One of the most important things to keep in context within the framework of this class is, how does this standard relate to the other systems, standards, and methodologies we’ve seen?  Observe:

• ENERGY STAR:  This government-sponsored system is used widely by building professionals and manufacturers.  But, it is somewhat unwieldy with lots of checklists and tools and has been rejected in multiple jurisdictions for being too complicated.
• State programs and codes: There are too many of these to mention, and they range from prescriptive to performance, regulations to codes.  Standards vary from place to place and can be quite helpful in certain areas – if you know how to take advantage of them.
• Architecture 2030:  This organization sets ambitious goals but provides very little framework for how to get there.
• LEED:  This large and dense standard has achieved what we might call “market transformation” due to its position as THE green building benchmark.  But, to achieve certification you must wade through mounds of paperwork and fork out lots of money.
• Passive House:  This simple and straightforward standard places a premium on high performance, but is perhaps not as comprehensive as some of the other systems.

In contrast, the Living Building Challenge asks the question, “what if every single act of design and construction made the world a better place?”.  With the LBC, the ideal outcome IS the goal, and there are no choices about whether or not you follow the “imperatives”.  If you are trying to reach Living status, you either “go big or go home”.

This brings me to our field trip last week, the last one of the quarter… we are so fortunate in Portland to live in a community that places such value on sustainable living.  We have not just one but THREE Living Buildings in the works in the city of Portland!   The Oregon Sustainability Center, when it is built, will likely be the greenest high-rise ever built and reassert Portland’s status as a global leader in the green design community.  The Key Delta Living Building in North Portland will be a phenomenal resource to its community once it is fully transformed from the gas station it used to be.  But, as great as those buildings will be, they are not built yet.

The Living Building that IS built, or I should say nearly finished, is the commons, a two-family home in SE Portland that is a labor of love for the brothers building it.  Sticking to the integrity of the Living Building Challenge has been a – dare I say – challenge for the owners, but they have come a long way and will have one of the greenest houses in the land when they are done.  We had a good time on this field trip, and even took a class picture!

In discussing the Passive House standard, we learned that there are probably as many as 25,000 Passive House structures all around the world, the majority of which are in Europe, and only a handful of which are in North America.  One of these buildings is the Smith House in Urbana, Illinois, the first Passive House built in the U.S. in 2003 by Katrin Klingenberg, who literally wrote the book on Passive House.  Another Passive House is the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s Solar Decathlon house from 2009, also known as the Gable Home.  This house came in second in the 2009 Decathlon to Team Germany, who won their second Decathlon in a row.  We took this opportunity to talk about the technology and building science on display at the Solar Decathlon, and how great an event this is for green home designers and enthusiasts alike.  You can see more photos and read about my thoughts from immediately after the last event here.

from the Solar Decathlon 2009

Finally we got to the issue of our field trip this week to the Everhart Passive House in SE Portland.  The Everhart family has put a lot of time and effort into the retrofit of their house into a Passive House, and they are extremely generous for opening their home to our class.  For Assignment #5, we’ll be modeling the Everhart home using the Recurve modeling tool. Students are encouraged to bring a tape measure and their sketchbooks, and to “divide and conquer” spaces in the home to find inputs for all the rooms in the most efficient way possible.  See you at 10:30 on Thursday morning!

Image courtesy of Inhabitat

File this under “better late than never”… I just learned about this house and knew I had to talk about it here because it embodies many of the things that I love in one tidy, very livable package.  Observe:

1. It’s a house, which is great, since I love house design;
2. It’s made of straw bales, which are sustainable, renewable, AND energy efficient with proper installation;
3. It’s pre-fab, which is super cool because pre-fabricated designs cut down on job site waste and allow for easier manufacturing recycling;
4. It’s small, and compact, and cute, which means it’s got a lower carbon footprint (although the cuteness doesn’t contribute to that, it’s just a bonus);
5. AND it meets PassivHaus standards, which is about as close as you can get to a net-zero energy house.

I mean, this is pretty awesome, right?  And it’s a good looking little house.  The only problem I’m seeing is that ModCell is a UK company which makes it nearly impossible to build the cute goodness in your pre-selected plot, if you live in the United States, that is.  Which is not to say that you couldn’t send the cuteness over on a giant cargo ship, it’s just that the adorable-ness becomes slightly less so when you realize how much fuel you had to use getting it States-side (think of how much carbon you burn when you get a on a plane to take a short flight, then multiply that by like, oh, 10,000*).

*(I’m exaggerating, I don’t actually know what kind of carbon footprint a trip on a cargo ship would yield.  I have to believe it’s bigger than having it built down the street, though).

So, here’s to hoping that ModCell partners up with an American manufacturer to begin more “local” production of it’s pre-fab wonder so that some of us can get our hands on this wee, energy-efficient, awesomeness.

Here's another photo of it because it's cool; image courtesy of Inhabitat

The good news is, in the meantime, I’ve been able to upload and catalogue all of my photos from the event and add some commentary as well.  Feel free to check out my Solar Decathlon collection on Flickr, where each house has its own set of photos and my corresponding thoughts written alongside.  Note the overwhelming gray clouds in all of the pictures – made for some pretty gloomy photography :-/

Wow, that sky is ugly

I will now wax poetic on my favorite house in the Solar Decathlon, since I haven’t done it yet.   I want to talk for a moment about Virginia Tech’s Lumenhaus. This house was truly lovely, and I am at a loss to explain their 13th place finish.  I felt that this team used every sustainable system reasonably available to a residential customer to create a truly green, net-zero energy home.  And not only that, they did so without compromising on space – the interior of house was perfectly proportioned in its public versus private areas, with some extra special touches thrown in that really sealed the deal.  Case in point: the partitions in the bedroom that not only held your closet, but they separated to reveal a TV and in doing so, created a partition wall between the bedroom and the living space.

The rainwater collection system/awning over the front door

But I’m not going to stop there.  The exterior screens were cut steel and then bent by hand in a pattern that was meant to direct sunlight into the house but also maintain privacy.  The awning over the front door doubled as a rain scupper, and drained water into catchment basins under the house… which could be recycled in a closed-loop graywater system.  The skylight in the bathroom… the geothermal heating system in addition to the roof PV array… and if all this hotness weren’t enough, to move this house, all you needed to do was put it on a giant set of wheels and hitch it to the back of a tractor trailer, and you’re on your way!

Metal sunscreen and panel system as seen from the inside

I’m not the only one who thought the Lumenhaus was pretty great, however; the Virginia Tech team was approached by NBC during the Decathlon and the team is now in negotiations to move the house to Rockefeller Center so it can be on the Today Show, which may happen in mid-November.  Also, the team of bloggers at Inhabitat did a great write up of the house on their blog, which included some beautiful photos that I will now borrow to show you how nice the house is -  if only it had been sunny while I was visiting!

courtesy of Inhabitat

courtesy of Inhabitat

Everyone loves a section detail! courtesy of Inhabitat

Congrats to VT for such a job well done, and let’s hope they get some of their technology upgraded in time for the Solar Decathlon Europe competition next year – since they are the only team from the U.S. Solar Decathlon to compete overseas too!

courtesy of Inhabitat

Click on the link above to view a Treehugger slide show to see more of Edouard’s projects: below is a building called Flower Tower, with planters stacked on all of the balconies.

Flower Tower

Which is why, in my most recent e-newsletter from Architecture 2030, I was pleased and not surprised to discover that they had spent so much time poring over the 1428-page Waxman-Markey climate bill in the House of Representatives.  I am going to take Ed’s word for it, as I do not have the energy (or enough caffeine) to read a 1428-page bill, when he tells me that the 29 most important pages of the bill are contained in Section 201, which requires updating national building energy codes to meet the following energy reduction targets:

• in 2010, 30% below the baseline energy code (IECC 2006 and ASHRAE 90.1-2004),
• in 2014-2015, 50% below the baseline energy code, and
• every three years after, out to 2029-2030, an additional 5% reduction.

Simply put, this is totally awesome. If designers and architects are going achieve lower energy buildings, we are going to need the building codes to be our guides, because our clients usually won’t pay for it on their own.  This is starting to change, certainly, but frankly there are not a whole lot of people in the building industry that are getting paid for anything right now.  This portion of the bill will not only regulate new construction, but it will encourage people who can’t afford new buildings to reconsider renovation as a viable option.  And both of these things NEED to happen:  new construction should be more energy efficient, while renovation should happen on a broader scale.  The GOOD NEWS is, clients, developers, and builders need to work openly with architects, designers and engineers to make this happen.  Which means, everybody gets back to work!

To read more about the awesomeness of energy efficiency in buildings and the implications of this climate bill, read the complete analysis (with fun graphs and everything) in Architecture 2030′s latest e-newsletter.

Image courtesy of Treehugger

The Beddington Zero Energy Development – BedZED for short – is now seven years old in England and a report has been drafted that describes how much its residents have reduced their carbon footprints.  I won’t get too far into the report, as Treehugger does a great job of that already, but I think it’s interesting that this development goes so far above and beyond other housing to reduce energy but the average resident’s carbon footprint is still an average of 8.9 – 9.9 tonnes.  To be truly sustainable on a global level, that number should come down to 1!  So we really have a long way to go before we are building homes that contribute more effectively to a carbon-free lifestyle.

image courtesy of Inhabitat.com

Click here to read a recent post by Inhabitat about the resurgence in passive design.