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Forget green roofs – this whole building lives
Julie Sloane, Small Business, Fortune
Green roofs are so yesterday. Meet the designers who will wrap an entire office block in plants.
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There aren’t many cutting-edge urban architecture firms in Carmel Valley, Calif., a placid expanse of gnarled oak trees and steep, grassy hills about 120 miles south of San Francisco. But this is where you’ll find Rana Creek, a 14-year-old, $6.5 million company that converts city buildings into countryscapes.
Last year Rana Creek founder Paul Kephart put together an audacious plant-covered roof for the new California Academy of Sciences, in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. Green roofs are becoming commonplace across the U.S., but no others yet have hills.
Now Rana Creek hopes to bring the country to San Francisco in its boldest project yet. Pending a city permit, ground will be broken on the first commercial structure in the U.S. with “living walls.” The 10-story building, 110 Embarcadero, will have plants growing out of the spaces between floors on the building’s glass exterior. Vines will snake around vertical and horizontal trellises on three sides of the building.
(27 March 2009)
The reinvention of the trailer park
Lisa Selin Davis, Gristmill
Trailer parks get a bad rap, especially in the post-Katrina days when we’ve come to see them as North American refugee camps slowly poisoning their displaced inhabitants with formaldehyde fumes. But the trailer park, done right, actually holds great potential as a development model.
minihome
Even in its current form, with communities of not-particularly-mobile homes plopped atop concrete blocks, the trailer park is a kind of low-rent template, a version of new urbanism without the bells, whistles, and marketing budgets. In Canada particularly, trailer parks are vacation spots, more campground than affordable housing, with density, communal green spaces, swimmable and fishable bodies of water, and dwellings a fraction of the size of the current average, which falls in the 2,500-square-foot range.
“If you look at all the ground rules and best practices guidelines for perfect ecotopia villages, you’re going to see all the things you find in a [Canadian] trailer park,” says Andy Thompson, designer of the Sustain MiniHome, an extremely green mobile home manufactured in Toronto.
Problem is, those parks are filled with, you know, trailers. The formaldehyde kind.
Well, Thompson has a solution to that particular problem.
(26 March 2009)
The RV: Going the way of the dinosaur?
Tim Jones, Los Angeles Times
The economic crisis threatens an industry and an American lifestyle. ‘This is the worst it’s ever been.’
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Reporting from Forest City, Iowa — In the realm of conspicuous consumption, few things are larger than the RV, the multi-ton vehicular brontosaurus that has taken generations of families on the great American highway adventure.
But in the worst economic crisis since the Depression, the RV is facing perhaps its gravest challenge as sales have plummeted, manufacturers have filed for bankruptcy or gone out of business, and lofty expectations of a grander profile for recreational vehicles have been drastically cut.
Even the most pessimistic economy watchers will acknowledge that someday people will begin buying cars again, only because they have to. That assumption, though, does not apply to RVs, which are not essential purchases, can easily cost a quarter of a million dollars and are relentless binge drinkers of fuel.
(28 March 2009)
Interesting comment by tstreet on The Oil Drum’s DrumBeat:
Maybe the RV industry needs to reframe itself. The term “RV” implies the use of a lot of discretionary income. Most people speed tens of thousands of dollars on an RV and use it just a few weeks a year at best. RVs,however, start to make sense economically when they are used year round or near year round and move with the seasons to cut back on heating and/or cooling costs. There is an emerging tiny home movement that is wheel based and environmentally sensitive. The problem is the emphasis on recreation and vehicle.
The RV industry needs to become the PH (portable home) industry. They also need to build PHs that are nontoxic, solar powered, and more efficient.
Here’s a good example of what I am talking about. http://www.martinhousetogo.com/
prudentrver adds
My wife and I have lived in a PH for the past 11 years after retiring from the electronics industry in the SF Bay Area. Right now our living space is 240 square feet plus a moveable yard that covers several thousand square feet (depends on our location at the time). We can survive on solar power and rarely use more than 60 gallons of water a week. It is a most enjoyable way to live, and much less expensive. Right now we are in Arizona, but come August we will be in Washington state.
Smaller, energy-efficient homes popular: Canada survey
CBC News
More Canadians are looking at buying smaller homes, a Royal Bank survey released Wednesday suggests.
The proportion of potential home buyers interested in less space hit 27 per cent in January, up from 19 per cent in the bank’s 2008 survey, and nearly double the 14 per cent a decade ago.
But more than two-thirds (68 per cent) of potential buyers who may close a deal in the next two years still want a detached home, with condos and lofts trailing at 12 per cent, townhouses at eight per cent and semi-detached homes at six per cent.
Almost everyone in the survey, the bank’s 16th home ownership study, said low energy consumption is an important consideration when buying a home.
“Energy efficiency is rated just as important as the look and appearance of the home,” 94 per cent of the respondents said.
(25 March 2009)
