Anglonautes > Vocapedia > 2000s - 2010s - 2020s > Englisg words - vocabulary - dictionary - encyclopedia > Arts > Architecture, Cities > Sustainable architecture > Green / eco-friendly homes, energy-efficient homes

Eleven years ago, Sally Liu, a water-resources engineer, and her husband Bay Chang, then a senior research scientist for Google, bought a 0.84-acre lot for $2.675 million in suburban Hillsborough, Calif. Avid environmentalists in their mid-40s with two young sons, they set out to build something different from the neighborhood’s overblown mansions and closer to their hearts: a green energy home.

“I really did not want a large house next to a lawn,” said Ms. Liu, who is now 56 and advises for the Nature Conservancy.

The couple hired Aidlin Darling Design, a San Francisco firm, to build what the architects would come to call the “House of Earth and Sky.” Joshua Aidlin and Peter Larsen, the principals on the project, had ample experience with LEED, an evolving national standard for green buildings. And the couple wanted, and received, no less than the highest of the four LEED certifications: platinum.

“Sally and Bay had been to a friend’s rammed-earth home, and had fallen in love with the material,” Mr. Larsen recalled, referring to the compacted soil used in ancient constructions and many contemporary, sustainable ones. Ms. Liu’s desire for a drought-resistant garden was another prominent theme.

Within a week, the owners had a working model. Its ecological strategies for a durable, all-electric home were incorporated in a sculptural composition of rammed earth and glass walls, clerestory windows and blackened wood cladding, all customized for the partially sloped site.

“It was a diagram for sustainability,” Mr. Aidlin said. “The forms all had a function.” But before their clients settled on the version they built in 2015, the architects added Ron Lutsko, a landscape architect, and Gary Hutton, an interior designer, to the creative team.

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Intended for intergenerational living — in itself a green idea — the 7,477-square-foot enclave (including basement) is not monolithic. It has three public and private zones linked by insulated glass-walled walkways shaded by steel trellises or roof overhangs. The sections are laid out in a U shape around a central limestone courtyard dotted with garden beds and block-like stone benches where the family and friends can gather.

“We wanted an abundant connection to the outdoors from every space,” Mr. Aidlin said. So the entire light-filled indoor-outdoor composition sits at the center of a garden.

If you are a guest, you can climb from the car court at street level, through an entry garden of native grasses and up a flight of stairs to the formal front door. Turning right from the foyer takes you into Mr. Chang’s sanctum, where he keeps his prized board game collection. Turning left leads to a 65-foot long, open-plan sequence of living spaces on the north edge of the courtyard. This 1,000-square-foot area is lit with LED pendants and finished with nontoxic or low-VOC materials that have the downside, Ms. Liu noted, of degrading with powerful sunlight. (Though automated blinds have reduced the impact, the stained floors have faded to natural walnut.)

Beyond the public space is a private area containing bedrooms and gardens for the couple and their sons, who are now adults. A glass-walled bridge that borders a reflecting pond links the living/bedroom wing to a poolside pavilion on the south side of the central courtyard. The pavilion contains a family room and guest spaces for the couple’s parents.

The modern design inconspicuously incorporates water- and energy-conservation features. Retractable steel-and-glass doors open onto the courtyard from different sides of the house, offering a sleek visual contrast to the exterior walls and allowing for cross ventilation.

Those beautifully striated 18-inch-thick walls, made of compacted soil gathered from the site, were engineered by David Easton, an inventor in Napa, Calif., who concocted the blend of sand, earth and Portland cement. They are low-maintenance and rot-resistant, and their thermal mass shields the interiors from outdoor temperature fluctuations. This feature minimizes the use of hydronic heating and cooling systems embedded in the wood-covered concrete floors inside.

Asymmetrical “butterfly” roofs rest lightly above the living area and combined pool and guesthouse. Their wide wings angle upward so that out-of-sight arrays of photovoltaic solar panels absorb maximum sunlight that is converted to electricity and sent to the grid. The house produces and stores enough energy to power all needs, though a Tesla battery, to be used during storm-related blackouts, is still to come.

The V-shaped roofs double as rain collectors and drain into a 5,000-gallon underground cistern that preserves runoff for nonpotable purposes like irrigation. A 500-gallon cistern under the pool deck likewise collects used household water for the gardens, which Mr. Lutsko populated with native live oaks and with species he jokingly calls “honorary natives,” like Mediterranean Jerusalem sage and olive trees.

Because the site slopes up from the car court, the architects were able to excavate a subterranean floor for a garage, family entrance, wine cellar, utility rooms and the base of a rectangular concrete tower three stories tall.

The tower is just wide enough to contain a steel spiral staircase that rises past the living rooms on the main level, up to a third-story crow’s nest. The slender tower is not an architectural conceit, but a passive stack effect cooling chimney with a motorized window at the top to ventilate the interiors when they get hot and simultaneously pull cooler air up from the basement.

“It could have been automated but Sally and Bay did not mind being active users,” Mr. Larsen said.

Several years later, the combination of passive- and engineered-solar power seems to work as planned. At first, not fully trusting the energy systems they had invested in, Ms. Liu monitored everything closely. “I am an engineer who loves spreadsheets,” she said. “The goal was to be net-zero energy, and I was relieved the solar numbers met the goal.” That is partly because with many days in the 80s, the pool rarely requires heating.

Ms. Liu can now divert more of her attention to her other environmental causes, which she tends from a home office. The room’s raised floor gives her views of the gardens even from her desk.

“It all looks natural. I can see a ‘meadow’ and the hills on one side. In the other direction, I look at a ‘forest’ of trees,” she said. “And this wonderful house is simply a conservation cipher for others to decode.”

A version of this article appears in print

on May 7, 2023, Section F, Page 4

of the New York edition with the headline:

As Green as It Gets.

A House That Is as Green as It Gets
A down-to-earth couple in California asked
for a structure that was guaranteed to be net-zero energy.
NYT,
May 4, 2023
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/04/
realestate/net-zero-house-california.html

The New Trophy Home,

Small and Ecological

June 22, 2008

The New York Times

By FELICITY BARRINGER

For the high-profile crowd that turned out to celebrate a new home in Venice, Calif., the attraction wasn’t just the company and the architectural detail. The house boasted the builders’ equivalent of a three-star Michelin rating: a LEED platinum certificate.

The actors John Cusack and Pierce Brosnan, with his wife, Keely Shaye Smith, a journalist, came last fall to see a house that the builders promised would “emit no harmful gases into the atmosphere,” “produce its own energy” and incorporate recycled materials, from concrete to countertops.

Behind the scenes were Tom Schey, a homebuilder in Santa Monica, and his business partner, Kelly Meyer, an environmentalist whose husband, Ron, is the president of Universal Studios. Ms. Meyer said their goal was to show that something energy-conscious “doesn’t have to look as if you got it off the bottom shelf of a health-food store.”

“It doesn’t have to smell like hemp,” she said.

That was probably a good thing. The four-bedroom house was for sale, with a $2.8 million asking price.

Its rating was built into that price. LEED — an acronym for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, is the hot designer label, and platinum is the badge of honor — the top classification given by the U.S. Green Building Council. “There’s kind of a green pride, like driving a Prius,” said Brenden McEneaney, a green building adviser to the city of Santa Monica, adding, “It’s spreading all over the place.”

Devised eight years ago for the commercial arena, the ratings now cover many things, including schools and retail interiors. But homes are the new frontier.

While other ratings are widely recognized, like the federal Energy Star for appliances, the LEED brand stands apart because of its four-level rankings — certified, silver, gold and platinum — and third-party verification. So far this year, 10,250 new home projects have registered for the council’s consideration, compared with 3,100 in 2006, the first year of the pilot home-rating system. Custom-built homes dominate the first batch of certified dwellings. Today, dinner-party bragging rights are likely to include: “Let me tell you about my tankless hot water heater.” Or “what’s the R value of your insulation?”

But if a platinum ranking is a Prada label for some, for others, it is a prickly hair shirt. Try asking buyers used to conspicuous consumption (a 12,000-square-foot house) to embrace conspicuous nonconsumption (say, 2,400 square feet for a small family). Or to earn points by recycling and weighing all their construction debris (be warned: a bathroom scale probably won’t cut it). The imperatives of comfort and eco-friendliness are not always in sync.

For instance, the Brosnans, environmental advocates who admired Ms. Meyer’s house, are now building a home of their own and “really want to do it green,” said David Hertz, their architect. Mr. Brosnan may adopt many environmentally sound building techniques, but he “is not going to live in a 2,400-square-foot home,” the architect said.

Mr. Hertz’s complaint goes beyond size. He says the rating system is rigid and cumbersome, something that has been heard across the country as green building slowly ceases to be a do-gooder’s hobby. The ratings are now woven into building codes in Los Angeles, Boston and Dallas. The federal government and many states and cities use LEED standards or the equivalent for their own buildings. The system is based on points earned for a variety of eco-friendly practices; builders choose among them, balancing the goals of cost control, design and high point totals.

Nevada, North Carolina and Virginia, not to mention Chicago, Cincinnati and Bar Harbor, Me., give tax incentives or other concessions, like expedited permitting or utility hookups, for construction that is up to the nonprofit council’s standards.

And “LEED-accredited professional” is a new occupational status.

Worries about climate change and rising energy costs are part of the equation: roughly 21 percent of heat-trapping carbon dioxide emissions come from homes; nearly 40 percent come from residential and commercial structures combined. As energy prices rise, the long-range economic value and short-range social cachet of green building are converging.

More than 1,500 commercial buildings and 684 homes have been certified but just 48 homes have received the platinum ranking, among them a four-bedroom home in Freeport, Me., as well as homes in Minneapolis; Callaway, Fla.; Dexter, Mich.; and Paterson, N.J. The checklist for certification can be more daunting than a private-school application, which prompts many to abandon the quest. Mr. Schey is not seeking LEED certification on his next home (though the project’s architect, Melinda Gray, is seeking it for hers).

Randy Udall, a builder in Colorado who wrote a piece critical of the process after building two accredited ski resort additions, said, “You’re happy when you’re released from the U.S. Green Building Council’s Abu Ghraib,” though he added, “You typically end up with a delightful building.”

One requirement for getting a home certified is hiring an on-site inspector approved by the council to test the new systems and help fill out the huge amount of paperwork, which is reviewed by the nonprofit council. The organization charges from $400 for a home to $22,500 for the largest buildings to register and certify costs.

Joel McKellar, a researcher with LS3P Associates, an architecture firm in Charleston, S.C., said that to earn credit for adequate natural light, “you have to calculate the area of the room, the area of the windows, how much visible transmittance of light there is.”

Michael Lehrer, who designed the platinum-rated Water + Life Museum complex in Hemet, outside Los Angeles, said, “They have mundane things in there that are pretty nonsensical and others things that are pretty profound.” He added, “At a time when everybody and their sister and brother are saying ‘We are green,’ it’s very important that these things be vetted in a credible way.”

To cope with the growing appetite for accreditation, the council this spring asked other agencies to help make LEED certifications. A new code, which addresses some of the criticisms, is at www.usgbc.org/DisplayPage.aspx?CMSPageID=1849.

Is LEED a useful selling tool? Offered with great fanfare last fall on eBay for $2.8 million, the Meyer/Schey home in Venice, which can be seen on their Web site, www.Project7ten.com got no bids at the time; it recently found a potential buyer, for $2.5 million.

But Maria Chao, an architect in Amherst, Mass., said her new home’s certification rating had meant instant recognition. “This is a small town,” Ms. Chao said. “When I mention I live in the house on Snell St., people say, ‘Oh, the green home.’ ”

Frances Anderton, a KCRW radio host and Los Angeles editor of Dwell magazine, longs for the day when LEED recognition is irrelevant. “Architects should be offering a green building service,” Ms. Anderton said, “without needing a badge of pride.”

The New Trophy Home, Small and Ecological,
NYT,
22.6.2008,
https://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/22/
us/22leed.html

The green house effect:

Eco-houses get closer

The home of the future
will be kind to the environment.

This week ministers laid the foundations

Published: 25 May 2007

The Independent

By Michael McCarthy,

Environment Editor

The Eco-House, the one which doesn't damage the planet with its profligate energy use, has just got closer.

Not as imminent as it needs to be. But after three big sets of government proposals in the space of four days, the road to the energy-saving home which is sustainable as well as comfortable is certainly clearer than it was.

White Papers on planning and energy (plus a new strategy for waste disposal) have this week all set out ways of making Britain's housing stock much more environmentally friendly.

Not before time. Although most of the attention in the fight against climate change is focused on greenhouse gas emissions from power stations, motor vehicles and aircraft, emissions from buildings are hugely significant - as the Government's chief scientific adviser, Sir David King, is constantly keen to point out.

Just look at the figures. Britain's emissions of carbon dioxide, the principal gas causing global warming, were 152 million tonnes (expressed as millions of tonnes of carbon, mtC) in 2004, and of this, emissions from the domestic building stock were 41.7mtC - no less than 27 per cent of the total.

Most of that energy goes on heating water and heating space. (For the record, 53 per cent goes on space heating, 20 per cent on water heating, 16 per cent to power appliances such as computers and televisions, 6 per cent on lighting and 5 per cent on cooking.)

But much of that can be cut right back - as of course it will have to be if the Government is to meet its climate change target of slashing UK carbon emissions by 60 per cent by 2050.

It can be done in two ways - by energy-saving measures in the home, and also by decentralising the electricity supply system so that power is generated locally, on a small scale, rather than at a huge power station far away, which wastes much of the energy it produces in transmission. In some places this has produced astonishing results: Woking in Surrey reduced its carbon emissions by 77.4 per cent between 1992 and 2004.

Local generation may take place in a miniature power station serving a small community, but taken to its logical conclusion, you can do it in your own home, with solar panels on your roof or even a mini-wind turbine à la David Cameron. This is known as "microgeneration".

On Monday, the Planning White Paper published by the Department of Communities and Local Government set out to make microgeneration easier. That didn't make the headlines - they were concerned with the easier ride that was going to be given in future to large infrastructure projects such as airports, motorways and superstores.

But published with the main document was a 52-page consultation paper entitled "Permitted Development Rights for Householder Microgeneration". In essence, it spelt out a future where no clipboard-carrying council official is going to glance at the turbine on your roof, shake his head, and mutter, "That'll have to come down."

At present, there are substantial bureaucratic obstacles to domestic solar energy, wind power and other technologies such as ground source heat pumps, biomass burning and combined heat and power - they need planning permission. The consultation proposes that (within limits) they should be "permitted developments" for which official sanction does not need to be sought.

The reason is clear. A recent study, the paper reports, "suggested that 30 to 40 per cent of the United Kingdom's electricity demands could be met through the use of these technologies by 2050".

But home-generated wind power and the rest represent only half of the story. Energy-saving measures such as insulation are just as important in reducing carbon, if not more important, than "gadgets on the roof".

In the Energy White Paper, published on Wednesday by the Department of Trade and Industry, where, again, the big story was elsewhere - this time all about nuclear power - the Government proposed measures to give energy-saving a substantial boost. The principal one was to alter the role of the energy companies. In future, their job will be not just to sell units of electricity - it will be to sell energy services, and that means selling energy-saving measures such as cavity wall insulation.

Other proposals included supplying new real-time visual display meters, so you can see how much electricity you are using at any given moment; and talks with the electronics industry on reducing the time spent on standby by the proliferating number of household electrical appliances, the computers, TVs, DVD players and the rest. (Their standby time accounts for about 7 per cent of all the electricity used in UK homes.)

Finally, yesterday the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs published another hefty document, the new Waste Strategy for England. This too helps bring the Eco-House nearer, not just with its extensive proposals for recycling, but with the specific proposition that food waste should in future be collected separately, every week - and turned into fuel or compost. Organic waste such as food adds to climate change - because it produces methane as it rots, which is an even more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.

None of these proposals will bring about the green home overnight. They do, however, point in the right direction.