GreenGeezer

PATH Home in North Omaha, Nebraska

Fine Homebuilding magazine features a multi-page spread on the PATH Home. PATH,  or the Partnership for the Advancement of Technology in Homebuilding, is a voluntary partnership between leaders of the homebuilding, product manufacturing, insurance, and financial industries and representatives of federal agencies.  "The PATH Concept Home features a number of innovations: a flexible floor plan that evolves with the homeowners' family, panelized framing, an insulating-concrete-form foundation, soy-based foam insulation, an on-demand water heater, and a state-of-the-art gray-water system, among many other features." --Fine Homebuilding.  And, it's beautiful.

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.

Eco-Structure Magazine

It's good to see the "green" term being replaced by the more precise and helpful "high performance" term.  (Although don't worry, GreenGeezer is not changing its name.)  I just received our first issue of Eco-structure magazine  (July/August issue) and was pleased to see an article on the test houses being built by the U.S. Dept. of Energy's Building America program.  These houses are part of an effort to shift the building industry toward  high performance, sustainable-design practices, a movement which needs a jump-start.  The article "Zero Energy", by Chris Schwind reports that:

"A 2006 study by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, Golden, Colo., estimates widespread market adoption of zero-energy homes, or ZEHs, could begin as early as 2012.  If research and development of ZEH packages and federal incentives for on-site renewable energy generation continue, projected market diffusion of ZEHs by 2050 would account for 67 percent of single-family housing starts."

The test homes are being built at an affordable $94 per square foot, and use a combination of  Structural Insulated Panels (SIPS) , air-source heat pumps, and rooftop PV arrays.  Supporting statistics can be viewed at  www.toolbase.org