Design Your Green Home
How would you design your ultimate green home? My green home is one that incorporates Earth, Wind, and Fire!
Think of what technology might make possible in the next few decades and how we can use it to build homes that have a positive impact on the environment.
The growing awareness of the fact that buildings are responsible for 39% of our energy consumption, helps explain why green building and energy efficiency at home is one of the most pervasive trends in the construction industry — even as the economy struggles and home-building is at its lowest level in a generation.
Lets take a journey through our imagination and envision the green homes of tomorrow.
- » See also: US Green Building Council to Honor Hospitality Design Challenge Winners
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Green Visions Today
Now is a time of re-examining our values and re-examining what we need to continue to live comfortably, but in a sustainable way that is more in tune with our natural environment. So, if you could design the green home of your dreams, what would it look like?
What would it be made of?
How would it produce and consume energy?
For architect William McDonough of the Charlottesville, Virginia, his home would mymic a tree. Instead of building a home from the elements of a tree, his home would replicate the the life cycle of a living tree. The surface of his house, like a leaf, would contain a photosynthetic layer that captures sunlight. Unlike today’s solar panels, which are often pasted above a roof line, Mr. McDonough’s panels would be woven into the fabric of the exterior. Water would be heated and electricity for the home would be generated from the solar energy.
A Chameleon Home?
Wouldn’t it be cool if your home could change colors according to the temperature outside to heat or cool the interior of the home? At architecture firm Cook+Fox, they’ve come up with a concept called biomimicry, which means we look at nature’s way of solving problems as much as trying to adapt technology to solve them.
Mr. Cook’s green home has a skin that reacts to the weather, turning dark in the bright sun to insulate the house from heat and turning clear on dark days to absorb as much light and heat as possible. An example of this concept is the firm’s biggest green project in New York city at the headquarters of Bank of America, which is known as One Bryant Park.
The sculpted white-glass tower creates massive ice blocks in the evening when electricity is cheapest. As the “ice batteries” melt, they are used to cool the building during times of peak electricity loads during the day.
My Green Home: Earth, Wind, and Fire
I’m gonna put together my green home now, taking elements that are old, current, and dreamlike.
The future is great, but how can we incorporate building elements from the past to build green, sustainable homes?
My green home would be built from the Earth. One of my personal favorites is the straw bale home. I love the simplicity of building a home from mud (Earth) and an agricultural waste product to produce a home that is surprisingly fire resistant. Go figure!
For electricity, I’m going to harness the wind. Since my ideal home would sit a top a mountain over looking the sea, wind power should be plentiful.
Finally, I’m going to incorporate some heat for water and those cool winter nights. What better source for heat than our friendly neighbor high above; the sun? Solar water heating is a great way to not only heat the water you use, but to heat the water in order to keep your home warm through radiant heating floors.
So there you have it, my dream green home.
What can you envision?
“At architecture firm Cook+Fox, they’ve come up with a concept called biomimicry…”
Cook+Fox didn’t come up with biomimicry, though it’s good to see that they’re using it. The term was publicized by Janine Benyus in her book of the same name.
It’s great that you’re encouraging people to imagine green homes, but why site your house on a mountain? This would require the destruction of trees to build a road to your site and, if the mountain were previously uninhabited (and this house were to be a sort of mountaintop retreat), you would be destroying part of an ecosystem instead of integrating yourself with it. Furthermore, where do you get your food? Do you need to commute down the mountain? Will mountainside wind be enough to power your house and an EV?
And if you were to build on this mountain site, strawbales and mud aren’t very likely to be plentiful there — what could you use straight from the mountain that you could build the house out of? Perhaps timber, and you could set the south-facing house into a steep slope to superinsulate the north side. That way your heating systems could be smaller!
Basically what I’m pushing for is even more creativity and imagination. This is a great start — but keep going! Don’t be afraid to think about things many people don’t consider, like camouflaging, diversity of resources, nondestructive (maybe even constructive) integration into the surrounding environment, food/water supply, native construction materials, waste (there shouldn’t be any “waste” products that can’t nourish another biological or industrial process) — all of these and more are critical in designing a truly sustainable home.