A Live Green, Live Smart^TM Briefing
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Green architecture that utilizes passive and active systems to reduce a building’s carbon footprint has become vogue in the last couple of years.  But while green design has brightened our commercial lives to great public fanfare, it has yet to be utilized as conspicuously in our residential lives. Although several new apartment complexes have started to incorporate green techniques into their design, individual homes and condos, while greening up here and there, have not had sustainable design standardized as has commercial design.

Architects have yet to develop green residential standards similar to those of the commercial sector. When homes go green, it tends to mean that the power will be supplied by solar panels or they will have geothermal heating and cooling. It is common practice in residential building and remodeling to simply add green technology without changing the home’s architectural design. While the addition of alternative systems as substitutes for more polluting conventional technology makes a huge difference, there are many energy-saving techniques possible in the home’s exterior and interior design and structure.

Green commercial building, having begun the green building trend with the support of the US Green Building Council’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) efforts, provides a valuable resource for green residential projects.

Several buildings in a variety of climates have been designed to LEED standards, and many of the most innovative parts of those buildings are not their green technology per se, but the way that the structure itself is designed. An office building in California uses the shape of the building itself to create airflow, enhancing the overall air quality inside.  Green roofs are fitted to buildings so that the green space on which the building sits is not lost, but further utilized at an elevation; the same green roofs absorb rainfall that can be used for irrigation or sometimes passive water-cooling, or they can be turned into a rooftop garden. The Genzyme building in Cambridge, Massachusetts uses a chandelier to light the building during daylight hours through a system of mirrors that filter natural light down through a lobby surrounded by glass corridors on every floor. Several large office buildings have sunshades placed on the sidewalls to reduce cooling costs during periods of hot sunshine. These are just a sampling of the methods that the architects of green buildings have used to improve create more eco-friendly spaces that preserve the natural environment while giving occupants a high-quality experience.

These innovative solutions are littered with the trademarks of ideas long labored over.  Architects need not look much further than the vernacular architecture that preceded the current urgent demand for more cost and carbon-efficient structures.  Adam Goodheart, in an article in the New York Times Magazine architecture issue, titled “This Old, Organic House,” discusses ways that old homes that predate modern air conditioning and heating have their own form of green architecture. These homes were designed to circulate air with a cool breeze and block out the hot rays of the sun with shutters big enough to fit the windows. Many homes currently built to fit a cookie cutter design borrow design elements of the past, but for aesthetic rather than for practical reasons. Shutters are not made to fit the window and provide shade, but are nailed to the area adjacent to the window. The flow of air is not considered - and how could it be when production is swift and identical to every other house in the neighborhood? Those old homes include, in a more low-tech way, the same principles that have expanded into the standards and solutions of the green building community today.

Often times using simple ideas is the most cost effective way to make a home greener and more energy efficient. While new (and sometimes futuristic) technology provides ways to make homes and buildings more eco-friendly, architecture itself needs to make that next step – by considering how a house will be lived in as well as what systems will be put in it. The Live Green, Live Smart Sustainable House™ being built as a LEED remodeling project in Minnesota offers an example of one of those simple architectural solutions: the eaves on the roof have been extended to provide shade to the walls and windows of the home, saving energy normally needed to counteract the heating effects of the sun – and also protecting the exterior walls and windows from the effects of the changeable northern mid-continental weather.

Vernacular architecture, or the architecture of old, built by the people who lived in the structures, is some of the most thought-out form of design. Everyone requires something different from their specific environment.  One of the more important things to remember when building a home is where you will want to spend your time. Some families consider meals to be one of the most important times of the day and so the preparation and eating of food becomes central in their lifestyle and results in the need for a larger kitchen or dining space. Others find that their kitchen is simply a pragmatic necessity, and does not require as much space. People understand their own needs better and the place they life it better than anyone else. That is the basic principle behind vernacular architecture, an understanding of the place you call home and the needs of those that live there. In many ways this is also a principle of green design.

When a home is built to the homeowner’s specific needs, space and energy are not wasted on unneeded rooms or features. Rooms that are not used are a waste of the energy it takes to heat and cool them, as well as of the material to build and furnish them. Families that don’t care about more than a functional kitchen may find that those resources are better utilized in another part of the home. In some locales building practices provide space to homeowners who may never have wanted the extra room in the first place.

Natural lighting, rain collection, air circulation, sunshades, passive heating and cooling have all become standard to make commercial buildings responsibly green, as have eco-friendly technologies like solar panels and geo-thermal heating and cooling. They are also likely to become some of the standard systems consumers are looking for in the emerging green home building market. Still, some of the most important considerations going into a green home are what the site can provide to the building, such as shade, wind, amount of precipitation each year - but also what the person who is going to live there truly needs.

When beginning a building or remodeling project or just making your home a bit more green, keep in mind that the fancy technology is a major step in the right direction, but so is the simple act of following the needs of your family.



Prepared for Live Green, Live Smart by Abby Bartlett