I’m very interested in new design concepts for buildings that offer advances in energy efficiency.

The New York Times ran a very interesting story in their April 27th issue titled: “The Green House of the Future”. They approached several architects and asked them to draw some plans for “…the most energy efficient houses that they could imagine – and they imagined quite a bit!”

The article which was written by Alex Frangoes, a Wall Street Journal staff reporter in New York can be read at The Wall Street Journal Online.

The challenge was to come up with energy efficient , environmentally sustainable house designs without regard to cost, available technologies, familiar aesthetics or current notions of how we need to live.

Frangoes says, “The idea was not to dream up anything impossible or unlikely – in other words, no antigravity living rooms. Instead, we asked the architects to think of what technology might make possible in the next few decades.”
There are some intriguing possibilities here. The architects that participated are such notables as William McDonough of the Charlottesville, Va., firm William McDonough + Partners, who designed the green roof of the new Ford Motor Co. factory and Cook + Fox who are well known for their green designs including the New York headquarters of Bank of America.

Just to give you an example of how innovative these guys can be, the Bank of America building which is Manhattan’s second-tallest after the Empire State Building, “creates massive ice blocks in the evening when electricity is cheapest. As the “ice batteries” melt, they are used to cool the building during times of peak electricity loads during the day.”

One house design by Rios Clementi Hale Studios in Los Angeles is a house that has a garden façade that includes chickpeas, tomatoes and other plants. “The plants also provide shade and cooling. A rooftop reservoir collects water and keeps the building cool, while rooftop windmills generate energy.”

They cheekily call their concept the “Incredible Edible House”. The writer comments, “This somewhat fantastical design seems to be as much about the future of food production as architecture. The façade of the three-story abode is slathered in a vertical garden that includes chickpeas, tomatoes, arugula and green tea. Step outside in the morning and harvest your meals.”

The Cook + Fox’s house design “reacts to the weather, turning dark in the bright sun which insulates the house from heat and then turns clear on dark days to absorb light and heat.” “The walls of the building also capture rain to fill the homes water needs and inside, walls and furniture are on rollers to take advantage of the fact that some spaces, such as bedrooms, can be underutilized for most of the day.”
Check out the full article, it’s an interesting mix of futurism and cutting edge “green” home design.

Alan

I was thinking about the pictures of the Kibble Palace Conservatory that I posted on the blog last time and its amazing sense of “plasticity” when Mehmet sent me a link to a very interesting and relevant NYT article titled: The Nature of Glass Remains Anything but Clear By KENNETH CHANG.

Chang starts out with this unusual factoid: “Peer into its molecules, and glass is indiscernible from a liquid.” He then goes on to ask: “So how can it be hard? And how does it get that way?”

Evidently, scientists are still puzzling about this—although there seems to be as much contention about whether the problem has actually been solved as to what the solution is.

The often quoted “fact” that “panes of stained glass in old European churches are thicker at the bottom because glass is actually a slow-moving liquid that flows downward over centuries” is incorrect according to the author. He states “medieval stained glass makers were simply unable to make perfectly flat panes, and the windows were just as unevenly thick when new.”

“The tale contains a grain of truth about glass resembling a liquid, however. The arrangement of atoms and molecules in glass is indistinguishable from that of a liquid.”

“For scientists, glass is not just the glass of windows and jars, made of silica, sodium carbonate and calcium oxide. Rather, a glass is any solid in which the molecules are jumbled randomly. Many plastics like polycarbonate are glasses, as are many ceramics.”

The article proves to be an interesting peek into the ongoing scientific research of this “obscure” but important area of natural phenomenon. Take a look, it’s quite fascinating.

Alan