Backyard accessory dwelling units (ADUs) such as this one by Portland, Oregon, builder Hammer & Hand, are part of the trend towards greater urban density. (PRNewsFoto/Earth Advantage Institute)

Earth Advantage Institute, a nonprofit green building resource that has certified more than 12,000 homes, announced its annual prediction of 10 green building trends to watch in 2012.

The trends, which range from a boom in certified multi-family construction to the advent of consumer friendly home energy technology, were identified by Earth Advantage Institute based on discussions with a broad range of audiences over the latter part of 2011. These sectors included policymakers, builders, developers, architects, real estate brokers, appraisers, lenders, and homeowners.

“While the economy has not been kind to most new home builders, we have seen a surging interest in home energy management and energy improvement among homeowners,” said Sean Penrith, executive director, Earth Advantage Institute. “Those builders and remodelers who have adopted a transparent green message have been quite successful.”

1. Urban density. Filling in the spaces is the name of the game as homeowners and builders opt to create more living space through the construction of accessory dwelling units (ADUs), laneway homes (bordering the back lane behind the main house), and build on infill lots. All this because the younger crowd and the empty nesters are opting to settle in the city where they can be closer to cultural activity, mass transit, more sustainable lifestyles, and other like-minded people.
2. Green multifamily homes. As a corollary to the urban density trend, Earth Advantage Institute has seen a large spike in Northwest multifamily building certifications this past year. The increased interest by building owners and operators in energy efficiency savings coupled with 2011′s 17% growth in multifamily homes (McGraw-Hill) means that we can expect to see a rise in certifications in this sector, especially in progressive regions.
3. Energy upgrades start to drive home remodels. Builders and remodelers who are plugged into changing consumer preferences (smaller homes, reduced energy bills) have been able to capitalize on energy upgrade work. They have moved into the energy audit and residential retrofit market by either expanding their service offerings or, in the case of large West Coast remodeler Neil Kelly, creating entirely new service groups. In the Northwest, demand has increased, leading to significant new energy improvement business for these firms. Remodelers see such work as a driver to help bring in more remodel leads.
4. Deployment and testing of new materials. Although architects and builders are eager to try new energy-saving materials and systems, these products require significant testing to ensure that the materials and benefits will last the life of the building and to avoid litigation. As a result, national labs and university research departments are partnering with builders to create test beds and sensor-filled buildings that log the energy performance of new materials and equipment. Portland State University‘s mechanical engineering department recently partnered with a local builder to measure the effects of phase change material used as insulation in a duplex passive house, while Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories is constructing a test bed that will track all performance aspects of new materials and equipment.
5. Consumer friendly home energy tracking devices. The introduction of the Apple-like Nest Learning Thermostat, and Belkin’s Conserve Insight energy use monitor that tracks energy use by appliance, are two of many sensor-based energy and water monitoring products for the home that are easy to use and help save money. Large electronics players like Fujitsu and Intel are also developing products, among others.
6. Energy education for commercial tenants. The growing adoption of commercial building energy disclosure (New York, Washington, D.C., San Francisco, Seattle, Austin) has building owners/operators and utilities seeking effective ways to educate tenants on saving energy. Technology can only go so far in conserving energy without tenant participation.
7. Transparency in home marketing. The increasing use of smart devices by consumers to instantly access information at a home site means that buyers are much more informed and can see through any greenwashing claims. Those builders, remodelers, and real estate professionals who can clearly educate their clients about the benefits and features of energy efficient, green homes will be those who earn the buyers’ confidence.
8. More accurate appraisals. The old-school appraisal criteria based on a drive-by look at a home – view, approximate square footage – no longer holds. The ability for sellers and buyers to ask their banks for a green-certified appraiser (Certified Residential Green Appraiser) means that the lending community will buy into the idea of the additional value and return on investment offered by new certified homes and remodels.
9. Broader adoption of residential energy ratings for homes. Energy labeling systems are appearing in many states, offering a miles-per-gallon style estimate of a home’s energy consumption for homebuyers and homeowners. The Energy Performance Score and the Department of Energy’s own Home Energy Score have been rolled out in different climate zones across the U.S. to encourage homeowners to compare energy use and undertake energy upgrade work.
10. Smart grid-compatible high-performance homes. According to Smart Grid News, household appliances (heating and cooling systems, refrigerators, electronics, hair dryers) account for 60 to 90 percent of the residential electricity consumption in the U.S., depending on whose reports you read. Increasing numbers of those appliances are becoming “grid-aware” and are gaining the ability to monitor and report their own usage and to increase or decrease their electricity usage by remote command.

via 10 Green Building Predictions for 2012 from Earth Advantage Institute — PORTLAND, Ore., Jan. 17, 2012 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ –.

Get your panels on, increase the value of your home.

Homes with solar panels sold at a premium to comparable homes without solar systems over a nine-year time period in California, according to a new study by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

The average premium for a home with solar panels, also called a photovoltaic energy system, was approximately $17,000 for a relatively new, average-sized system capable of producing 3,100 watts.

The premium translates to an average of $5.50 per watt of solar power with the range of results stretching from $3.90 per watt up to $6.40 per watt.

California is approaching close to 100,000 individual solar systems installed. About 90 percent of them are residential.

The study examined data from more than 72,000 homes that sold in California from 2000 through mid-2009. Approximately 2,000 of the homes had solar panels at the time of sale.

via Solar panels increase a home’s value, study finds | MNN – Mother Nature Network.

In Hong Kong, because of the space, apartments are small and expensive. Gary Chang, an architect, decided to design a 344 sq. ft. apartment to be able to change into 24 different designs, all by just sliding panels and walls. He calls this the “Domestic Transformer.”

There’s a funny TED Talk video called “Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics” about how to make a good – and a bad – TED Talk. One way to go bad is to talk about architecture. We may be safe in generalizing from TED to the general culture: architecture makes most people grow faint and causes their eyes to roll.

Which is weird, because in and around architecture is where we engage with other people the most. Buildings great and small are pretty much exclusively where we conduct the four F’s — the two familiar ones, fight or flight, plus the two even more familiar ones that everybody forgets to put on the F-list: freeze (or space out) and fuck. Architecture is where we live all the fundamentals of, well, life. From coffee to water cooler to toilet to bed, we really, really need architecture to help house us.

Architectural history and agendas ought to be taught in grade school. We ought to be taught to find beauty in a joist, or a good coat of insulation, for the simple reason that thinking about buildings and their interactions with people, other buildings and the rest of the world — in other words, thinking about the ecology of construction — is a good thing, like reading and writing and music and math. And if we knew more about how things went together, the costs involved (both economic and environmental), we might make smarter choices about the places we build to live and work in.

It’s possible architecture and construction were taught in ancient times, as part of the normal school that goes into growing an adult(ish) human. Birds learn it, bees learn it – humans can learn architecture, too. Indeed, the root of our word “poetry” is an ancient Greek one meaning the sometimes all-too-familiar action “to make” and, by association, the agent practicing the action, the “maker.” But then, in the olden days, pigs knew how to make brick houses and wolves knew how to blow them down.

So much we’ve lost. Now our concern is getting the kids to soccer in the minivan which, when you stop and examine the interior, is a lot like a house in some ways.

In any case, we’ve gained a nice nugget of building wisdom and folly in Great Expectations & Kochuu, two fine and fascinating films by Jesper Wachtmeister.

Great Expectations, especially, is a fantastic introduction to the weird edges of architecture – or, as the film’s subtitle has it, it’s a “journey through the history of visionary architecture.”

It begins with the architecture of Rudolph Steiner, the Austrian founder of Anthroposophy, the Waldorf Schools and biodynamic farming. But Steiner was also an architect of incredible vision and imagination. In Dornach, Switzerland, there still stands a collection of homes built in the style of his Goetheanum, a building that pioneered the use of cast concrete in order to achieve an organic profile full of flowing lines and unexpected curves.

In sharp contrast to Steiner, the mystical scientist was the Swiss architect and urban planner, Le Corbusier. Le Corbusier was a strict functionalist who dedicated himself to providing better living conditions for people dwelling in crowded cities. He’s been criticized for creating “soulless monoliths.” Indeed, his work inspired the city planners responsible for those urban train wrecks of the 1940s and later, suburban tract housing and low-income inner city “projects.” With its philosophy of one-size-fits-all regardless of site and environment, the suburban tract home led the way to a general and widespread decline in the quality of American home building and tremendous waste of energy: most of the energy used by Americans goes to heat and cool their shoddy, leaky homes.

There’s great use of archival footage in Great Expectations, as with a shot of a huge troop ship heading toward the camera and every square inch of the ship is covered with G.I.s returning from Europe after World War II. Therein lies the origins of the cheap, suburban, single-family home: millions of soldiers needed places to live.

The great sprawl began in Levittown, Pennsylvania, where, thanks to a production-line method of construction, a new home was finished every 16 minutes. The homes looked all the same, and when the men went to work, the self-contained town was emptied of cars and populated only by women – all about the same age – and their children. When the men came home from work, one interviewee tells us, they sometimes didn’t remember precisely where their particular home was and so ended up sitting at the kitchen table of another man’s home, waiting to be served dinner until he looked up and, like in the Talking Heads song, said “You are not my beautiful wife.”

Going deeper into functionalism, we visit the capital of Brazil, Brasília. Brasília was planned and developed in 1956. Lúcio Costa was the principal urban planner and Oscar Niemeyer the principal architect. One resident of the purpose-built city says that living there is like living in a “giant office.” Like Washington, D.C., and Canberra, the capital of Australia, there is something desolate and inhuman about the wide, pedestrian-unfriendly streets and the sheer faces of the concrete office buildings.

The film then flips a one-eighty, switching from the functional to the whimsical. Consider Pete Cook’s zeppelin-borne cities descending on a rural village in order to provide residents with a brief urban experience. Cook says them some of his projects may look hi-tech, but the reality is that his budgets have never allowed such extravagance. Instead, he uses creativity and “crap tech.”

Moshe Safdie designed a village that was built on the water’s edge in Montreal for the 1967 World’s Fair. He had just discovered Legos, and his high-density apartment complex looks like it. This charming and humane complex is cleverly designed so that every apartment has a garden. Although Safdie’s intent is clearly along the lines of Le Corbusier’s, his designs are nothing like the monoliths that so influence urban planners in the mid-century.

Like Safdie, who dodged symmetry and the overuse of right angles, Antti Lovag designs round-surfaced homes, asking, Where in nature do we see straight lines? So, too, with Peter Vetsch, whose beautiful sprayed-concrete homes are partially covered with earth, thus drastically reducing heating and cooling costs.

Vetsch says innovation is inspired by disaster. If he’s right, the next few decades should be truly inspiring.

Two of my favorite moments in the film are visits to Florida and New Mexico. In the jungles of Florida, we meet Jacques Fresco and his partner in design, Roxanne Meadows. Fresco wants to move us toward a sustainable, resource-based economy. His utopian vision is truly off the hook but nonetheless charming. If, he says, we could increase productivity enough, we’d be rid of crime and greed because goods would be so plentiful that money would become meaningless. By Fresco’s calculations, fewer than 7,000 workers are needed to run a global utopia. But for this to work, we have to do it “nature’s way, not Fresco’s way.”

Then there’s a visionary with his feet on the ground: Paolo Soleri, the architect behind the community north of Phoenix, Arizona, called Acrosanti. Soleri coined the term “arcology,” meaning architecture guided by ecological principals. Surely influenced by the Barcelona Modernistas such as Antoni Gaudi, Soleri’s buildings are graceful curves that work with site and sun to become part of the landscape. Unlike the Venus Project, which is mostly models on a drawing table, Acrosanti is a living village famous for its intensely creative crafts people, a work in progress that welcomes tourists and kindred spirits.

This DVD has another beautiful film as well, Kochuu, which explores what might be called Japanese-Scandinavian fusion in architecture. Focused especially on teahouses, temples and churches, this wonderfully photographed film is perhaps best described with a line spoken by one of the architects interviewed: “what the eye does not see is richer than what it does.” Which is perhaps a contradictory way to describe an essentially visual medium but, as another architect in the film says, Westerners “lack Zen, our religion is too nervous.” We are advised, therefore, to contemplate the approaches to buildings, as well as the set and setting, the purposes and the moods of their environmental sites.

Buildings are, after all, arcologies, even if we don’t design them with their surrounding environment in mind. Nature bats last: count on that, and a building and its surroundings are a “kochuu”: they are worlds “in-the-jar.”

These films are highly recommended for anyone beginning to contemplate the four walls around them (and, too, for anyone who is asking, Why four?) or for anyone looking to communicate the urgent need for critical thinking about architecture.

Originally published on Curled Up with a Good DVD, © 2010 Brian Charles Clark

Solar tiles from SolTech

One of clean technology’s greatest challenges is the common perception that it is an eyesore – from wind turbine-hating NIMBY‘s to solar-quashing building codes, there’s a multitude of superficial fronts mounting against good green design. One smart solution that’s sure to curtail complaints from noisy neighbors is this set of gorgeous glass solar-thermal roof tiles designed by SolTech. The sturdy, modular shingles utilize a simple system to store energy from the sun to heat your home, and they’re quite beautiful to boot.

via SolTech’s Gorgeous Glass Tiles Heat Your Home With Solar Energy | Kohler.

Green building has been a status symbol among the wealthy. But a transformation is taking place up and down the quiet corridors of the 70-unit affordable housing project that has risen on a grubby stretch of Atlantic Avenue near the Compton border.

The $31-million Casa Dominguez project, built by the Los Angeles-based affordable housing developer Abode Communities, is aiming to be the first multifamily affordable housing project in Los Angeles County to win the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design platinum certification, the U.S. Green Building Council's highest LEED rating.

The building was constructed with a prefabricated framing system that reduced waste. An on-site healthcare clinic and a child-care center lessen residents' need to drive. The playground surface is made from recycled tires, and drought-tolerant landscaping is irrigated with gray water from the washing machines.

via Living clean and simple: Affordable housing goes green – Brand X.

Sustainable Fellwood, a new mixed-use, mixed income development in Savannah, Georgia, won a National Homebuilders Assn. 2010 Energy Value Housing Award for energy efficiency. (Photo courtesy Sustainable Fellwood)

Energy-efficiency measures in the southern United States could save consumers $41 billion on their energy bills, open 380,000 new jobs, and save 8.6 billion gallons of water over the next 10 years, finds research from Duke University and the Georgia Institute of Technology released today.

On average, each dollar invested in energy efficiency over the next 20 years will reap $2.25 in benefits, concludes the study, which also shows that the construction of dozens of new power plants could be avoided.

New appliance standards, incentives for retrofitting and weatherization, upgrades to utility plants and process improvements were among the policies researchers considered.

“We looked at how these policies might interact, not just single programs,” said researcher Etan Gumerman at Duke’s Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions.

“The interplay between policies compounds the savings. And it’s all cost-effective,” he said.

The average residential electricity bill would decline by $26 per month in 2020 and $50 per month in 2030, the study projects.

In total, the study concludes that investing $200 billion in energy efficiency programs over the next 20 years could return $448 billion in savings.

If the measures studied were implemented, it would reduce the need for new power plants, the study concludes. Almost 25 gigawatts of older power plants could be retired and the construction of new power plants generating up to 50 gigawatts of power could be avoided.

Thirty-six percent of Americans live in the study region. With its low electricity rates, which encourage consumption, the South consumes an super-sized portion of American energy, 44 percent, and supplies 48 percent of the nation’s power.

Yet energy-efficient products have a lower market penetration in this region than elsewhere in the country, and these states spend less per capita on efficiency programs than the national average.

To achieve their results, the researchers modeled how implementation of nine policies across the residential, commercial and industrial sectors might play out over 20 years in the District of Columbia and 16 southern states.

They generated a business as usual scenario, without any policies, and compared it with scenarios that included specific sets of energy-efficiency investments, to capture the cost savings.

The region’s economy is anticipated to grow by $1.23 billion in 2020 and $2.12 billion in 2030. Yet the study found that the reduction in power plant capacity would save southern regions of the North American Electrical Reliability Corporation 8.6 billion gallons of fresh water in 2020 and 20.1 billion gallons in 2030.

“An aggressive commitment to energy efficiency could be an economic windfall for the South,” said researcher Dr. Marilyn Brown of the Georgia Institute of Technology. “Such a shift would lower energy bills for cash-strapped consumers and businesses and create more new jobs for Southern workers.”

The utility Georgia Power says it is already promoting energy efficiency to help customers save money and to reduce the need for power plants. In total, the company plans to invest almost $500 million over the next 10 years on demand-side programs such as free in-home energy audits that show residential customers how energy efficient their home is and ways to save energy.

The company is providing some funding to help low-income customers make home improvements for increased energy efficiency and has a recycling program for older refrigerators and freezers.

Funded with support from the Energy Foundation, the Kresge Foundation and the Turner Foundation, the study, “Energy Efficiency in the South” is available on the Southeast Energy Efficiency Alliance website: www.seealliance.org/programs/research.php.

State profiles are also available through the Alliance, a nonprofit organization that promotes energy efficiency in the Southeast.

via The South Could Save Billions With Energy Efficiency.

The program is one of 54 around the U.S. that is set to receive Recovery Act funds for smart grid workforce training projects. The three-year project will develop a set of courses in clean energy and smart grid engineering.

“WSU’s power engineering program has been a leader in developing a safer, more reliable electric power grid,’’ said Candis Claiborn, dean of the WSU College of Engineering and Architecture. “Now, this grant will help WSU to better prepare our students to address the grand challenge of safe, reliable and clean energy in the 21st century workplace.’’

The power industry is facing the challenge of an aging workforce, with one-third of its workforce eligible for retirement in the next 10 years. Furthermore, the number of programs educating power engineers has decreased. Many of the existing programs do not have the resources to incorporate rapid advances in technologies, both in clean energy and in the smart electric power grid, into their curriculum, said Anjan Bose, Regents professor in the school of electrical engineering and computer science.

While the WSU/UW project will strengthen existing degree programs in power engineering, it also allows for the development of an undergraduate certificate, graduate level certificates and a professional master’s degree in the area of clean energy and smart grid engineering. Those who are working in the power industry currently will be able to take the courses online, so that technicians, for instance, will be able to receive an undergraduate certificate or those who have an engineering degree will be able to receive graduate training that will allow them to become involved in research and development.

“The project team proposed here is perfectly positioned to train and educate the engineering workforce needed to operate, maintain, deploy, design and innovate in the areas of clean energy and smart grid,’’ Bose said. “We recognize that it is not enough to train the engineering workforce needed to deploy new clean energy sources and operate the smart grid, but we also need to cultivate the engineering talent that will invent and design the next generation green technologies and information technologies for the power sector.’’

WSU and the University of Washington are the largest engineering colleges in the northwest. Both have a long history of cooperation with the power industry in the region. WSU received a gift in 2008 from Puget Sound Energy (PSE) for the development of a renewable energy course. Both universities are also part of a Department of Energy regional smart grid demonstration project throughout the northwest that is designed to expand upon existing electric infrastructure and test new smart grid technology.

Often, because we’re conditioned to think that bigger is better or because we’re told by a real estate agent that a house has to be large to keep its value, we build the largest home possible. By stretching budgets to maximize square footage, we’re then often forced to skimp on quality and performance. If, instead, we downsize the house, we can improve its quality (durability, detailing, energy efficiency, green features), and we might even be able to reduce the overall costs.

If you think you need a 3,000 square-foot house, consider whether 2,500 would suffice, or even less. There are some really great homes being built at 1,400 to 1,500 square feet — homes where every square foot is optimally used and there aren’t rooms, like formal dining rooms, that sit empty most of the time.

When it comes to energy, building a green, energy-efficient house usually does increase costs. But we can significantly reduce that extra cost — occasionally even eliminate it — by practicing “integrated energy design.” If we spend more money on the building envelope (more insulation, tighter construction detailing, and better windows) so that we dramatically reduce the heating and cooling loads, we can often save money on the heating and cooling equipment. With a really tight, energy-efficient house, for example, we might be able to eliminate the $10,000 to $15,000 distributed heating system in favor of one or two simple, through-the-wall-vented, high-efficiency gas space heaters, or even a few strips of electric resistance heat.

Well, and of course, building tight pays for itself over a few years. If you reduce your energy bill by 80 or 90 percent, you’re going pay for the extra upfront costs in short order. Add to that possible tax incentives or other local, state and federal government rebates, and it becomes absolutely stupid to not build “green.”

via BuildingGreen.com LIVE: Does Green Building Have to Cost More? by Alex Wilson on 03/04/2010.

Garbage Warrior

KJ and I just watched Gargabe Warrior and we recommend it to all interested in green building.

Oliver Hodge’s award-winning documentary chronicles the life and work of visionary Michael Reynolds, the radical architect-engineer who has been designing and building self-sustaining, eco-friendly homes out of disposable materials for 30 years. Battling opposition from bureaucrats, politicians and big business, Reynolds strives to show the entire world that “Earthship Biotecture” is the key to preserving mankind’s future on earth.

And here’s what Narz has to say on Amazon:

Garbage Warrior will not give you the latest cutting edge information about sustainable design (though it certainly is a great primer), nor is it a full biography of Mr. Reynolds (though it covers the period of his life relevant to the film superbly) or of the ins, outs & tangents of the Earthship movement. What it did do, for me, is whet my appetite for more & reminded me why I am interested in this type of thing to begin with. This movie is pure inspiration, what you do with it & where you take it is up to you!