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Passive is the new green. Passive Houses—well insulated, virtually airtight buildings—can decrease home heating consumption by an astounding 90 percent, making them not only an attractive choice for prospective homeowners, but also the right choice for a sustainable future. The Greenest Home showcases eighteen of the world's most attractive Passive Houses by forward-thinking architects such as Bernheimer Architecture, Olson Kundig Architects, and Onion Flats, among many others. Each case study consists of a detailed project description, plans, and photographs. An appendix lists helpful technical information. Including a mix of new construction and retrofit projects built in a variety of site conditions, The Greenest Home is an inspiring sourcebook for architects and prospective homeowners, as well as a useful tool for students, and builders alike.
Provides the first comparison of green building performance, using cost and energy use data that has been verified by independent third parties.
How to reimagine existing buildings to create a more sustainable future The construction and operation of buildings is responsible for 41 percent of all primary energy use and 48 percent of all carbon emissions, and the impact of the demolition and removal of an older building can greatly diminish the advantages of adding green technologies to new construction. In Building Reuse, Kathryn Rogers Merlino makes an impassioned case that truly sustainable design requires reusing and reimagining existing buildings. Additionally, Merlino calls for a more expansive view of preservation that goes beyond keeping only the most distinctive structures based on their historical and cultural significance to embrace the creative reuse of even unremarkable buildings for their environmental value. Building Reuse includes a compelling range of case studies—from a private home to an eighteen-story office building—all located in the Pacific Northwest, a region with a long history of sustainable design and urban growth policies that have made reuse projects feasible. Reusing existing buildings can be challenging to accomplish, but changing the way we think about environmentally conscious architecture has the potential to significantly reduce energy consumption, carbon emissions, and waste.
Find clarity on everyday green-living dilemmas to maximize your sustainability Are paper bags always more environmentally friendly than plastic? How much better for the planet are electric cars? What saves more water - using the dishwasher or washing up by hand? We all want to do the right thing for the planet, but with so many factors at play, it can be difficult to work out which is the greenest way. With answers to more than 140 everyday green-living questions, Is It Really Green? cuts through the confusion and gives you the facts. Get to the heart of each eco-conundrum, interrogate your instincts, and make informed decisions to reduce your ecological footprint.
This highly anticipated follow-up to the massively successful Ecoholic focuses on the home as the mainstay of sustainable living. Our resident Ecoholic comes to the rescue again, offering reminders and tips on how to keep your castle (however humble) clean, energy-efficient and healthy. We spend so much time at home — why not make it a sustainable haven instead of a polluting, off-gassing cesspool? Ecoholic Home addresses the green side of the economic crisis, and includes a resource guide for finding designers and contractors, and for renovating and shopping green. • Cleaning: product comparisons, disposal reminders, laundry tips • Cooking: avoiding Teflon, omitting Bisphenol A, reducing packaging • Powering: green energy (solar and geothermal), bundling (Bullfrog) • Maintaining: dehumidifiers, lighting options, ice removers • Renovating: buying energy-efficient appliances, choosing environmentally friendly building materials, insulating your home • Moving: LEED-certified homes, “greening” your first apartment
Revised and Expanded Edition - Includes CD-ROM with Custom Design Software For the past ten years The Passive Solar House has offered proven techniques for building homes that heat and cool themselves, using readily available materials and methods familiar to all building contractors and many do-it-yourself homeowners. True to this innovative, straightforward approach, the new edition of this best-selling guide includes CSOL passive solar design software, making it easier than ever to heat your home with the power of the sun. Since The Passive Solar House was first published, passive solar construction expert James Kachadorian has perfected user-friendly, Windows-compatible software to supplement the design process explained in the book by allowing homeowners/designers to enter the specifications of their design and see how changing a variable will affect its energy efficiency. This is the building book for a world of climbing energy costs. Applicable to diverse regions, climates, budgets, and styles of architecture, Kachadorian's techniques translate the essentials of timeless solar design into practical wisdom for today's solar builders. Profiles of successful passive solar design, construction, and retrofit projects from readers of the first edition provide inspiration to first-time homebuilders and renovators alike.
Your building has the potential to change the world. Existing buildings consume approximately 40 percent of the energy and emit nearly half of the carbon dioxide in the US each year. In recognition of the significant contribution of buildings to climate change, the idea of building green has become increasingly popular. But is it enough? If an energy-efficient building is new construction, it may take 10 to 80 years to overcome the climate change impacts of the building process. New buildings are sexy, but few realize the value in existing buildings and how easy it is to get to “zero energy” or low-energy consumption through deep energy retrofits. Existing buildings can and should be retrofit to reduce environmental impacts that contribute to climate change, while improving human health and productivity for building occupants. In The Power of Existing Buildings, academic sustainability expert Robert Sroufe, and construction and building experts Craig Stevenson and Beth Eckenrode, explain how to realize the potential of existing buildings and make them perform like new. This step-by-step guide will help readers to: understand where to start a project; develop financial models and realize costs savings; assemble an expert team; and align goals with numerous sustainability programs. The Power of Existing Buildings will challenge you to rethink spaces where people work and play, while determining how existing buildings can save the world. The insights and practical experience of Sroufe, Stevenson, and Eckenrode, along with the project case study examples, provide new insights on investing in existing buildings for building owners, engineers, occupants, architects, and real estate and construction professionals. The Power of Existing Buildings helps decision-makers move beyond incremental changes to holistic, results-oriented solutions.
Look out for David Owen's next book, Where the Water Goes. A challenging, controversial, and highly readable look at our lives, our world, and our future. Most Americans think of crowded cities as ecological nightmares, as wastelands of concrete and garbage and diesel fumes and traffic jams. Yet residents of compact urban centers, Owen shows, individually consume less oil, electricity, and water than other Americans. They live in smaller spaces, discard less trash, and, most important of all, spend far less time in automobiles. Residents of Manhattan—the most densely populated place in North America—rank first in public-transit use and last in percapita greenhouse-gas production, and they consume gasoline at a rate that the country as a whole hasn’t matched since the mid-1920s, when the most widely owned car in the United States was the Ford Model T. They are also among the only people in the United States for whom walking is still an important means of daily transportation. These achievements are not accidents. Spreading people thinly across the countryside may make them feel green, but it doesn’t reduce the damage they do to the environment. In fact, it increases the damage, while also making the problems they cause harder to see and to address. Owen contends that the environmental problem we face, at the current stage of our assault on the world’s nonrenewable resources, is not how to make teeming cities more like the pristine countryside. The problem is how to make other settled places more like Manhattan, whose residents presently come closer than any other Americans to meeting environmental goals that all of us, eventually, will have to come to terms with.
Eco Design Outside features dozens of photographs of cutting-edge designs in real-life context with informative captions, house and garden plans, and electrical, water and lighting schematics. Combining ideas with achievability, the book is more than inspiring; it is eminently useful. Some of the topics are: Lighting -- Room orientation to the sun, solar tubes to redirect sunlight indoors, home-security lighting automation interfaced with communication needs -- Water Conservation -- Rainwater collection and recirculation systems, solar showers, efficient watering devices -- Landscaping -- Living walls, green roofs, natural pools ("biopools"), xeriscaping garden plans and plants -- Ecological Building Materials -- Furniture, benches, decking and fencing, natural oil treatments, paving and stonework.