Sunshine Beach House by Wilson Architects

Posted by Caroline Williamson on 12.04.13 in Architecture Located in Sunshine Beach, Noose, Australia, the Sunshine Beach House began its life as the Prell House, designed by architect Gabriel Poole in 1997. Influenced by Mediterranean and Mexican lifestyle and design, the living areas were surrounding a central courtyard. When new owners purchased the property, they quickly decided they were in favor of additional living space and all-weather connections with the sleeping quarters, all while maintaining the character of the home. Wilson Architects were tasked with the job and a new design was born. The vital component in the new design was still the central outdoor room that’s now the new hub of the home. The hub, featuring a translucent battened roof, links all the surrounding living spaces and can be used year-round, except during the most severe weather. Wood seating, a lush green living wall, and landscaping keep the same outdoor feel of the original space. Double-height ceilings form the space but the woodwork and green wall keep it from feeling too massive. The kitchen and dining room completely open up to appreciate the ocean views with the roof extending out a bit to help filter the harsh light and strong breezes. The balcony is slightly lower as not to interrupt the view of those seated at the dining table. Photos by Brent Hardcastle.

Energy Equilibrium

Architect David Baker, unlike the cobbler whose children had no shoes, has been building for himself since 1999—he has kept the Shotwell Compound he lives in mostly under construction, until quite recently. It’s on a block in the northern section of San Francisco’s Mission District, a formerly rough neighborhood that is now a gentrifying, Tartine Bakery–supporting hipster haven where Facebook’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, purchased a home late last year. For Baker, it is a site for experimentation, play, and risk taking—all in the name of building just the right home for himself. Zero Cottage, a certified passive house, is his latest and most ambitious project in the compound. To achieve the net-zero standard, “if you take the rigorous position, you produce as much energy on site as you use,” Baker says. Typically, architects aren’t so rigorous—as Baker explains, people get pretty close, then bump it up to perfect standard not through architecture, environmental engineering, or design, but instead by purchasing generation credits for the energy their buildings do require. Zero Cottage, on the other hand, actually produces its own energy. In 1999, Baker first got a variance to build a cottage where there used to be an old stable, but let it expire. He renewed it and moved ahead with the project before the variance expired a second time. “The whole complex is really a design lab—it’s where I get to do things that you don’t get to do in big projects because they might fail,” he says. “I decided to see how far I could push energy efficiency, and right about then was when people started talking about passive housing.” There was a lot of general skepticism about the prospect of doing high-density urban buildings that could be net-zero. It’s one thing to build a solar-paneled, green-roofed building supplied by rainwater and relying on open ventilation in the middle of a wide-open field with full access to all of nature’s offerings, and quite another to do the same in a heavily populated, hyper-dense city. But Baker wanted to try. The structure combines tried-and-true strategies, like reusing wood from another project his firm had done in Oakland, with brand-new ideas like a rain screen made from movable tiles that clip into a curtain-wall structure and can be taken down, rearranged, or replaced with planters. That screen adds to the house’s most remarkable feature, which is its air- and temperature-control system. “It’s a super-insulated building and it basically doesn’t have heat,” Baker says, describing a heat-exchange air system and a recovery ventilator that extracts energy from, for instance, the heat produced when he or his partner, Yosh Asato, takes a hot shower. The ventilators aren’t currently used much in the United States, but Baker likes them for both the distance they take him toward net-zero and the healthfulness of the air they circulate. “You don’t get any mustiness because every part of the house is getting tempered—you get fresh air at this super-low volume.” The cottage wouldn’t be as efficient a building without a green roof, but Baker took a slightly different approach from the typical one. He points out that many green roofs are actually energy losers once you factor in the plants raised in New Jersey and then shipped in from, say, warehouses in Chicago (an example he gives based on research into what’s typically used). His roof, filled with native and nonnative succulents tucked into repurposed scooter and motorcycle tires to control erosion, required no warehousing or air-freighting. These thoughtful tactics made all the difference in Baker’s breakthrough— if you want to build net-zero in a city, no detail is too trivial.

In keeping with the weathered aesthetic of the cottage, the living areas on the second floor—which include a kitchen and work space, as well as a comfortable, informal seating area—use a variety of reclaimed materials and vintage pieces. An unusual ladder, with split and staggered rungs, serves as a staircase to the levels above. The first floor is a woodshop that Baker uses for making models and furniture.

NOMAD Micro Home Promises Inexpensive Off-Grid Living

A Canadian company called NOMAD Micro Home sells prefabricated homes, easy to assemble in just a few days. This prefabricated house is an example of ergonomic use of space. The standard model, with sides of just 3 meters long, is equipped with a living room, a kitchen, a bathroom and an upstairs furnished bedroom. The living area on the ground floor of the micro-house has plenty of space to be furnished with a cozy sofa to relax on in front of the TV. A kitchen with cabinets for storing cooking vessels is designed in extension of the living room. To save the little space of the house with only 9 square meters footprint, the access stairs that lead upstairs, where there’s a bedroom equipped with a double bed and space for a wardrobe, are just above the kitchen furniture. The very well insulated modular house, in order to minimize heat loss, can be delivered with a solar panel-heating system, but with a rainwater collector as well, these improvements making it economical and environmentally friendly.
Project developers say such a house can be built both in urban and in rural areas, suitable both as family residence and as a shelter in areas affected by natural disasters. And the fact that the home comes packed and ready to assemble, greatly reduces the final cost of construction. The price is $25,000 CA.

Emerging green building material technologies to watch

"Green building" is being transformed from a buzzword to a sophisticated approach using technology that redefines how we make and live in buildings that both reduce building energy consumption and provide for building energy production. http://exclusive.multibriefs.com/content/emerging-green-building-material-technologies-to-watch