like a water-lily, it’s a completely self-sufficient, zero-emission floating city intended to provide shelter for future climate change refugees in low-lying areas around the world. Each Lilypad, with varied topography including three ridges and a central lake, could support about 50,000 people afloat in the ocean. 

Now that green roofs have become accepted, if not yet common, a growing number of designers seem to be exploring the next great frontier in living architecture – green walls.

This past February in Paris I stumbled across the Musée du Quai Branly and was blown away by its 8600-square-foot Plant Wall designed by Patrick Blanc. A horticultural tour de force, Blanc’s creation reportedly includes more than 150 different plant species. A portfolio of Blanc’s living walls can be found on his website.

I’ve seen a number of spectacular green roofs both in the U.S. and Europe (my current favorite is the new roof on Queens Botanical Garden’s LEED Platinum Visitor and Administration building, one of the few planted with native species). Because green walls are even more visible to the public, they’re bound to capture the fancy of landscape designers. They could even revive the venerable tradition of the garden folly. Case in point: Gas Design Group’s “Topiade” (topiary + façade) overlays for an existing Louis Vuitton store.

By the way, living walls can have some if not all of the environmental benefits of green roofs: They can reduce storm-water runoff, trap and break down airborne toxins, and by decreasing the urban heat island effect, help keep cities cool. 

I thought my obsession with treehouses was bad — I’ve been fantasizing about treehouses since I first saw Swiss Family Robinson as a kid — but the design mavens at Inhabitat have really been bitten by the bug. This roundup of their favorite treehouse finds over the past few years ranges from a glowing Japanese lantern-like structure nestled among fir trees on Lake Muskoka, Ontario to two Buckminster Fuller-inspired geodesic domes linked by a canopy walk.

As I said the other day, every arboretum and botanical garden needs at least one of these awesome arboreal aeries. 

Fritz Haeg has been deemed a horticultural revolutionary of late for daring to propose scrapping front lawns for “edible estates.” But his proposal pales compared to Columbia professor Dickson Despommier’s vision of entire skyscrapers devoted to growing crops. Such “vertical farms” could reduce the carbon footprint of city dwellers by conserving energy used for long-distance transport of food to urban markets. Even better, they could free up expanses of farmland to return to forest, radically reducing the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

Among the other benefits of skycropping: a year-round supply of organically grown fruits, vegetables, grains, and fish; no weather-related crop failures; no polluting agricultural runoff; lots of green collar jobs in inner cities; and an intensive form of food production capable of feeding the 3 billion additional people predicted by the year 2050, most of whom will live in urban areas.

Several sky farm designs are featured on Despommier’s website. He says roughly 150 30-story towers could feed the entire population of New York City for a year. This article, published in New York magazine last year, explains in detail how they would work.