GreenGeezer

Pre-Fab Green Home in Sag Harbor, NY

Yesterday's New York Times featured an affordable (for the Hamptons) pre-fab home as a prototype which the architect, Laszlo Kiss, will live in with his wife.  The design has standard design elements such as a front and back cedar porch, and a translucent pergola, but what makes it special is its green features:

• Geothermal heating system
• Solar PV panels that will provide electricity and sell back excess power to the grid
• Light fixtures what will only accept CFLs
• Five sets of sliding glass doors and L-shaped windows which will allow passive solar heat

One of my favorite things about the house is that it is designed to make flexible use of space and is generous with its inclusion of storage.   Oh yeah, and it can be assembled quickly right from the factory. "The Kiss House design is 'exactly the kind of innovative thinking we need to make green homes that large numbers of people can embrace and afford,' said Neal Lewis, president of the Neighborhood Network of Long Island, a nonprofit alternative energy organization.'"  Treehugger shows the house layout and this image in their coverage of this article.

Ecological Home Magazine Features Green Communities

The fall issue of Ecological Home Ideas has a great feature on Green Communities, including Atlantic Station in Atlanta which clusters affordable homes around businesses in downtown Atlanta close to dining, shopping and parks.  Hope it helps to reduce Atlanta's hideous traffic problems.  Rhapsody Cove near Kankakee promises prairie restoration and wetlands protection, but it's still way the heck out of town forcing people to drive just to buy groceries.  Sanctuary Place in Chicago, designed by Farr Associates, is an affordable housing complex for formerly homeless women that uses passive solar design and insulated concrete forms to keep the building snug even in cold Chicago winters.  "ICFs are hollow blocks, usually made of foam, stacked into walls that are then reinforced with steel rebar and filled with concrete.  The result is a highly durable, energy efficient wall..."  Tribeca Green in NYC also used concrete walls to help win LEED Silver status.

Grun Development High-Performance House, Chicago

 

Yesterday morning we met with Paul Ahlrich, who owns Grun Development and he took us through one of his recently-completed single family homes on W. Walton in Ukrainian Village.   The homes are fine examples of high-performance architecture, are handsome and elegant, and fit in with the character of the neighborhood.  These homes have been tested and shown to use 35% of the energy of a conventional structure.  Both Cappy Kidd of Informed Energy Decisions and  George Sullivan of Eco-Smart Builders have conducted energy efficiency tests on the buildings.   

The first thing one notices upon entering the home is the open layout.  Generous window sizes allow bountiful light.  Paul uses Jeld-Wen Windows. 

High-performance homes feel especially strong and safe when you are inside them.   Noise from the street doesn’t penetrate; if you want to hear the sound of the rain on the roof you’ll have to go back to your ordinary house.

Paul rattled off the components of the house like a proud teenager listing the components of his hot-rod (okay, I’m giving away my age here).  And he should be proud, because these homes will win the energy-efficiency race.  At 4,200 square feet,they are large homes, but at least they aren't built out in the middle of farmland, like other "green" homes we have complained about.

The exterior walls are made of split block masonry, 1” super-tough R styrene walls with foil on each side and metal-taped seams, and then “rocked”.  That’s sheet rock, for you tinhorns.   Paul spoke highly of Dave at KTB Foam Insulation and this is not the first ringing endorsement I’ve heard of KTB: too bad they don’t have a website that I could link you to.

Paul insulates his trim joists with a half pound of soy insulation and uses IC rated insulated cans for his recessed lights, so they don't leak energy out through the holes.  Two inches of under-slab styrene completes the envelope.

Contractors, take  note: Sherwin Williams now offers a contractor grade of low/no VOC paints.  Paul uses highest quality rated drywall, with an anti-fungicide and anti-mold fixative.   

The kitchen cabinets are made by Homecrest in Goshen, Indiana (love those local providers!) and are FSC certified while the kitchen floors are Bona from Sweden and feature a water based finish with no off-gassing.

Paul’s next focus: Urban Privacy.   Green building calls for tightly clustering buildings where the urban footprint already exists; but that doesn’t mean that people don’t want their privacy.  Hence the roof deck he features in his homes and the bonus above-garage deck, which one can view through the master bedroom on the second floor.   Watch this developer, because he really "gets it" and he's going to go far.

"Green" McMansion vs. Brownfield Development

Friday's New Homes section in the Chicago Tribune showed how the term "green" has been completely co-opted; builder Robert Lord is creating a six bedroom, six bath, 11,000 square foot "green" home with multiple garage spaces, which will sell for $3.9 million.    Just let that sink in for a moment.   Even the Real Estate reporter was a little skeptical, asking:  "But isn't the essence of going green making less of a footprint on the Earth?"    As he ticked off the list of "green features"  in this St. Charles, IL home, the  builder pointed out that the buyer would save "as much as $7,000 annually" using his geothermal heating system.  Well, yes, it's easy to 'save' money on energy when you are spending a king's ransom on it in the first place....After nearly choking on my breakfast at the sheer obscenity of building a house like this in the middle of valuable farmland, I was heartened by another story on the same page.

Developer Gerald Snowden is reclaiming a former junkyard in downtown Traverse City, MI and turning it into a mixed-use building with shops, offices, and residences.

"Hans Voss, executive director of the Michigan Land Use Institute, praised the idea of reusing an inner-city location instead of gobbling up another cherry orchard on the outskirts of town.  'Putting up a green building where everyone drives 20 miles back and forth is not nearly as sustainable as putting it downtown where we can walk and not burn fuel to do our daily activities,' Voss said."

The  builder is developing the site to meet LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) standards established by the U.S. Green Building Council.  Way to go, dude.

 

Green Armitage Development in Chicago's Logan Square

The Green Armitage development in Chicago is an example of leadership in green building. 

• "According to computer modeling, the building exceeds the EPA's Residential Energy Star standard by significantly more than 50% (project target is 85%), which gives buyers a significant energy savings over a similar conventionally-built unit.
• Revolutionary ELFI wall system for super-efficient insulation.
• ELFI exterior walls perform at R-40  and roofing panels at R-60 thermo-insulation values. (Chicago code requires only R-13)
• High-efficiency HVAC and tankless water heaters create a high level of comfort with less energy.
• Low or no-VOC paints, finishes and sealants as well as formaldehyde-free custom cabinets help prevent indoor air pollution."

Best of all, I didn't see a mention of the too-trite-for-words "granite countertops" anywhere on the website.  Instead they are using Paperstone, an FSC-certified product with the hardness of stone, made from post-consumer recycled paper.  This product is endorsed by both the Rainforest Alliance and Smartwood.  The builders have recognized their responsibility to deal with water conservation and runoff management:  plumbing systems are highly efficient, and "storm water runs to ground where it percolates down into the porous soil instead of Chicago's overwhelmed storm sewers." The team involved includes George Sullivan's Eco Smart Building .  George has been  a leader in the green building movement for several years and is now finding himself much in demand.

High Performance House Tour

On Saturday we attended an event at 4227 S. St. Lawrence in Chicago's Bronzeville neighborhood.  There we met the partners in Om Development .   Shunning the "green" designation, they have opted instead for "high performance house".  We're fine with that.  This picture is of the back of the house; having been unable to save it in the renovation, they rebuilt it using the same Chicago-style bricks, and added this great fenestration, which contributes wonderfully to the air flow and light inside the house.  We applaud developers who are going green; we can't do it right without them.

Grun Development: Building Green in Chicago

We ran into Paul Ahlrich, head of Grun Development ,  at the coffee shop this morning.  Paul, otherwise known as the "Green Grouch" because of his good-natured complaining about the difficulties of being a green developer, is nevertheless building high-end super-efficient homes in the Logan Square area in Chicago.  We think if we keep working on him we can get him to incorporate more solar features into his buildings.  Check out his current projects at his website.