Green Building Elements

Move — to Louisiana:

According to SolarPowerRocks! Louisiana has a state tax credit of 50% for solar roof installations, the most generous state subsidy for solar — Combined with the 30% Federal tax credit for solar that we all get now; (you knew about that, right?) so in Louisiana you can put a solar roof up, paying only 20% of the cost: (30% + 50% = 80% off).

The way this credit is designed it will benefit modest homeowners the most. If you need a $25,000 system, you get the full 50%. If you need a larger system you get less than 50%, because it maxes out at $12,500.

So, if you have ten plasma tvs and a pool pump and run the A/C day and night, you won’t get as much help with running all that…but

Read more at Cleantechnica…

Given the climate change coming to most regions of the US, this new roof idea is a great passive cooling solution worth looking at even if you don’t live in the desert regions… now.

Because, by century’s end; you might.

“Summer temperatures in Florida could rise by 10.5F, with the heat effect multiplied by decreased rainfall under the higher emissions scenario. There would be increased hurricane intensity and rising sea levels leads to loss of wetlands and coastal areas.”

“When you’re out in the desert, shade is gold. It’s the most valuable asset you have, so to make more shade was [the] strategy,” says Lloyd Russell of this house he designed to withstand both the scorching heat and the cold of the desert for a client in Southern California.

Russell’s very low carbon way to cool a home is another example of how creatively some architects are thinking out of the box and in the process creating an entirely new design vernacular - architecture for zero energy use in a carbon-constrained, hotter, wilder new world.

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If every building had a white roof, we would be able to cool the surrounding areas. That is the reasoning behind a California law about to go into effect next month requiring light reflective roofs on all new buildings. It is already the law for new flat roofs here.

Here, architect Richard Meier and his partner Michael Palladino have apparently created a design to go one further. It’s entirely white; roofs, walls, and interiors.

So this luxury design of a cool  and airy Southern California beach house is glamorous and climate friendly.

Well, no. The McMansion-sized size of the thing at  4,280-sq.-ft is not so planet friendly; because it takes more energy to heat and cool a larger space. But this house would be well suited for a ground heat exchange to passively heat and cool itself with 55 degree air cooled from 10  feet under the ground.

As architects in California get closer to 2020, they will need to think more about passive cooling and heating and zero energy houses, as that will be the law by 2020. All new building must be zero energy by then.

Incorporate solar roofing on the white roof, and this could be a zero energy house.

The blue of a solar roof would visually extend right out to the ocean. (And conceal that horrible mess of  mechanical contraptions on that roof.) White elastomeric cool roof paint under the solar panels would help cool the modules making them more efficient on hot days.

But are architects thinking about these things?

With 2020 almost upon us:  “The beams at the roof, located above the horizontal framing, express the structural rhythm and layering of components,” explains the architect. “This cadence is repeated with the joinery of the painted aluminum exterior wall panels and modular windows. The mass of the exterior plaster walls are juxtaposed to the transparent glazed facades, creating a mosaic of layered materials.”

Blah, blah, blah.

Via Digs Digs
Images: Scott Frances/Esto

At the other end of the design spectrum from the energysucking gizmology that now pervades our lives; simple tech is quietly bringing back simplicity and sustainability as a worthwhile goal for industrial design. Here’s a good example; a low tech kitchen appliance that would go well beyond a simple energy star rating for efficiency.

This practical and simple energy efficient dish washer/dish storage unit by design students Schwartz and Steiner at the Bauaus Universität Weimar is a great example of the simple tech that the world needs now.

It is a reduction of a machine to its essentials, orientated to user-needs. This dish washer builds on the movements that we already make…

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U of Kansas grad students have just completed their chic Buffalo House at Springfield in Kansas City, designed with a very elegant approach to sustainability.

We are seeing more climate conscious design in architecture: In this case; the rain screen.

A skin over the house is designed to manage and harvest occasional heavy precipitation, to provide protection from premature decay from moisture intrusion.

I like the way the rain-screen is carried up over the roof and mounted flush with the photovoltaic solar panels on the roof for a sleek look while also protecting the building.

Like a skin over the building; this Cumuru wood cladding is designed to shed rain water separately from the structure of the building. Rain screens deter rainwater intrusion into walls - by shedding most of the rain and by incorporating storage to reuse the rainwater - which you can see below the doors here.

There’s 8 other sustainable features, as well.

• » See also: Discounted Home Energy Audits in San Francisco Bay Area with 1BOG.org
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Rather than attacking the symptoms of moisture intrusion, rain screens tackle the source-the forces that drive water into the building shell. By neutralizing these forces, rain screens can withstand extreme environments. They appear to be effective in any climate and handle any weather condition short of a disaster.

All rain screens include the following elements:

• Vented or porous exterior cladding
• Air cavity (a few inches of depth is sufficient)
• Drainage layer on support wall
• Rigid, water-resistant, airtight, support wall

Integral gutters and downspouts are hidden behind the rain-screen. These then carry rainwater for storage in underground tanks.

The home also features passive solar heating through large expanses of south facing glass. These windows are protected from the summer sun with fixed sun louvers made of steel and Cumaru wood.

So as not to trap too much heat, low South-facing operable windows work in tandem with skylight vents in the north-facing roof-top pull hot air out of the top of the building for a thermal chimney effect.

For maximizing filtered daylighting, a three-level steel frame with milky glass inside encloses the staircase for spatial separation but spreading daylight between the rooms of the house.

The sustainable features are:

1. Enough rooftop photovoltaic solar panels for a net zero electricity supply (90-100%) for an average home.
2. One on-site 1.2 KW Windspire wind turbine that could produce about 20% of the energy an average home (550 kWh a month) assuming wind speed of at least 12 miles-per-hour year round.
3. Geothermal heat exchange between the house and the below-ground 55 degree temperatures year round, providing a constant starting point for both heating and cooling.
4. Epoxy coated gyp-crete floors for interior thermal mass to prolong passive heating and cooling
5. Passive solar design: low South-facing windows with sunlight access to thermal mass in the floor.
6. Heat-chimney effect created with roof ventilation in North skylights for expelling hot air
7. The framing wood was recycled from an ammunition plant.
8. Recycled materials in interior finishes such as the composite recycled paper countertops.

and of course

9. The rainwater reclamation using a wooden slat skin to keep water off the building and stored in underground tanks. Cumaru is one of the hardest woods on the planet and can be harvested sustainably.

But it comes from South America, so there is quite a carbon footprint getting it to Kansas City.

Images: Robert McLaughlin
Via Jetson Green

Steel is just about the most recyclable building material on earth. You could be well reading this in an office building built with steel originally smelted from iron in Julius Caesars day.

So it makes good green sense to build eco prefab houses with steel…

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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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VisionDivision has a very innovative entry in the Design for the Children competition to design a sustainable and culturally responsible pediatric clinic in the hostile environment of the desert of East Africa. Here is what inspired their design:

Says VisionDivision; “When we saw this competition, we felt urged to create a proposal:

Insufficient water is one of the most severe problems in rural Africa. For many families it is extremely time consuming to collect and can easily start conflicts between…
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Whenever I see my friend James D’Addio, the architectural photographer, I ask him about which new green buildings he’s been shooting. Not surprisingly, in a city with dedicated green building blogs and the NYC Department of Design & Construction’s award-winning programs, NYC may be the greenest city in the United States.  Here two projects in NYC that exemplify where green building is going.

It seems like if a building is going up, its just as likely as not to be green. McGraw-Hill research tells us that 53% of building professionals expect to be dedicated to green on over 60% of their projects in the next five years. It seems like there is ample opportunity for innovation in the building industries despite a downturn in overall building. I guess NYC is as good a place as any to lead the charge.

Norman Foster’s Hearst Tower, which sits atop a 1928 landmark building in Manhattan is engineered to use 25% less energy than required by code and boasts the world’s largest “air conditioner.” The two-story, stepped waterfall is also a huge radiant cooling system that along with other measures saves 1.7 million gallons of water every year. Other interesting facts about the building include:

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Even in a Greencentric city like Berkeley, locals and Bay Area visitors would be Green with envy when they see the just opened David Brower Center. It feels healthy just to walk through the Green down-to-the-bones building which combines advanced technology along with simple recycled materials.

When entering for their housewarming party we had a difficult time not noticing the soaring concrete walls which made us think more dot com than gallery. The fact that in creating a building with an oh- so-feathery carbon footprint (when compared to most structures) Principal Architect, Daniel Solomon included up to 70 percent slag in those walls. Read the rest of this entry »