Green Options » Now House Project http://greenoptions.com/tag/now-house-project Posts tagged 'Now House Project' Tue, 03 Jun 2008 14:31:22 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.5.1 en The Now House Project: Providing a Model for Recycling WWII-Era Houses http://greenbuildingelements.com/2008/06/03/the-now-house-project-providing-a-model-for-recycling-wwii-era-houses/ http://greenbuildingelements.com/2008/06/03/the-now-house-project-providing-a-model-for-recycling-wwii-era-houses/#comments Tue, 03 Jun 2008 14:31:22 +0000 Kristin Dispenza http://greenbuildingelements.com/2008/06/03/the-now-house-project-providing-a-model-for-recycling-wwii-era-houses/ Diagram of Energy Saving Systems in Toronto’s First Now HouseRenovating and ‘re-using’ older homes may be one of the greenest forms of construction. But fixing up an old house tends to be a highly individual endeavor, and the lessons learned while retrofitting a single home are difficult to adapt to larger-scale applications.

In spite of this, Lorraine Gauthier, co-founder of the socially-conscious Toronto design studio Work Worth Doing, has identified a housing type which offers a high degree of consistency across a large number of homes: post-war housing. Post-war homes, built to accommodate returning WWII veterans, are still a part of the landscape throughout Canada and the United States, and many of these aging homes have poor energy performance. By assembling a team of designers and other sustainable building experts to retrofit a single home in the Toronto area (as part of an undertaking known as the Now House™ project), it is hoped that a formula can be created and then applied to literally millions of homes.

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