Designing a Restaurant in Reverse

The Melbourne Food and Wine Festival Greenhouse by Joost from Will Watt on Vimeo.

Smart Planet.com has a great article on a restaurant in Melbourne, Australia that has purpose made urinals that collected pee to be used as fertilizer for crops of Canola which will then be harvested and used to heat next years restaurant, which if I understand it correctly is first used to cook with then recycled for heating. How great is that? The video above is a time lapse of the building going up.

Designed by Joost Bakker who says:

"I have designed a restaurant in reverse.  I've started at the end: assessing the waste production and working back from there."

Kind of ass backwards you might say, but brilliant - read the whole article which goes into detail about building materials and how it got built.

A man after my own heart Joost states that:

"My dream has always been to create a restaurant hat created no waste and I think I have achieved it!"

I'd love to do something like that here in NYC, but you have to wonder what the City department of buildings would have to say about it!

Check out this fact sheet which outlines the materials, time frame of the build out and much more.