How to Build an Environmental-Friendly Residence
NJ School of Architecture professor indicates how to build an environmental-friendly residence on a tight budget.
Author – Cynthia Booth.
Did you know that two NYC-based designers designed an asymmetrical home with a fixed budget of $250,000?
Architects and Jersey City residents Richard Garber (assistant professor at NJ Institute of Technology’s College of Architecture and Design in Newark) and Nicole Robertson of GRO Architects in NY rose to the difficult task of creating and overseeing the building of a single-family house that’s a genuine evidence of both revolutionary design and environmental-friendly technologies.
Not too long ago, Denis Carpenter purchased a compact vacant lot to attempt his interest for the environment – a house that was environment friendly and very easy to maintain.
What’s so exceptional about this home?
- Inside the home, on the ground level, radiant heating beneath the exposed concrete floor warms the full bathroom and two bedrooms.
- In the loft-like 2nd level, sleek aluminum and stainless steel railings accent the bamboo stairway to the mezzanine, family room and an artfully designed kitchen, outfitted with restored devices and cabinetry.
- Passive a/c strategies like ceiling fans and clerestory windows make it possible for occupants to be cool during summer and warm during winter months.
- The roof consists of 260 sq. ft. of photovoltaic panels that supply about 2,000 kilowatts of energy every year to a battery stored in the basement.
- The root have a 2-foot-square area planted with drought-resist to collect rain.
This single family 1,600-square-foot home was constructed in 6 months and won a 2009 American Institute of Architects merit award and the 2010 Green Building of the Year Award from the Jersey City Redevelopment Agency.
How can you transform your home into an eco-friendly home without spending too much money?
If you’re redesigning a home, conduct an energy audit first to help you identify what energy efficiency changes should and can be made to your home. In this way you’ll calculate how much energy your home needs.
My personal favorite eco-friendly technique is the passive solar cooling/heating design.
Passive solar usually means that your home’s windows, walls, and floors can be made to collect, store, and distribute power from the sun in the form of heat in the wintertime and reject solar heat in the summer.
Existing structures can be adapted or “retrofitted” to passively collect and store solar heat too.
The following five elements constitute a comprehensive passive solar home design:
- The Collector – The area through which sunlight enters the building (usually windows).
- The Absorber – The hard, darkened surface of the storage element – sunlight hits the surface and is absorbed as heat.
- The Thermal Mass – The materials that retain or store the heat generated by sunlight below or behind the absorber surface.
- The Distributor – The technique by which solar heat circulates from the collection and storage points to different areas of the house.
- The Controller – Roof overhangs may be used to shade the aperture area during summer months or thermostats that signal a fan to turn on.
About Author – Cynthia Booth writes for the architecture careers blog. It’s a nonprofit web-site dedicated to offer help for beginning architects who need resources for their careers. With this she would like to raise the attention on eco-friendly home design and change the general public perception of energy efficiency.
