GreenMobile: Eco Prefab

Image by Michael Berk (double click image for higher resolution)


In response to the Katrina toxic trailer debacle, the federal government appropriated $400 million for alternative temporary housing.

Mississippi's Katrina Cottage concept got the lion's share of the money, but a respectable thin sliver - almost $6 million - went to fund the production of a lesser known concept - Michael Berk's GreenMobile.

The GreenMobile, pronounced like the oil company, not the auto-, is a factory-produced, transportable, expandable, affordable green home that can serve as a "port after the storm" or as permanent domicile. This prototype ties into existing infrastructure or can be equipped to go it alone as self-sustaining living quarters.

Though Katrina Cottages are in abundance - the State of Mississippi is now selling off the excess units - I have to say I'm having some trouble finding a constructed GreenMobile anywhere in Mississippi. (Can somebody help me out here?)

I asked Michael Berk recently about the status of the funded GreenMobile and he said he didn't know. Seems that after consulting early on, he's out of the loop on any resulting construction. Sounding like someone talking about an estranged former lover, Berk commented about the design : "It's changed." I could hear him shaking his head over the phone.

Nevertheless, the final proposal for funding that I saw two years ago was far deeper shade of green than anything else out there. The wording in the appropriation announcement contained the disclaimer "up to" before funding amounts. It would be a shame if this progressive prototype died a premature death with money on the table.

Check out Professor/Architect Michael Berk's website for more images of the GreenMobile.

Green Homes for New Orleans' Ninth Ward

Image by William McDonough + Partners


In New Orleans, Brad Pitt's initiative - Make It Right Homes - is refitting the devastated 9th Ward with an interesting collection of affordable green homes. Four years after the storm, several units are finished and occupied, more are under construction, and still more are on the way.

Pitt's organization managed to obtain the services of some of the country's leading green architects to design MIR prototypes including this one by architect William McDonough.

McDonough seems to have come out of the womb thinking green. His influential book Cradle to Cradle has proven to be somewhat of a manifesto for sustainable design. In the book, he and coauthor Michael Braungart promote the idea that "waste equals food" introducing to a wide audience the concept that products can be designed for infinite uses in a closed loop life cycle.

His early claim to fame was the design of a solar house built in Ireland in 1977. New Orleans has considerably more sun than Ireland; you guessed it - this home is equipped with a rooftop of PV panels.

Some very nice work is going on here, but given the huge demand for affordable housing in the Katrina affected zone, it's just a drop in the proverbial bucket. But the ideas generated in the process - many experimental - are the real power of this initiative. How this plays out will influence far more than the Ninth Ward, I predict.

Click on this link for detailed renderings and plans of William McDonough's green duplex prototype.

And for some "on the ground" reporting on the new MIR homes, check out this link from Lira Luis' blog. Lira is a former Taliesin apprentice and uber-creative architect in her own right.

The House of the Future

This week's newspaper column:

What does the future hold for sustainable, energy efficient housing? Let’s take a peek.

Technology is available now to revolutionize the way we monitor energy usage. Smart meters – already in use in some areas - let homeowners see in real time how much energy their home is consuming. It’s even possible to track each outlet, light, and appliance in the house to determine where the “energy hogs” are.

Got an old refrigerator sucking more than its fair share of electricity? A smart meter can identify excessive energy drains letting you know it’s time to recycle that old clunker to make room for a new super-efficient model. And with a user-friendly interface, you’ll be able to access this information from your desktop, your television, or from your phone while on vacation.

The next-generation house will manufacture some or all of its own energy. Every year, more and more energy-producing building products - photovoltaic shingles, for example – come on the commercial market. Imagine a house where the roof, walls, and windows all generate electricity feeding itself and selling back excess energy to the local energy company; each home becomes a mini power plant.

In the future, solar panels will not be “add-ons,” but will be integrated into the fabric of the structure. Instead of looking at panels mounted to a roof, you’ll see a wall and know it is collecting solar energy.

Currently, prices are high for this new breed of technology, but we are just now standing at the threshold looking in; think about how rudimentary computers were just a generation ago. Over the next few decades, we will find a boom in the availability of energy-producing building products, and like with computers, continual improvements in technology lower the cost per unit of energy produced.

Looking a bit further into the future we can expect intelligent building skins. Walls and roofs reflect or attract heat depending upon the season and time of day. Surfaces will automatically take into consideration the local environment’s temperature and humidity changing like a chameleon with the climatic forces at play.

And there are some eternal environmental solutions that are destined to make a comeback.

Natural ventilation as a way to cool and clean inside air has been used since man started building homes. Although technology advances, the basic principles of physics stay the same. Natural ventilation will be just as viable in the future as it was for our great-grandparents.

Indigenous vegetation planted in “just the right place” will clean the air and temper the home’s microclimate. For example, planting deciduous trees on the south side of the house shades the structure in the summer and, when fall strips the leaves, allows the passage of warm sun rays in the winter. Incorporation of plant life in the home of the future will be taken for granted.

Tomorrow will be here before you know it.

Pringle Creek Community, Salem Oregon

A holistically planned sustainable development is taking shape in Salem, Oregon – the Pringle Creek Community.

This community features a walkable design, dedicated green space, community gardens, a village commercial center, super-green construction, and environmentally friendly paving on 32 acres of natural woodland.

True to the spirit of sustainable design, the Pringle Creek Community is expressly non-stylistic, instead making design decisions based on a set of over-riding principles.

1. Build efficiencies by building green
2. Celebrate the natural environment
3. Encourage social diversity
4. Activate the local economy
5. Conserve and reuse natural materials
6. Smart transportation and movement

As an extension of these principles, Pringle Creek has established a set of 35 sustainable design goals further articulating and codifying the design ethic. From the community’s website:

http://www.pringlecreek.com/35sustainablegoals.htm

Comprehensive sustainability plans like this do not happen by accident. Sustainable Development Inc., headed by Don Myers, has been engaged in a conscious effort to build green since buying the 32 acres in 2004. The developer brought in Opsis Architecture, a Portland firm specializing in green design, to articulate the vision.

A couple of high points.

Roads in the community, all flanked by 5 foot sidewalks, are constructed of “porous” or “pervious” paving, a technology designed to allow the passage of water through the paving and back into the soil. Almost all paving used today is impervious to water, thus creating stormwater run-off problems typically managed by expensive, intrusive (and always un-natural) engineering efforts. This, according to the developer, is the largest residential project in the US to utilize porous paving.

Recently, a model home was constructed embodying the neighborhood’s design goals. This home, amazingly, graded out as the highest rated LEED Platinum home in the United States. The home incorporates solar energy, geothermal heating and cooling, as well as a comprehensive array of passive environmental elements.

The rub? A $432,000 price tag for this 1460 square foot home - that's almost $300 per square foot. Not exactly what I would call "affordable" but give credit for the herculean effort.

For more on the community, visit their website at:

http://www.pringlecreekcommunity.com/

This Week: Green Communities

The NAV blog highlights new communities in the United States that incorporate green building ethics into the overall planning and design.

Solar Village in Freiburg

New “plus energy homes” in Freiburg, Germany’s Vauban district produce more energy than they use.

Since the 1970’s, the city of Freiburg has taken proactive steps to become an eco-friendly city with an ethic of conservation, environmentally-responsible master planning, and development of alternative energies – especially solar.

In 1992, the city council mandated that all new municipal buildings must be “low energy” buildings employing both passive and active solar components. Freiburg’s green ethic goes all the way to the top; the mayor is a member of Bundnis 90/Die Grunen, Germany’s green party.

The Solarsiedlung, or solar village, designed by Freiburg Architect Rolf Disch, is powered by a rooftop solar panel array. Each home is considered a mini power station. Electricity produced by each home feeds into the existing grid contributing a net surplus of power, thus producing revenue for the homeowner.

Hot water is used for heating as well as domestic purposes and comes from solar heated tubes on the roof of an adjacent business park designed by the same Architect.

In the winter months, an on-site heating plant fueled by wood chips supplements the solar hot water heating system.

Rainwater is gathered and utilized for toilets and irrigation. Catching storm water in an urban context helps relieve pressure on the city’s storm water drainage system.

And in any good green building, a whole array of passive measures have been employed such as sun orientation, sunscreens to shade in the summer and let winter sun in, and triple glazing to reduce heat loss.

Natural ventilation is also an integral feature of this new breed of homes – an eternal concept that works as well now as before the days of advanced mechanical systems.

For more on this development, including Sonnenschiff, the solar powered nearby business park and other green urban projects, see the Architect’s website. A link to projects:

http://www.rolfdisch.de/project.asp?sid=-1411551097

Frank Lloyd Wright's Organic Architecture

Meet America’s first green Architect – Frank Lloyd Wright. He called it “organic architecture.”

When I was in high school, I came across photos of Fallingwater, the Johnson Wax Building, and the Price Tower. The powerful resonance of those images changed my life.

I remember sitting and staring at those pictures for hours at a time. Intuitively, I knew there was something very magical there, something profound in Mr. Wright’s approach to architecture. Here before me was evidence that the built environment was so much more than floors, walls, and roof.

Fallingwater, nestled into the Pennsylvania countryside and perched on a rock over a waterfall, feels right at home in its dramatic natural environment. Man with nature, not man over nature, is the artistic expression - an extension of nature itself.

In the Johnson Wax Building, lily pad columns artfully structure the main work area manifesting an open environment of space and light. The tower, added later, provides a striking counterpoint to the streamlined linear massing of the original building. Its “tap-root” foundation draws directly from nature for its inspiration.

Especially mesmerizing for me was the plan of the Price Tower – a delightful play of geometries. In the tower floor plan, the square is juxtaposed with a 30-60-120 degree geometry creating an amazing kinetic feel. And in an epiphany for me at the time, I was fascinated with how Mr. Wright consciously augmented the geometry, both horizontally and vertically, when function changed. Each floor in the tower has three square sides of office space; the apartment on the fourth corner is skewed 30 degrees and becomes a two-story space with a bedroom mezzanine looking out over the living space below. The mezzanine takes back the geometry of the rest of the building in geometric sympathy. Beautiful!

I’ve had the wonderful opportunity to spend some time at Taliesin, both in Wisconsin and Arizona as adjunct faculty and (as often as I can) a member of the Taliesin Chorus Mr. Wright started in 1932.

“What did Frank Lloyd Wright mean by organic architecture?” is a question I have posed to many senior apprentices who studied under the master before his death in 1959. Not surprisingly, I get a different answer every time I ask the question.

“The whole is to the part as the part is to the whole.”

“Each building must respond to Nature, and every building must have its own Nature.”
(Mr. Wright always put a capital N on Nature.)

“Emulate, never imitate.”

And the explanations go on and on like the beautiful poetic tapestry that is organic architecture. Like Nature, Mr. Wright breathed LIFE and SPIRIT into everything he touched. Isn’t that the essence of green architecture?


Today, the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation carries on the legacy. Plan a tour of Taliesin East or Taliesin West, and donate to the organization by going to their website:

http://www.franklloydwright.org/

And check out what is going on at the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture on their website:

http://www.taliesin.edu/

I will be spending a week, probably around his birthday (June 8th), on different aspects Frank Lloyd Wright’s work and his contribution to American architecture.

Sambo Mockbee's "Shelter for the Soul"

Sambo Mockbee showed the world what it really means to be an Architect with a capital A.

Emerging as a quirky, regional Architect in Mississippi in the 1970’s and 80’s, he shattered the myth that affordable housing should look and feel “cheap.” Always the artist, Mockbee took on each project with design ideals usually reserved for the richest of the rich.

Although he was not at all opposed to taking on large commissions, most of his work involved budgets every other architect called “not nearly enough.” He worked with a palate of inexpensive materials, many of which were recycled, and created a soulful expression that lifted the spirit and felt at home with the natural surroundings.

A beautiful chapel made of recycled car windshields.

A home covered with carpet scraps or rustic old barn tin.

A woven retaining wall constructed of used, discarded tires.

Mockbee was the master of breathing life into the ordinary, of making something out of what we consider to be nothing. He taught us that every building, regardless of budget, can and should have a “soul.”

Full disclosure: I’ve personally drawn great inspiration from Mockbee’s work. He was an occasional speaker and visiting professor at the Mississippi State University School of Architecture when I was a student there in the 1980’s. He argued for an artistic approach to architecture. He articulated his heart-felt belief that Architects should be socially responsible and proactive agents for positive change. I stopped in his office from time to time and witnessed his creative process first-hand; he greatly influenced the way I view the world.

In the last decade of Mockbee’s life (sadly, leukemia overtook him in late December of 2001), he devoted his time to teaching at Auburn University, his alma-mater. Along with D.K. Ruth, he founded the Rural Studio, where his vision of a decent architecture for all is studied and practiced.

In 2000, Mockbee was recognized for his life of service with the MacArthur Foundation’s prestigious Genius Award.

Check out the work of Sambo Mockbee and Rural Studio at:

http://cadc.auburn.edu/soa/rural-studio/

Michelle Kaufmann's Glidehouse

Michelle Kaufmann is changing the way people think about "pre-fab" homes.

This Oakland, California based Architect is designing factory-built homes that don't look, operate, or feel like the ubiquitous single- or double-wide house trailer. Kaufmann's fresh designs make a strong case for contemporary American architecture.

Her Glidehouse features natural lighting, natural ventilation and non-toxic materials - basic principles of passive green design.

Each home is designed to easily incorporate solar, wind, and geothermal energy systems as well.

And you’ll find no superfluous Greek or Colonial ornamentation on these gems.

Since Kaufmann introduced the Glidehouse a few years ago, she has developed a series of modern, pre-fab home designs of various character and size, all in a contemporary aesthetic.

Units are built in assembly-line fashion in a factory and shipped to a pre-prepared site proving that the mass-production model works for high design.

Prices are about the same or maybe a little more than site-built homes (depending on location), but considering that energy costs over time will be lower, and the quality of the product, its worth considering.

Americans have been starved for options when it comes to the “beautiful pre-fab home” – Michelle Kaufmann just served up a tasty treat!

Her website:

http://www.mkd-arc.com/

Micheal Berk's GreenMobile

Professor Michael Berk has some innovative ideas.

His GreenMobile concept combines sustainability, energy efficiency, affordability, and mobility for a fresh take on green housing. In one clean stroke, this Architect shatters the myth that green costs more. With prices starting at about $50,000, this green home is affordable by most of the American population.

The GreenMobile draws on modular and manufactured home technologies in to create a handsome structure that can be easily transported and set up on-site in short order. Berk’s design is perfect for emergency housing, and even more perfect for the green-conscious, budget-savvy homeowner.

Designed with solar panels and a rainwater collection system, this new breed of home is no slave to the "grid." The GreenMobile can work independently of infrastructure, or as a hybrid-house attached to local utilities. Homebuyers need not depend on the availability of utilities to dictate their choice of home sites.

And keeping the footprint small (a two-bedroom model is 890 square feet, a one-bedroom is 560 square feet) keeps costs in check; the McMansion may have been the fad in the recent past, but modern-day economics is sending too-big houses the way of the dinosaur.

GreenMobile was awarded an almost $6 million grant recently from FEMA's Alternative Housing Pilot Program (part of Congress' post-Katrina relief funding) in an effort to develop a new generation of disaster-relief housing - a good use of taxpayer money, in my opinion. A prototype is currently under development to replace some of the FEMA trailers on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. Approximately 80 units are expected to be produced later on this year.

Check out the poster of the GreenMobile’s winning entry in last year’s Lifecycle Building Challenge:

http://www.lifecyclebuilding.org/files/poster-GreenMobile.pdf

And for more information on Professor Michael Berk and GreenMobile development, go to his web site:

http://www.caad.msstate.edu/mberk

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