A community of tiny houses! This is a really neat idea if they can keep architectural unity and keep it well maintaned through the years. It will be really interested to see how they make this project happen as it is out of the realm of what city planners and zoning officials have ever seen.
Join us at the James River Green Building Council luncheon on Tuesday, July 9th 12:00 — 1:00pm to learn about ways to think more about the total environmental impact of products!
Have you ever wondered why skyscrapers sway back and forth in the wind yet are made of steel and concrete? You aren’t alone. Several people are taking the idea very seriously, most notably Micheal Green, who wrote an open source guide for us about how it can be done!
Here’s the idea, glue a bunch of small pieces of wood together from quickly growing trees and make yourself a massive chunk of wood. Make these chunks in to massive panels and design them so that they can be easily joined together in the field and super strong by alternating the direction of the grain. It sounds a lot like plywood on steroids. This may seem against the tree-hugger in you, as well as going against the first R rule: Reduce. Actually this is a green technology, here’s why:
First of all, think about the building itself. Mass in a building helps to regulate the temperature of a building, much like a battery (or more technically accurate, a capacitor) it slowly gains heat from its surroundings and slowly releases it. Plenty of people have written about this already: Greenpassivesolar.com is just one. When you have massive walls you need less insulation to have the same effect. Bingo, less fiberglass or foams off-gassing into the building. Panels also take less time to put together in the field, so you spend less time with no roof and waste less material on the jobsite.
Second, think about the environment: Trees are some of the best carbon sequester-ers (I know that’s not a word) on the planet. By building something out of wood, one effectively stores that carbon. This principal is a green one only if the trees used are fast growing (rapidly renewable) and responsibly harvested. The building must also be built to be useful for a very long time.
Inhabitat, Ford, and the Chicago Architecture Foundation are hosing a live webcast with leading automotive designers and architects to talk about how to make functional and comfortable rooms out of tiny spaces. It will be interesting to see how the seemingly very different worlds of cars and buildings can provide much insight to each other. The Webcast Starts Thursday, June 6th at 12:30PM CDT (1:30 PM EST)
Join us at the James River Green Building Council luncheon on Tuesday, June 11th 12:00 — 1:00pm to learn about how to make our built environments more resilient!
Just over a month ago the first of the new site plans for the Greater Stonehenge Ecovillage were released and since then the interest in the project has multiplied. A lot of great people interested in the project, the Virginia Department of Transportation and Albemarle County have given us a lot to think about and a lot of stellar ideas for how to make it better. We have tried our best to show what we’ve learned in this new site plan. If you have any ideas about how to make it even better, please share!
Located just outside the city limits of Charlottesville lies a six acre parcel of land next to the aging Stonehenge Neighborhood; its gentle south-facing slope and existing structures make it the perfect place for something quite a bit different from a typical subdivision: The Greater Stonehenge Ecovillage. Please check out the newest plan, and tell us what you think!
See the details here on The Housing Lab or The Greater Stonehenge Website
Resilience: The ability to recover readily from illness, depression, adversity, or the like; buoyancy. That’s what the dictionary says. More importantly though, as climate begins to change and the natural world bombards us with more and more challenges, how will we design our living systems to take these new challenges in stride? Resiliency and Sustainability are two terms we have begun to hear very often especially in building circles, but resiliency often gets replaced with redundancy. Resilience.org has a lot to say about the topic, so I’ll let them be your guide:
Located just outside the city limits of Charlottesville lies a six acre parcel of land next to the aging Stonehenge Neighborhood; its gentle south-facing slope and existing structures make it the perfect place for something quite a bit different from a typical subdivision: The Greater Stonehenge Ecovillage. Please check out the newest plan, and tell us what you think!
See the details here on The Housing Lab or The Greater Stonehenge Website
There are varying degrees of low impact living. Every person has a different idea of what comfort is and what she can live without. What if there was a community where you could try out varying levels of low impact living in order to decide which was right for you? What if this community also had a shared building with a workshop, gathering space, laundry, and guestrooms for family or residents on the journey to intentional, low impact living? Check out this concept for a physical Housing Lab
The Housing Lab 