Stylish Housing that Fights Pollution

How do you turn massive liability into a premium asset? Green, green, green.

Take contaminated industrial brownfield, haul away 5 feet of poisonous dirt, add architecture and planning firm, solar heating, wind power, green roofs, gardens that extract pollutants from the soil, huge argon-insulated windows, a view of the coastline and Web accessible remote control.

Then stand back and marvel at the chic elegance of Tango, a designer housing complex in Malmo, Sweden. The complex also recycles its waste water into a rebuilt marsh ecology that mimics the development’s east side, the marshy ecology of the sound. In passing the article mentions that the construction methods and materials were “hewed to ecological building standards that Malmo had set for the district.”

It’s all very geeky and cool, but I look forward to the day when sustainable design is boring and mandated outside of northern Europe, too, not just left to showcase projects that benefit those that can rent at three times the market rate or that make great PR when they pave over industrial contamination.