building green

The Green Building History Timeline

jchait — Tue, 06 May 2008 00:28:21 -0400

Lately one of my favorite green blogs is the GreenGeezer. Since I write a ton of green blogs, it's nice to see a fresh take on the same topics I'm always thinking about. In any case, the blog is not new, just one I missed. GreenGeezer's tagline is, "Green homes for baby boomers: Because there's still time to do it right." Which is very cool considering that everywhere I go people act like green is a youth issue - NO. It's an everyone issue.

Where this is going is one, you should visit GreenGeezer, and two, the other day she had a good post up with a link to Building Green's history of green building time line. I've actually read Green Building often, yet somehow missed the time line.

You'll enjoy it. I don't like that it quit being updated in 2000, because we've made huge green building strides in the last seven or so years, but other than that, it's a nice read.

The time line starts way back in pre-20th century – a time of understandably simple passive designs that had to heat and cool on their own, because big shock, no central air. It skips to the 30s when technology started to take over and then a big bulk of time from the 70s through the 90s is covered. We made huge building mistakes, and some nice green advances during that 70s-90s period.

Now of course green building is coming on in a more forceful and organized way (thankfully). Visit the time line - maybe, if you're the advantageous sort you can continue the time line from where they left off.

Locating Green Goods & Services

jchait — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 02:23:40 -0400

If you’re building or remodeling green you’re likely interested in finding products, companies, and services that match your green values, offer real eco-friendly solutions, not just a green sticker, and if all goes your way, a decent price.

There are many places you can look for homebuilders, eco-friendly appliances, green supplies, building materials and more. However, basic phone book or internet searches aren’t always useful. As of now there’s very little regulating green practices or green labels of any kind.

By checking with certain sources you stand a better chance of getting what you need. Not a perfect chance mind you; you always need to personally research a company before investing in green, but your chances of avoiding greenwashing increase when you concentrate you research efforts on trusted resources.

Here are some decent to good places to start your search for green minded companies – these are places I’ve had decent results with.

Co-op America’s National Green Pages: This is basically the “green” yellow pages; offering services from investing, furniture, gifts, B&Bs, restaurants, real estate, housing, lumber, and far more. I’ve been using them to find reputable green services since 2000 with good results.

If you live in one of the following areas:

Denver / Boulder / Fort Collins
Greater Salt Lake / Park City
Portland/Vancouver

You can check out the ReDirect Guide. I love this guide and it covers a wide range of green companies. Not so wide as the National Green Pages, but good. It would be nice to see guides like this in other areas. In fact, some areas do have their own green guide. Ask your local Chamber of Commerce or visitor’s center.

Green Home Building is one of my favorite green building sites ever. One you can find many links to services and two they even have an expert panel (it’s huge). You can submit a question and get an answer to your most pressing green home question.

The U.S Green Building Council not only offers advice but breaking news about all things green including residential LEED. Best of all they offer a huge ever updated monster page of green building links. Seriously, one of the best lists you find.

Here's what they offer links to:

Associations and Non-Profit Organizations
Building Codes and Standards
Building Materials, Guides and Certification
Case Studies
Campus Initiatives
Commissioning and Post-Occupancy Evaluation
Design and Simulation Tools
Design Resources
Economics
Energy
Funding
Government Initiatives & Guidelines
Life Cycle Analysis and Costing
Media
Rating Systems
Research Centers
Sustainability/Miscellaneous

Green Building has useful information about all things related to green building. Their one major problem is that the “Find a Pro” section is under construction – with what looks like a long way to go. That said, the site already has offered good info in the past, offers some services, and they may be one to watch for more resources.

These are just a few places where you can find better, greener home building, renovation, and material information. In future posts I’ll share more of my favorite green building resources and earth friendly architects.

I'm Exploring the Green Appeal of Modular and Pre-Fab Innovations

ellen — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 00:00:00 -0500

One idea I have been taken with lately is the idea of modular houses. These are houses that are are fabricated in factories and shipped to the site rather than built from scratch on site. Why would this type of house be considered more sustainable than your typically constructed house? Well, modular houses tend to be small. Since they are factory made, modular houses use materials more efficiently with less waste. Green technology such as solar PV panels, automatic shutters etc… can be installed efficiently. Many of the models I have been researching use low-VOC materials, responsibly harvested wood and are engineered to be extremely energy efficient.

This is one of my favorites, by a Norwegian company called Lovetann, which I first saw on Inhabitat .

Note to our readers: Ellen is reporting on a variety of eco-arhcitectural projects at RiverWired and on her own blog, too -- see the end of this article.

Most of the modular companies will design to suit your needs so if we wanted to adapt the Lovetann, perhaps we would order a smaller one, with just a tiny penthouse which would allow access to the little terrace. The Owners’ primary use for this space will be as an artist’s loft for painting so ideally, we could combine part of the 2-stories into one double height space. I love the options of solar panels and a green roof.

There are so many great modular designs out there. I’ll share some of the more notable ones.

I love this one, called Loftcube, by Aisslinger Studio in Berlin but… until they are manufactured somewhere a bit more locally, we’ll have to continue looking.

This one, called the weehouse, is a little bigger than we are looking for but it’s such a clean design. For this climate though, I think I’d install it on a foundation to prevent heat loss. This a wood frame model with oxidized steel exterior and fir interior.

There is a whole subset of pre-fab houses which are made from re-purposed shipping containers or are designed along the lines of an old fashioned RV. While they are often laudable on sustainability grounds, I object on aesthetic grounds. These are some samples of what I’m talking about.

This is Duo from miniHome and unfortunately resembles a truck in its proportions.

and this one, by Jones, Partners was an entry in the Dwell Homes Design Invitational - a competition for a pre-fab prototype home designed for mass production. The Dwell site has the most cutting edge models but this one looks way too much like the shipping container it was made from.

Some bigger models:

This one, from Jennifer Siegal, a leader in pre-fab housing design, is a beautiful combination of light and space that would work well in a variety of locations. It’s large (3,000 sf) but still a reasonable size for a family of 4.

One more: the ASAP House (House About Saving A Planet) is a zero-energy, beautifully designed modern modular house that is actually available for sale in the North East! Inhabitat did a great piece on it a while ago.

OK, I digress. With all these interesting possibilities out there, let’s see how our Indianapolites (what do you call people who live in Indianapolis anyway?) want to proceed.

Other interesting links for more information on pre-fab houses:

Prefabs.com

Modern Modular

Ellen Honigstock is an architect in the DUMBO section of Brooklyn who specializes in sustainable architecture and interior design. She is also the LEED for Homes Advocate for the NYC chapter of the USGBC (US Green Building Council)

Note to our readers: Ellen is reporting on a variety of eco-arhcitectural projects at RiverWired and on her own blog. Check it out.