June 25th, 2009
Sears Tower to Get Green Retrofit
Stumble it!
Courtesy of Environmental News Network and Reuters
The tallest building in the Western Hemisphere will undergo a $350 million “green” retrofit that its owners said on Wednesday will make the 110-story office tower a beacon for environmentally sound space.
Plans call for the 1,450-foot Sears Tower to reduce its electricity consumption by 80 percent and water usage by 40 percent. It will be renamed the Willis tower later this summer in a deal with new tenant global insurance broker Willis Group Holdings.
To achieve the savings, owner American Landmark Properties and its partners plan to:
- Replace the 1973 tower’s 16,000 tinted single-pane windows and create a “thermal break” between Chicago’s frigid winters and hot summers and the interior.
- Install gas boilers equipped with fuel cells, which generate electricity, heat and cooling.
- Revamp the tower’s 104 elevators and 15 escalators to cut their electricity usage by 40 percent.
- Conserve 24 million gallons of water with new restroom fixtures and “condensation capture.”
- “Harvest daylight” by installing systems that automatically dim lighting based on available natural light.
- Install solar panels to heat water.
- Erect wind turbines on building setbacks, if possible.
Popularity: 11% [?]
June 22nd, 2009
Kansas City Prefab Home: A Green Gem in the Heartland
As a native of Kansas City you can imagine how thrilled I was to learn about the new green prefab achievement in my home town. I learned about it from one of my favorite publications, Natural Home. They did a wonderful feature on the house, which you can read in its entirety here.
The 1,200 square feet house is a two-bedroom, one-bath home (remember in the eco-sphere small is good!) and is perched on stilts atop a hill. It has a wonderful view of downtown. It was designed by architecture students from the University of Kansas (KU), who are part of a program that focuses on sustainable and affordable design. It’s an excellent example of affordable, green design.
The home was built in six modular units in nearby Lawrence, Kansas. Then they trucked 40 miles to Kansas City and assembled. The house was designed and built over five months by the KU students. The owners paid around $150,000 for the house.
Natural Home also produced a nice video on the house – check it out.
Popularity: 11% [?]
June 9th, 2009
A Steel Prefab Treads Lightly on a Desert Floor
Written by Susan Kraemer, courtesy of Green Building Elements.com
Steel is just about the most recyclable building material on earth. You could be well reading this in an office building built with steel originally smelted from iron in Julius Caesar’s day.
So it makes good green sense to build eco prefab houses with steel…
Steel does not spread fire. Building with steel allows for a lighter load, so it does not require a huge concrete foundation. Making concrete is one of the most carbon intensive building industries there are, producing the heaviest carbon footprint.
And steel framing makes for construction simplicity: these homes are able to be erected by hand and do not require welding, special torque tools or specialized inspections. This allows an entire house to be framed and enclosed in less than five days.
Click here to read the rest of this article and see more photos.
Click here to learn more about other types of green prefab houses.
Popularity: 13% [?]
April 20th, 2009
Planes, Trains and Subway Cars!
It’s the ultimate way to recycle: reuse structures and adapt them for living and work space. Planes, cars, railcars, boats, subway cars, and trucks all have good bones that can easily be built upon and modified into something usable. We’ve been seeing a lot of these adaptive reuse projects popping up and wanted to highlight a few of our favorites.
Sleeper Car Studio Apartment
If you’re like us, as a kid you might have had an obsession with the Boxcar Children too. Their creativity and innovation to live on their own inside a rail car was inspiring and exciting. Like the Boxcar Children, Marc Riera designed this studio space inside of a 1949 sleeper car in Portland. The modern interior is complete with DSL, new stainless steel windows, grid connection, and incinerator powered toilet.
The 85 foot long car is surprisingly roomy with plenty of room for a kitchen, living space and bedroom. The sleeper car is located on a private lot in Southeast Portland and is actually on the market for $225,000. The rail car could easily be moved anywhere you want by simply hooking it up to a train engine and pulling it there on an existing rail line.
2-Bedroom Plane Hotel Suite
Airplanes also make for a good structural skeleton, since they deal with high speeds and repetitive landings and takeoffs. This 1965 Boeing 727 once carried globetrotters around Africa and South America, and now it serves as a swanky two-bedroom suite at the Costa Verde Resort in Costa Rica. Taken from it’s graveyard at the San Jose airport, the plane was transported piece by piece on 5 big trucks to bring it this resort on the edge of the Manuel Antonio National Park near Quepos, Costa Rica.
Set up on top of a 50 foot pedestal, guests of this hotel suite have inspiring views of the Pacific Ocean from their recycled room. The interior is paneled from tip to tail with locally harvested teak wood, and not as eco-friendly teak furnishings imported from Indonesia. The two-bedroom, two-bathroom suite also has a kitchenette, dining area and beautiful veranda, which is perfect for watching the sunset.
Subway Car Artist Studios
There are also a lot of empty subway cars being retired from active duty. An innovative art and design organization in London, Village Underground, decided to recycled ex London Underground subway cars into studio space for artists. The studio cars now sit on top of a Victorian warehouse, which is a flexible multi-use space for gallery shows, exhibits, parties and meeting space.
Artists, writers, film makers, fashion designers, musicians and more are welcome to work in the revamped subway cars at a very affordable low-cost rent. Only the original seating was removed, in fact all the levers and buttons are still in tact at the end of each car. Tables, chairs, couches, bean bags and power outlets were brought in to make them functioning for the artists.
Van Studio Apartment
The last example of creative and adaptive reuse of retired transportation equipment is an old transport van that has converted into a studio apartment. Dubbed the “Peggy M” by the owners of the studio, it gets 15 miles per gallon, but does run on biodiesel. The Ford Econoline-350 was almost completely outfitted with free things off craigslist - even an upright piano, table and chairs, work shop space, and two mattresses that hang overhead on a pulley system. The artists drove around and sold paintings out of the back.
Popularity: 16% [?]
April 10th, 2009
The Most Beautiful Green Home Building Construction Project Ever?
Written by Brian Liloia, courtesy of GreenBuildingElements.com
My jaw dropped when I first watched this video tour of a beautiful owner-built green building construction project in Oregon. This particular green building is made entirely out of cob, a mixture of clay, sand, and straw.
Meka Bunch of Wolf Creek, Oregon built this stunning cob house over a four year period. Complete with hand-sculpted furniture, shelves and nooks built directly into the walls, arched windows, and a killer custom staircase, his cob building is a divine artistic achievement.
Check out the video and photos of Meka’s cob cottage for yourself:
This couch is made of cob and features wood storage tucked underneath, right next to the stove.
The kitchen features many shelves and nooks built directly into the cob walls, and also includes a small compost chute. (Look for the tilted latch.)
The wood stove is surrounded by cob for thermal mass, and includes a warm nook with shelf to culture yogurt.
Gorgeous custom-made cob staircase.
The north porch of Meka’s cob cottage.
I must say that Meka’s cob house design is one of my favorite projects that I’ve seen. This is truly a beautiful hand-built green building.
For more information, visit the Artisan Builders Collective.
(Image credit: Artisan Builders Collective)
Popularity: 25% [?]
