Our Favorite Things: Volume 2

by Maggie Flickinger

With a certified permaculturalist on staff, and all of us having veggie gardens, we were thrilled to find the Denver Urban Homesteading Farmer’s Market.  Chock full of everything local, from honey to flour to fresh produce and chickens, and offering classes & seminars covering various homesteading topics, this is a one-stop-shop for the burgeoning urban gardener, relocalization buff, or serious homesteader.  Given our enophilic ways, we’re particularly excited about the urban wine project, where several grape growers throughout the city (and guerrilla growers!) will pool their harvest for a truly metropolitan bottling!

The human powered rolling bookshelf is not only a clever accessory for the modern home, but also has potential to be a unique transportable library for rural & developing villages.  Called the Archive II, it’s been developed by the David Garcia studio as an intellectual investigation into books and meaning in their storage.  We couldn’t help but envision (a beefier variant of) this being walked down a dusty street by the local librarian with a band of children in tow – a much more learned version of rolling the tyre.  We heard about this nomadic library via Inhabitat.

While women edge ever closer to parity in the architectural industry, at Barrett Studio, we’re the majority!  Women in Design, a Denver based professional networking group, is comprised of empowered, creative women in a multi-disciplinary cross-section of the design industry.  In addition to high-minded design events, they host Habitat Build days and Happy Hours.  Having attended a few of their events, we can attest that they are intelligent, inspiring, and an excellent venue for making contact with other women design professionals!

Building materials that actually contribute to their environment are on the cusp of emerging nanotechnology.  Pioneered through selfcleaning cement – as famously used in Meier’s Dives in Misericordia church – the technology made a huge leap with Ceracasa’s introduction of BionicTile, which actually cleans the surrounding air of NOx.  Following this, Ceracasa unveiled the LifeWall tile, an elegant vertical living wall “tile,” which when used in concert with BionicTile creates a symbiotic decontamination system.

Let us know what types of things you’d like to hear about in our recurring “Our Favorite Things” posts!