Green Building Elements

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

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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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 »

If it works for one San Fran hotel then it must work for another. No, we’re not talking about more upscale mini bar items but Greening a hotel. In this case, the Orchard Garden Hotel’s (which garnered LEED-NC certification) sister property the Orchard Hotel just nabbed LEED-EB certification.

The Orchard represents San Francisco’s only hotel to earn this honor, the Orchard Hotel is the second hotel in California and fourth hotel in the world with this certification. The inspiration from these green hotels comes from its 85-year-old owner, Mrs. S.C. Huang, who has pushed her environmental agenda and created more environmentally safe and sustainable hotels after the untimely cancer-related deaths of three family members. Read the rest of this entry »

Through natural building, there are many ways to prevent global warming. Conventional suburban houses are large, poorly designed, and inefficient, and the manufacturing and construction processes are big contributors to global warming.

Natural building is a sustainable design approach that promotes low impact homes built with natural and recycled materials. I will highlight two different techniques in natural building that promote global warming prevention through increased energy efficiency.

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Now that we are all in danger of losing our homes, and the young are so burdened by their unthinkably immense college loans, perhaps we need to find out how to build with absolutely nothing down.

Who better to show us how to DIY on a budget of zilch, than the homeless builders of Berkeley who created the innovative squatters park made famous by the documentary movie Bums Paradise.

Here’s another way to build with no money down, no mortgage, no credit, and —no cash.
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Instead of usual colors that we associate with wine such as white or dark red, our color paradigm might shift to say Gold. With the CADE Winery just about to open, this solar powered and organically farmed winery, hopes to garner LEED Gold status and if so, would be the first Estate Gold LEED certified winery in the Napa Valley.

When visiting a winery, people’s olfactory system normally goes into overdrive but instead of inhaling the aromas of vanilla, rosemary, oak and sage here we took deep breaths of the air. As in indoor air quality. No stuffy AC here as the building relies on natural ventilation. While others admire the wines, we admired the other green aspects. CADE will utilize 100% solar power and organic farming methods which both sound tasty to us.

From top to bottom, we got our buzz from the other building features like the concrete composed that contains a generous amount (30 percent) of fly ash, steel made up of 98 percent recycled material, FSC glass and wood, as well as blue jeans for insulation and its own concrete mass for cooling.

The Green aspects just don’t stop at the building. It’s too bad that we didn’t bike or drive our electric car (we did carpool) because the winery offers a plug-in base for hybrid electric cars; and bicycle racks. Even better, they offer a shower (hopefully with low flow showerhead) so cyclists can clean up before tasting or event.

One the eating side, they will have a full-time chef on site who will focus on organic, sustainable cuisine grown on site. We haven’t had the chance to sample some of the sustainable cuisine but we’ll report back when we do.

We, like many people, wondered about the name. The winery name CADE derives from a Shakespearean term used for an oak cask or barrel, — comprises more than 60 acres, 23 of which were planted as vineyards in 2003. Of the remaining land, 28 acres will be protected in a land trust to ensure that they will always remain open space.  Now there should be a big “Cheers” to that fact.

With the economy in turmoil, a real estate prices dropping, green communities and green building will become more important. It’s easy to see how broken our current community model is in terms of the urban sprawl; the average American commute continues to grow longer. Between 1969 and 2001, the number of vehicle miles traveled for commuting jumped from 4,180 to 5,720.

The Sierra Club notes that today’s average American driver spends what amounts to 55 eight hour workdays behind the wheel every year. Gas won’t stay at the current level so we need to look at developing more sustainable communities.

San Francisco area architect Michelle Kaufmann & Kelly Melia-Teevan came up with a top 10 (sorry Letterman) EcoPrinciples for Communities.

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