Museum Unveils Green + Wired

The Museum of Science and Industry announced today that a fully-functional, three-story "green" home will be built just east of the museum on its Jackson Park grounds in Hyde Park this spring. The foundation is currently being laid, and it will be open to the public from May 8, 2008 through January 4, 2009. The 2,500-square-foot home will exhibit some of the latest environmentally-friendly technologies and offer a primer on incorporating these innovations into our homes.

The MSI exhibit was given the catchy title of, "Smart Home: Green + Wired, Powered by ComEd and Warmed by Peoples Gas" because it's a collaboration between Wired magazine, ComEd and People's Gas, as well as some very cool landscape and design architects. The house will feature cutting-edge green technologies such as energy monitoring systems, gray water systems, a living roof, a solar electric generator, and on-demand water heaters, and it will be built with renewable and recyclable materials and non-toxic paints, according to designer Michelle Kaufmann's blog. In addition, the exhibit house will feature "truth windows" that give you a glimpse of the contents of floors and walls.

Body Worlds was O.K. (though it was way over-hyped), but this sounds like the coolest thing they've done at the 75-year-old MSI since that full-sized Boeing 727 was hauled in in 1992. --Mark Boyer

mkSolaire via michellekaufmann.com