Isaac Newton wrote about his work, acknowledging those before him: “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” The idea of the Passivhaus, or Passive House building system, is often seen as an original mix of super-insulation, tight envelope and controlled ventilation, when in fact lot of people were looking at many of the key principles back in the seventies.
So what has changed in the last eight years? Disappointingly, not very much.
The fundamental aim of the composting toilet designers is to deal with our inhibitions about poop. We have grown up with a flush-and-forget system where we don’t see the stuff, we don’t have to deal with it, we send the problem somewhere else. Most of the attention is going to making the composting toilet experience as close to this as possible, sometimes by……
Find how to decipher what’s stamped on your pallet to see if it’s safe or not for your project.
Courtyard houses made a lot of sense. The residents got outdoor space that was secure and usable at all times of day; nobody had to lock a window or door that opened into the central area. It provided lots of natural ventilation. The roofs were often used for rainwater collection. Jennifer has noted that they have kept people appropriately warm and cool without high technology- for 4,500 years.
Now, according to the Wall Street Journal,……………..
So welcome to the Active House, sponsored by VELUX, the big skylight manufacturer. It’s a new building standard that promotes energy saving, healthy indoor conditions with lots of fresh air and you guessed it, lots of natural light and ventilation from lots of windows and skylights…..
When I first showed the Sleepbox in 2009, I wondered if the concept would ever get to reality. In 2011, The Arch Group showed a working model in Sheremetyevo International Airport, Moscow. It has proven to be such a success that they have built a hotel out of them in…………
It has lined the interiors of everything from greasy spoon cafes to luxury cruise liners, from hospital wards to train cabins – bringing a fusion of wipe-clean practicality and sleek modern style. And now Formica is celebrating its 100th birthday. The brave new seamless surface of the future is officially an antique.
While it may now be synonymous with the retro glamour of 1950s compact kitchens and roadside diners, the origins of the miracle material are much more mundane. Invented in Cincinnati in 1913 by engineers Daniel O’Conor and Herbert Faber, Formica laminate was designed to be an electrical insulator, to serve as a replacement for the silicate mineral mica – hence “for mica”. (The fact that formica was a pre-existing Latin word for a type of ant seems to have hampered the brand little.)
Formica originally consisted of layers of fabric bound together with resin; later, it was made with thick pieces of paper laminated with melamine. This tougher substance could resist heat and abrasion, while the paper opened up a wealth of possibilities for printing colours and patterns, which proved key……
Green building means different things to different people, but improved insulation and reducing energy use is certainly up at the top of everyone’s list. Some of the most effective insulations are made from plastic foam, either in rigid boards or sprayed foams.
But there are concerns; Architect Ken Levenson recently wrote a controversial article, Why Foam Fails. Reason #1: Dangerous Toxic Ingredients, which was the start of a series that is very critical of foam insulation. I wrote about it inDoes Foam Insulation Belong in Green Buildings? 13 Reasons It Probably Doesn’t and at the Green Building Advisor, the discussion almost turned into a flame war between those who think that plastic foam does a great job, and those who agree with ……….
In courting tenants over the last six years, 7 World Trade Center has trumpeted its gold LEED rating, an emblem of sound environmental citizenship.
But when it comes to energy efficiency, the young 52-story tower is far from a top performer, according to data released under a city law that tracks energy use in New York buildings. It had a score of 74 — just below the minimum of 75 set for high-efficiency buildings by the federal Environmental Protection Agency’s Energy Star program. On the other hand, two venerated show horses from the 1930s……..
We have been recommending water filters for years, but they are not without their issues. (Remember Beth Terry’s Take Back the Filter campaign?). They are often ugly, plastic things. I love my ZeroWater, but it is ridiculous to fill, and is seriously out of place in an architect’s kitchen.
The Soma, on the other hand, is lovely to look at. CEO Mike Del Ponte tells us that it is designed according to Dieter Ram’s principles (which inspired Jony Ives and Apple). Rams has written:
My aim is to omit everything superfluous so that the essential is shown to the best possible advantage.
From everyday items like clocks to large outdoor structures, we’ve gotten an idea of the extensive possibilities of parametrically-generated design. Earlier this year, students from China’s Tongji University created an interesting prototype for a prefab house that combines both passive and active energy strategies for the European Solar Decathalon, held in Madrid, Spain.
The industry rallies around an attack on Nick Kristof of the New York Times, but he’s right.
The real importance of the shipping container isn’t the fact that it is a box; it is that it is part of a larger system of handling and transport. One can move them anywhere with standardized equipment. Professor Han Slawik builds his Homeboxes out of wood, within the internationally recognized standards of an ISO shipping container. The Professor writes:
Worldwide are almost steel containers in use. But wear, repair and maintenance of steel materials are more costly (in term of purchasing costs, welding, etc.) than for wooden materials. Wooden constructions can be repaired cheaper and easier. Variation and adjustment to changing necessaries and conditions are easier and cheaper with wooden containers. Live in wooden homes is healthier and more comfortable as in a home made of
People all over the United States were out of work; if she bought American-made products for the house, she could do her part. But how far could she take it? Was it possible to build a house entirely of products made in America?
Some things were easy. Lantz traveled to a quarry in Lueders, Tex., to find chocolate-brown limestone. The marble chips that made up her terrazzo came from Marble Falls. She found Heatlok Soy 200 foam insulation in Arlington and windows manufactured in Stafford. Other items required her to look further afield: Lantz bought shower drains from Iowa, a skylight made in South Carolina, hose valves made in Alabama, fences from California and baseboards from Georgia. She developed the skills of a private investigator.
Hi, we’re Novotera. We’re embarking on this Indiegogo crowdsource fundraiser to distribute 1,000 of our new PlanetStove hybrid-biochar cooking stoves to remote villages in China, Thailand, and Indonesia during fall 2012.
Over 2 billion people cook indoors with inefficient wood fires causing deforestation, climate change and, according to the World Health Organization, more than 5000 premature-deaths a day due to smoke inhalation. After two years of working with Chinese villages to develop our stoves, we have finalized ……. Click Here to read the rest
A decade ago, the Rocky Mountain Institute released Cool Citizens: Everyday Solutions to Climate Change: Household Solutions. It was full of great tips for what you can do to reduce your energy use. However I found the most important feature was this page, which ranked measures you can take by the bang for the buck. It was pretty shocking, demonstrating that we have been pretty much sold a bill of goods, of expensive green gizmos, that cost a fortune in proportion to the money and carbon they save; a programmable thermostat saves more than changing all your windows. Insulating your ducts saves more than an entire solar hot water system.
ive percent of America’s electricity is used for residential air conditioning, and it is considered now to be a necessity, not a luxury. It’s usually needed most when the sun is shining, so as I have noted since 2006, Solar Powered Air Conditioning Just Makes Sense. For most of that time I have been looking at absorption units that run like a propane fridge, but I recently mused that perhaps it is time for a change in the way we think about this:
I am wondering if the solar powered air conditioner might not be in the end a small, high efficiency home with a small, high efficiency air conditioner powered by a big honking bank of photovoltaics, and be done with it.
Being a highly cost-effective design-build firm, we spend a significant amount of time and effort on project budgets. We publish the construction costs of most of our projects, discuss pricing in many of our posts, and have even gone to the extent of designing a construction cost cheat sheet. To us, the design and the finances of a project are interconnected. We’ve never cared for the vague and uninformed approach toward construction costs that are all too common in the architecture industry. In fact, it’s common for us to dive into a realistic construction budget discussion as early on as the initial interview for a new project.
There’s nothing quite as invigorating as showering outdoors, under an open sky as birds flit overhead. While there are many ways to build one from the ground up, it does take time. Oborain is one Massachusetts-based company that’s offering pre-fabricated models that are hand-built in their shop, uses sustainably-harvested materials and can be assembled and plumbed on any level surface in an impressive thirty minutes.
Concrete is heavy, and 5% of the world’s CO2 is created during the manufacture of the cement that goes into it. Then there is the aggregate that is dug out and the trucks that have to carry it. Not only that, but most of the concrete that is in a slab isn’t even needed; it is just a spacer between the bottom, where the reinforcing steel is in tension, and the top, where the concrete is
