Zero Energy Houses Creating a New Design Vernacular:
The deep Butterfly Roof
The traditional gabled roof that we are all familiar with was engineered to slough off snowfall. But in an uncertain post peak oil future of possible energy shortages and water shortages, more and more houses are showing up with roof-shapes engineered to harvest their own rainwater, and support solar power generation.
This creates a butterfly roof, the opposite of the traditional gable. The very post peak oil Kangaroo House in increasingly drought ridden Australia has the same distinctive roof shape, for the same reasons: it acts as a huge funnel for rainwater, which can then be harvested.
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This design for a zero energy house on the coast of the Brazilian rainforest features such an inverted gable roof, designed to funnel and centrally harvest its own water supplies for the entire year. This coast of Brazil provides abundant rainfall from January to July.
The huge roof also is also designed to maximize solar energy production on top and to funnel cooling breezes throughout the open plan holiday house, so as to eliminate the need for airconditioning.
Tropical areas such as Hawaii have utilized the Butterfly roof to harvest precious rainwater since the middle of the last century, but these new ones are angled at the steeper 20 to 30 degree angles that are needed to maximise solar production.
With the steeper angle the tropical downpour is also more efficiently harvested in the roof’s center rain-funnel shape, where it is then filtered, stored and pressurized to the tap. The energy generated from solar panels on the roof, and hydraulic, gas and telecom services run in two vertical cores accessible from the bathrooms and kitchens for maintenance. This simple coastal location is far from a public sewage system, so a sceptic tank with a super efficient anaerobic filter cleans up to 90% of the effluent.
The clients of the Camarin Architects wanted a simple holiday house with three bedrooms that allowed wide possibilities of contact with nature. Both the wooden skin that envelops the gallery and the suspended roof, shelter the house from the Sun while keeping it permeable to the cool South wind, to avoid the need for air-conditioning.
Passive cooling is achieved the old fashioned way with wide verandas, and a gallery open to the elements and sea breezes, to shelter the interior spaces from the tropical sun. The wooden skin that wraps the gallery filters the glare, providing intimacy in the bedrooms, shading the interior while framing the views outward.
This design creates its own cool micro-climate during the dry season. The self-sufficiency of the house is unprecedented in the region.
Via Contemporist
Photography by Nic Olshiati
You show examples of Zero Energy Houses. What you show is complete extravagancy and uncessary use of valuable materials. You leave the impression that low energy is costly and not for ordinary people. This is not what the world and the climate needs. The buildings are just for some few rich. Needed is a building code that sets new standards for the ordianry home with its very insufficient insulation, one-sheet window panes, no heat recovery, no solar panels for the summer supply of hot water etc. Be a little more humble. In Austria and Germany you will find thousands of modest homes that are true low energy houses. They call them passive houses because there is no active heating by burning gas, oil and power to heat-up the house.
Preben Maegaard
http://www.maegaard.net
You are right that this one is a very extravagent example.
I have covered zero energy houses in a variety of price ranges, even how to build your own for $5,000
I agree that this is not what the world and the climate needs. But design styles do tend to filter down from those rich enough for an “complete extravagancy and uncessary use of valuable materials” - because they hire architects who follow eachothers work. Like how fashion filters down from couture.
The rich will always be with us. So it is a good thing when they start to engage architects in thinking about sustainability, rather than wet bars or tencar garages or poodle condos which add nothing sustainable to the admired (and hence, copied)design vernacular.
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