Photo: Orca Yapı Sistemleri

In Turkish, the word for a slum is gecekondu, meaning "settled overnight." A prefabricated house doesn't go up quite that quickly, but mass production can make homes--of both the conventional and ecofriendly type--available to more people at varying income levels.

The house-in-a-greenhouse probably wouldn't play very well in say, Arizona, where enclosing your house in glass shell would be folly. But Bengt Warne, a Swedish architect, starting designing what he called the Naturhus (Nature House) in 1976 to work with Scandinavian nature. Warne put up his own Naturhus before he died in 2006, but two other Swedish families have now designed their own versions of an enclosed house.

photo: Chet Yeary II

Jimmy Stamp at Life Without Buildings compares current shipping container architecture proposals from LOT-EK, Adam Kalkin and others to Icelandic designer "B. Börkur Eiríksson’s dark vision of a smoggy dystopic future where we’re all crammed into mile-high towers by colossal mobile crane systems."

Extraordinary image follows:...

Dwight Doerkson has developed "an affordable eco friendly building that’s transportable and doesn’t need to be hooked up to the grid"- out of shipping containers. He cuts out an entire wall and hinges it, so when you want to leave your ecopod you simply flip a switch and a solar powered winch pulls up the deck and closes up the box. ...

No, it's not a new IKEA store, (the base would be blue) it is the expanded Brooklyn Children's Museum by Rafael Vinoly that opens on September 20. According to Nicholas Tamarin at Interior Design, it is the "city's first LEED Silver-certified museum."...