Green Options

Under recommendations from the UK Green Building Council, otters could return to urban rivers, bats could roost under bridges, swifts could flock to office blocks and peregrine falcons soar above cathedrals. Written by Felicity Carus and shared via the Guardian Environment Network.

What do the Westfield shopping centre, Canary Wharf and a Victorian museum have in common? They are all at the vanguard of a move to encourage biodiversity in buildings that could take on an unprecedented scale if guidelines published today are adopted.

There may be few occupations that have more opportunity to incorporate sustainable choices into their products, services, and day-to-day operations than architecture.  The market for green building has cooled down along with everything else, but it seems inevitable that it will replace its traditional counterpart faster than most other sustainable industries.  Organic foods, for example, grew 20% year after year for almost a decade before slowing to a 6% growth in overall sales last year, but no one believes that organic will completely replace traditional agriculture anytime soon. Green building, however, may be lined up to become mainstream.

It just makes sense.  Rising energy prices coupled with decreasing costs of many green building products and widespread acceptance of the many benefits of green building have produced a perfect storm that could realistically propel green building forward to mainstream acceptance.  The other major influence is the economic downturn, which is bringing liquid clarity to the costs of maintaining a traditional home, and the corresponding benefits to planning for energy efficiency.

Warren Lloyd, of Lloyd Architecture, says, “Things will be very different [when residential construction starts to heat up again after the downturn].  Green Building will just be how we do things.”  Lloyd, whose firm

A California architect has constructed a home that heats itself from the warmth of its appliances. Homes like this have been popular in Germany, where a local architect built the first of its kind in 1991, but they are only just starting to catch on here in the States.

[Creative Commons photo by KeWynn Lee]

Nabih Tahan’s “Passive House” on Grant Street in Berkeley is the first one in California. It uses a ventilator to recycle the heat that radiates from the appliances, reducing the use of heat from fossil fuels by 80%-90%.

Vinay Gupta is a man with a novel approach to disaster relief and emergency shelters.

The Red Cross is interested. FEMA is interested.

Does OpenSource architecture and peer-to-peer emergency response hold the key to effectively meeting people’s needs in a disaster?

In an interview with TreeHugger, OpenSource designer Vinay Gupta had this to say:

“The idea that the U.S. might have to handle a city worth of refugees very suddenly shouldn’t be a strange thing to anybody who’s aware of the fact that there is some risk of terrorism on a mass scale. An organization like FEMA really has the responsibility to be able to evacuate a city worth of Americans in 24 hours if they have to be able to do so. That capability had not been developed so it couldn’t be deployed.”

Implementing Gupta’s emergency response plan and simple disaster shelters could develop that capability, working with FEMA, the Red Cross, and other local aid organizations.

Looking at the events surrounding the Katrina disaster, I’d say we really need to have a plan that works next time. The Hexayurt sounds like a phenomenal answer for sheltering displaced people, quickly. It’s a public domain project, OpenSource and ready to be taken to the next level.

Imagine houses with six feet-thick seaweed roofs, deep-nestled and hand-carved cave homes, and pigeon-harboring huts made of mud. Sounds a little unreal, huh? Well, this and more is all vividly documented in Built By Hand: Vernacular Buildings Around the World, a most inspiring bit of natural building eye candy I recently had the fortune of stumbling upon. Built by Hand is a hardcover collection of photographs of traditional buildings of all styles across the globe.

If you weren’t already appalled by the house design atrocity known as the McMansion, Built By Hand will make you pine ever harder for more intimate, natural, sensible, and green home designs that can be found all over the world, still being built by indigenous peoples and sometimes mimicked by enterprising, modern day natural home builders.

I happened to live in France back in 2002, and during my year there I noticed a pretty significant gap between sustainability as practiced in Europe in the US. In Europe, I was working with large public companies who were already integrating the implications of global warming and sustainbility into their businesses. In the US (and sadly still today), many companies were still arguing whether global warming even existed!

This difference was also evident in houshold products - from luxury hotels in Italy fully outfitted with CFLs to low-flow water fixtures and dual-flush toilets in many homes to small upright washers in even the most basic apartments, the kinds of products associated with our burgeoning US green movement today were already the norm in many parts of Europe back then.

On a recent trip overseas I happened to pick up a French architecture magazine for the flight home. I was pleasantly surprised to see that we had really caught up in the past six years - outside of being written in French, you would have been hard-pressed to distinguish this magazine from any of the leading US architecture magazines.

One article caught my eye, though, for it did point out a slight difference that needs to move across the pond. It was on a beautiful and practical prefab home, called the EvolutiV house by Olgga Architectes of Paris. The house itself is striking, made from two rectangular prefrabicated sections that can be rearranged to develop different floorplans and having exterior walls made from sections of wooden logs. The homes also come with the latest and greatest in eco-design: natural ventilation, rainwater collection, solar panels (both PV and thermal), green roof, radiant heating with an option for geothermal heating/cooling, and the typical eco-friendly materials throughout.

The most interesting piece of the story, though, is that the literature for the house and the articles written about it all refer to the home’s target energy usage: less than 48 kWh / m2 / year, which translates to about 4.4 kWh / ft2 / year. This is 70% less energy usage than the typical US home in similar climates.

It’s not the level of performance that makes this interesting, for many prefab options in the US can do as well. It’s that the media in France AND the architecture firm who designed the house feel compelled to advertise efficiency in terms of a single number that is easy to understand and can be used to compare this home to others one might choose. I’ve rarely if ever seen that in discussion of US prefab options (or other green homes) - outside of a LEED rating, we’re often left to guess exactly how eco-friendly that home is. We’d love to see this become more widespread in the US - information is power, and simple, objective numbers like this can help us separate the truly eco-friendly from innovative designs that are green in name (or advertising) only.

To see more photos of the Evolutiv house, click here to view the balance of this posting. (FYI, the EvolutiV house is about 800 square feet and is available in France for about $150,000.)

And click here to find great green prefab homes available in the US.

Some people build houses. Others, go abroad and help build or rebuild communities. Still others build… mobile kitchens! Earlier this year, students from the University of Toronto’s master’s program at the faculty of architecture designed and built a mobile kitchen. So what you say? What’s so big about a kitchen table on wheels? Well, some people pimp their cars, these UofT students pimped their kitchen! This kitchen comes with a barbeque, seats about 50, and has garbage, recycling and composting bins available.

Ancient Egyptian pyramids and Middle Eastern ziggurats are coming alive in the 21st century technology.

A new futurist concept that encompasses green building technology and—according to the developer—can house up to a million people, will make a debut at the world stage in October.

The 2.3 square kilometer Ziggurat Project, undertaken by Timelinks, a Dubai based environmental design company, will be 100 per cent carbon neutral and will run by harnessing the power of nature setting a futuristic pace for eco-friendliness for other similar projects in the pipeline.

Borrowing from ancient ingenuity, the inhabitants won’t even have any use for a car: transport throughout the complex would be connected by an integrated 360 degree network (horizontally and vertically) so cars would be redundant. Biometrics would provide security with facial recognition technology.

I met Mr. Chen at a bar-b-que in Tennessee last weekend. Admittedly I learned of his interest in sustainability by eavesdropping on his conversation, hearing phrases such as “reclaiming rainwater” and “solar power”. You may be thinking “so what” there are plenty of architects who are applying sustainable techniques to their work. What makes Tien-si Chen different is that he is a Christian Conservative.

As the environment continues to gain more and more attention, so does the need to stay green and environmentally friendly. We’re seeing these qualities become more and more relevant and important in a variety of fields; from automotive to architecture.

The latter has long been a focus of the green development. One need only look at the mass of stories coming out of the Middle East and Asia to see that a green focus on design and architecture is now more important than ever.

If you can’t tell, we’re pretty hooked on the latest and greatest in green prefab design. One big problem, though, is that there’s a huge amount of noise and not all that much action - plenty of fabulous prefab designs and museum / conference exhibits, but very few actual installations (and even fewer mid-market installs, which is where prefab has to go in order to make a true difference in our housing stock).

Finally, the log jam seems to be breaking. Several firms have begun to produce green prefab homes for real people in small but growing numbers. This past month, Marmol Radziner, a prefab company here in Southern California, made a splash with some pretty showy installation videos on local media outlets. These homes are either a) high end or b) for the firm’s founders, so they’re still a ways away from mass-market. But, the videos do a good job of showing what elements make prefab homes unique (factory construction, rapid installation, modular components) and at least to me suggest that they’re not all that far away from being able to replicate these installations on a larger and thus less expensive scale.