Sustainable Design Update

Living Homes PreFab

There is a growing number of environmentally responsible high quality home designs available as pre-fabricated structures.  The advantage of prefabrication are many.  First, your home is made in a climate controlled factory.  (I’ve had clients panic as torrents of rain and hail assailed their dream home before the roof was complete)  Prefabs don’t have water damage before they are complete.

Prefabs can bring the price of design down to a level where more people can afford a name brand architect.  Check out Living Homes.  Designs by Ray Kappe usually don’t come at pre-fab prices.  Prefabs also go up much faster than their “stick built” counterparts.  This means your $ start providing shelter sooner, saving the cost of maintaining your existing home/apartment while you are shelling out the big bucks for constructing your dream home.

PreFabs have the unique advantage of providing a physical model that you can walk through before you move in.  Many fabricators also can customize your design for a small additional cost.

Note:  The PreFab above is LEED Certified.

From Living Homes:

LivingHomes is inspired by the school of modernism initiated by the Bauhaus and widely practiced by great architects like Walter Gropius, Richard Neutra, A. Quincy Jones, and Ray Kappe, our first architect. These architects’ designs integrated form and function, presenting materials authentically, devoid of adornment or dress. Their homes expanded space through open floor plans, and invited the outdoors in through floor to ceiling windows that bathed interiors with natural light.

We believe these ideals align coherently with an environmental agenda that directs us to only use what we need. We don’t believe in dressing things up unnecessarily. Focusing on what we like to call “warm modernism”, our homes integrate the light, volume and linear forms you expect (and hopefully like!) in a modern space – as well as the warmth and detail you find more typically in a Craftsman home.

LivingHomes partners with world-class architects to create our homes.

More at:  Living Homes

Related Links:

Fabulous Pre-Fab at Dwell on Design, LA

Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taleisin Pre-Fab

Low Cost Paper House for Slum Dwellers

10 Tips for Building a Sustainable Home

Mcube – Green Home Design

Bamboo – Abundant and Renewable

In my past life I studied lots of different mixes for concrete and reinforcement.  Good concrete is easy to make but without some sort of reinforcement it lacks tensile strength.  Concrete by itself can’t make a beam or span a distance.  Beams want to deflect under load which causes the bottom of a beam to stretch (slightly).  Concrete doesn’t stretch – instead it  cracks.  In Haiti a lot of structures failed due to a lack of proper reinforcing.

Bamboo grows naturally in Haiti (I checked).  Its cheaper than steel and when used in concrete it stores carbon.  Bamboo can be used as reinforcement for concrete in a manner similar to how re-bar is used now, or in some cases it can be chopped and added to a concrete mix to give seismic strength.

A great paper on Bamboo Reinforced Concrete:  Bamboo Reinforced Concrete

Photo: Darwin Bell via Flickr

Friend House

FriendHouse Hotel on the Orel River in Ukraine is constructed of only eco-friendly material: clay, reed, wood and stone.  The designers designers considered the project’s effect on the environment from the start.

The space juxtaposes organic forms with modern design.  The rooms feel like a mash up between Mies meets Bilbo Baggins.

Design Data:

Architects: Ryntovt
Location: Orel River Bank, Dnepropertrovsk, Ukraine
Project Team: Yuriy Ryntovt /chief architect, Aleksey Bojko, Alan Kravchenko
Project Area: 1,750 sqm
Project Year: 2008
Photographs: Andrey Avdeenko

More at: ArchDaily

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Invitrum Cabinets

Valcucine has designed a line of cabinets that are made from 100% recyclable materials.  While I’d like to see the Invitrum line become both 100% recycled content and 100% recyclable, but as-is these cabinets represent a big step in the right direction.

Working as a carpenter many years ago I remember many kitchen renovations where we ended up taking old cabinets to the landfill.  We now have good cabinet recycling options if the cabinets are in good condition, but after a long life most cabinets are not things most people want in their houses.

Invitrum cabinets have fewer parts than most cabinets and due to the ruggedness of the materials, they should last nearly forever.

From Valcucine:

Disassembled glass base unit

Products made of single materials have been used: 100% recyclable glass and aluminium. The structure can be completely disassembled and is connected by mechanical joints.

Non-toxic, without glues and easy to dispose of because the materials can be recycled.

Lengthy research into materials and into their limits of resistance have allowed Valcucine to revolutionise the furniture industry, producing the first 100% recyclable base unit in glass and aluminium. The production process of recycled aluminium has the advantage of consuming only one-twentieth of the energy needed to obtain primary aluminium. Traditional kitchens usually entail base units that are installed side-by-side, meaning that the chipboard side panel is double and can reach a thickness of 36mm; Valcucine, on the other hand, has developed the structure of its kitchen horizontally and uses a single carcass side in glass that is only 10mm thick.

• 100% recyclable
• 100% glass and aluminium
• No glues
• No formaldehyde emissions.
• Completely water-resistant
• Designed to be disassembled at the end of its life cycle

Valcucine Green Wall

When I was a young Architect I remember asking a senior partner in the large firm where I worked how he was going to integrate his design into the landscape.  His response was “When I am done designing I’ll send it over to (name brand landscape firm) and they will stick some growies on it”.  While he was kidding me, that expression embodied more than a little truth about how Architects, Engineers and Landscape Architects worked together back before integrated green design became popular.

I think the “green wall” by Valcucine shown above is a  tongue-in-cheek commentary on green design.  If they were serious they would have used something other than the WalMart pots for the plants.

More at: Valcucine

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Hof House – Studio Granda Architects

The cold weather here in Ann Arbor reminded me of one of my favorite buildings of 2009.  Just south of the Arctic Circle, the Hof House both blends with and contrasts the local environment. Studio Granda Architects designed the house with salvaged materials wherever possible, carving telegraph poles into a sun screen and using local basalt for stepping stones. Designed for extreme local weather conditions (Skagafjörður Fjord), the Hof House utilizes passive solar design strategies for the half year when the sun shines.  It also uses geothermal heating and high insulation levels.

The exterior finish is cedar attached to concrete structural walls. and like Frank Lloyd Wright buildings it is intended to weather to a natural grey.  While the overall aesthetic doesn’t look it, the Hof House has repeating irregular hexagonal shapes.

Geothermal heating warms stone floors and provides heat and hydro power provides electricity throughout the house.

Studio Granada’s Hof House won the Mies van der Rohe Award for 2009.

Check Out:   Studio Granda Architects

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