Lose an hour, gain some great deals this weekend!

Chromalab – 15% off all clocks, through 3/14.

diseño I bos – 25% off pillows, cushions and throws, through 3/14

Mitchell Gold & Bob Williams – 20% off all tables and storage, through 3/14.

DWR Semi-Annual Sale – Save 15% on most items throughout the store. Free upgrade to white-glove delivery on orders over $2,000. Though 3/16

We’ve learned about a lot of great events focusing on green design lately around the city recently, and just learned about one more.

CBT Architects – whose office is a beacon in a sea of sports bars across from the TD Bank Garden – is hosting CBT Green Day 2010. The name is a bit of a misnomer, as it’s actually spread across two days: this afternoon, and tomorrow morning.

Today is”Into The Light” a panel on sustainable light performance, with a case study of the AI Tech Center in Hartford, CT. From 3:30pm to 4:30pm, panelists will display, demonstrate and answer questions about their green technology and products. Panelists will include:

David Hancock, CBT
Richard Wilson, Nysan Shading Systems
Avi Bar, Advanced Glazing / Solera
Paul Zaferiou, LAM Partners
Bill Hurwitz, Lutron
Steve Moran, Genzyme

Tomorrow morning is the Vendor Show, where 30 vendors will display their green products and services for review. “This year’s tradeshow will focus on vendors offering local products. It is also an opportunity for attendees to earn AIA continuing education credits. We are opening the event to the greater AEC community and will accept a limited number of outside attendees.”

Participating vendors include:

Alteris Renewables
Armstrong Ceilings
David Gooding, Inc.
Dooge Veneers
Duraamen Engineered Products & Vexcon Chemicals (both with Madstone Concrete)
The Eagleson Group
Eco-Chic Solutions
EcoUrban Kitchens
Fletcher Granite
Gavin Associates
The Green Cocoon
Guardian Glass
Kingston Block
Knoll (with Peabody Office Furniture)
LightBlocks
National Gypsum
Nexus / Green Roundtable
North Shore Floor Systems
Northeast Air Solutions
OmniLite
Pharos Project
Planet ReUse
Specification Sales
Stone Source
Tate Access Floors
Thos. Moser
ToMarket
Trikeenan Tiles
USG Corporation
Yusen/Vanguard Lighting

I’m going to try and make it to this afternoon’s panel, and possibly the vendor show tomorrow. See you there?

CBT Architects
110 Canal Street
Boston, MA 02114

Live Architecture Network is an organization that directs global workshops on digital design and fabrication in architecture for academic and client-based projects. LAN brings their workshop to Cambridge next month for “Architectural Response: Time, Tech, Tectonics”.

Its clear in 2010 perhaps more than ever that significant shifts in economies and culture can occur extremely rapidly; climatic crisis can devastate enormous populations in seconds. Our architectural response time is critical. The architectural recourse of one crisis needs to be more than a temporary fix as it is often the only opportunity to implement further preventative measures for a future occurrence.

Parametric practices are moving architectural design on a micro-scale through dynanic modeling & on more significantly on a macro-scale towards a dynamic architectural medium–a Live practice. LaN asks you to abandon representation modes of design and practice LIVE.

“Architectural Response: Time, Tech, Tectonics” will be held April 12-14 and will consist of a combination lectures, instructionals, and directed worksessions. The workshop will take place at the Microsoft New England Research and Development Center (yes, that’s NERD) in Kendall Square.

Registration for the three-day workshop ranges from $255 for students who register early, to $395 for professionals. Want to go but can’t afford it? You can apply online for 1 of 2 available scholarships.

Microsoft NERD
One Memorial Drive
Cambridge, MA 02142

From a consortium of handmade designers, to a single designer — handmade Monday has a dramatic range of scale.

Albertine Press is a Somerville-based, letterpress print shop run by Shelley Barande, “a sometime-architect who just loved paper more.”

Albertine Press’s first specialty is as a custom design and print studio. Shelley designs and creates custom save the date, wedding, baby, and other special and social events stationery.  But since the shop’s inception in 2007, her work has spread to a collection of greeting cards, note cards, and coasters.

I particularly like the graphic quality of her work. And I have a very Patrick Bateman-esque love of the way Shelley’s pieces reflect the texture of the press against the paper.

Le Corbusier was a pioneer in modern architecture, urban planning, and, of course furniture design. He thought about every aspect of how design — from the chair you sit in to how bulldozing Paris could help the underprivileged — can affect human existence. He’s largely credited with starting this crazy design thing called modern architecture.

But there’s one thing that, through all of his research, writing, and belief in “a machine for living in” that Le Corbusier overlooked: Children.

Children don’t prescribe to any set belief in how to behave, how to live, or how to sit. They’re imaginative. They take the limitations we adults try to impose upon them, and flip them around. (That’s my son, DesignKid, on Christopher’s LC4)

So designers, and design fans, remember: As great and thoughtful as your work and pieces and creations are, there’s an 11-year old somewhere that is ready to do something with it you’ve never dreamed of.

From spring cleaning sales at a local studio to semi-annual sales at a national retailer, this is a good week for deals. Know of a sale coming up that we should mention? Let us know!

JHill Design & Jill Rosenwald Spring Studio Sale – pieces as low as $5. Through 3/6.

Vessel – 40% off Roomies and Fusionware.

Mitchell Gold & Bob Williams – 20% off all tables and storage, through 3/14.

DWR Semi-Annual Sale – Save 15% on most items throughout the store. Free upgrade to white-glove delivery on orders over $2,000. Though 3/16

Karianne, a DesignBoston reader that works at Suffolk University’s New England School of Design, just tipped me off to a great, green design event happening today!

Design for the Environment 2010 is NESAD’s 4th annual green design trade show, featuring 26 local, national and international design companies, with an aim at showcasing their best, most environmentally-friendly designs.

The design community, along with society as a whole, has become aware that a new, more “bio-friendly” approach design must be taken if we are to stop polluting our earth, wasting energy and resources and jeopardizing the health of all species. Design firms are looked to for expertise in these areas and educated designers must be conversant with both design strategies and building technologies associated with environmentally responsible structures and spaces. Those designers who adapt and respond to changing global energy and resource issues through sustainable design will pursue their profession in a socially and environmentally responsible way.

Design for the Environment 2010 is taking place today, from 12:00 to 2:30, at the NESAD Galleria

NESAD Galleria
10 St. James Ave (the same building as Landry & Arcari and Montage)
Boston, MA

Yesterday afternoon, I took a walk around Charlestown with my camera. I walked along the Mystic, from the Charlestown High School playing fields down to the Navy Yard, taking photos of everything and anything that caught my attention (which is a lot).

After a couple hours of walking and shooting, my camera warned that battery exhaustion was imminent, so I started making my way home. Instead of back-tracking, I decided to walk by the Bunker Hill Monument — an omnipresent structure in the neighborhood. As I’m approaching Monument Square, I look a side street, and spot this:

I was stunned. A modern home in Charlestown? That seems as unlikely as one in Beacon HIll, what with all the Victorian brownstones and the historic gaslights in the neighborhood. On top of that, how have I not noticed it before? I’ve lived in Charlestown for almost two years, and I walk everywhere!

It’s a four-story, single-family home with a very open interior layout. There’s a balcony on each story, but they’re not carbon copies of the floor below. The first story is parallel with the road behind and the garage door, while the three above are angled to get the most of the morning light coming in over Boston Harbor. The fourth floor is set back further than the rest, providing additional privacy from what is presumably the master suite.

Intrigued and impressed, I just had to see what the front of this house looked like. When I curled around the block, what I found was not dramatically different from what the rest of the neighborhood looks like.

You’d be forgiven for thinking this was just another renovated brownstone. The metallic cladding on the dormer is the only giveaway that there’s anything different beyond the historic facade.

The renovation looks to be about 80-90% done. It looks like some interior details and finishing touches — a light at the front door, doorbell, and the like — are all that are needed.

Someone came out of a house a few doors down. I asked him if knew who owned the house, and he told me someone from a block or so away bought the house, but wasn’t sure who. He said the entire house was demolished, save the front facade. I asked a local realtor and found out the owner is a local business owner and his wife, lifelong Bostonians.

The house is beautiful, and incredibly unique for Boston. Yet for all of it’s modern updates, it blends in with the surrounding neighborhood very well. I’d love to get a walkthrough of the home when it’s finished. If that happens, you know I’ll be sharing with you.

What do you think? Does this home fit in with what you picture Charlestown — or Boston — to be? Can you see a street of modern brownstones being built, or is it just a one-off idea?

At SHIFTBoston, we saw the top 20 ideas presented by the expert panel, but what about the other 122 proposals? At least one firm is very proud of its proposal, and believe it would make a great addition to the city’s infrastructure.

Boston is a walkable city. I can vouch for this reputation, having walked from North Station to Brookline Village, and from the Back Bay to Ashmont Hill, in the past. But what about East Boston? Eastie is separated, physically and mentally, by Boston Harbor. Jamaica Plain-based OZIIO has a solution for this.

The Harbor’s Public Space, known as the Harbor Walk, follows the edge of Greater Boston from the North End and as far south as the ICA. The project proposes a Harbor Walk bridge to link both sides of the harbor and ultimately encourage reactivation of East Boston’s harbor edge. Scaling back farther, an argument can be made to connect the linear ‘green’ corridors that exist on both sides of the river. To make this connection the bridge will be sited on disused urban fragments such as the abandoned East Boston ferry terminal that has a direct connection to Maverick Square. Sargent’s wharf in the North End is chosen to be the Boston terminus transforming its function as a large-scale parking lot by giving the site new urban dynamism.

By giving the bridge multiple, alternating layers and a corner midway across the harbor, the bridge provides more function than simply a connection from one neighborhood to another. “Through this urban deign concept, the unconventional bridge form evolves to be more than just a bridge but rather an urban landscape extending out over the water. By extruding the various organic and orthogonal lines emanating from the docks found on both sides of the harbor, the bridge begins to take on shape. Paths form where the lines intersect carving out surfaces of decking, concrete pavers, and green space.”

The bridge’s atmosphere offers both space for peaceful reflection and speedy transit. The bridge provides unobstructed views of Boston’s skyline as well as leisure space surrounded by indigenous trees and plant life. The injection of new functions such as urban market space and dedicated bike commuting paths provide a pathway that can be traversed in 2 to 15 minutes with activities to do in-between. Restructuring the space over the water as a new public forum allows the harbor bridge to play the roll of destination and not just means to get from A to B. By bridging the waterfronts we help further move the urban infrastructure of Boston away from car-centric travel and toward a true walking city.

OZIIO’s Justin Viglianti believes their proposal wasn’t selected as a finalist “because there were so many projects that took into consideration the water around the city and on a much grander scale. Yet our modesty might say something about how personally intimate we feel about such issues as connecting waterfronts and providing an infrastructure for the underprivileged.”

What do you think? Could you see a link between East Boston and downtown becoming reality? How could connecting the neighborhood with the city change either, or both?

How much do you love the MBTA? Enough to display the map in your bathroom? If so, Izola Shower has your solution.

The Izola MBTA shower curtain is made of translucent PVC-free PEVA and has the full MBTA map — both subway and commuter rail lines — shown. It’s a playful display, depending on how often you ride the T.

Izola was nice enough to send me on to live with for a bit (that’s my bathroom, above). While my stand up shower doesn’t provide the MBTA map the full exhibition space it deserves, I figured a live shot would serve you best. Looking at the MBTA shower curtain while I brush my teeth, I thought of a few extra functions it can provide for you:

• Where do you have to transfer? Right at the soapy spot!
• There was another Green Line trolley crash?! Grab the Sharpie and mark it down.
• How do people in Somerville, Dorchester, Roxbury, Mattapan, and Hyde Park get around? Draw in the bus routes.

In truth, the MBTA shower curtain is a bit too kitsch for my home. But what about you? What do you think of using the MBTA map as part of your decor?