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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
Within the green home market, there does exist a niche for small houses, fueled largely by the runaway success of "The Not So Big House" book series by Minnesota architect Sarah Susanka and, to a lesser extent, an emerging trend toward sleek, efficient -- and affordable -- modular housing. But for the most part, the green housing market mirrors the megahouse trends in the conventional homebuilding market.
"My clients want to build green, but they want to build bigger," says George Ostrow, principal of Velocipede Architects, a leading sustainable design firm in Seattle. Ostrow links big green houses to fuel-efficient SUVs and other green-living oxymorons. "It's a contradiction of our culture," he said.
Whether it's a McMansion or an architect-designed estate, big green homes offer a recognizably American take on eco-friendly trends sweeping the country.
There's the 4,200-square-foot solar-powered home featured in Salon last month -- a house "so spacious it includes an entire guest wing the couple never uses." Rob Harrison, another Seattle architect who specializes in sustainable design, cites a 4,100-square-foot home -- including garage and attached greeenhouse -- he recently designed for a single family household in Redmond, Wash. Among other features, the house will incorporate advanced framing, Forest Stewardship Council-certified lumber, hardwood floors and plywood, as well as sustainably harvested cork floors. The main roof slopes south for future photovoltaic panels, and there is porous paving on the driveway.
"We had many green features," Harrison said. "But ultimately, because of the size, we are still using more resources." The client's personal requirements, including room for a regulation-size pool table and a music performance atrium for 30 people, made it impossible to reduce the footprint of the house, Harrison said.
"House size," he says, "is probably the most important criterion and often the most difficult one for us to meet."
Not all green designers and builders hew to the notion that less is more. Take William McDonough, the visionary green architect who likes to invoke the cherry tree -- in which thousands of blossoms provide fruit so that one pit might take root and grow -- as a model for sustainable production.
"No one would ever look at the ground littered with cherry blossoms and say 'how inefficient how wasteful,'" writes McDonough in his book, "Cradle to Cradle." Instead, he observes, the blossoms decompose and provide nutrients for soil, plants and other organisms. Nature, in his view, is both abundant and productive -- qualities that "eco-effective" design (a McDonough alternative to "eco-efficient" design) can and should emulate.
Allison Ewing, a residential architect at McDonough's Charlottesville, Va., firm, applies this theory to the 4,000-square-foot-plus green homes she designs. "Our belief is that if it's solar powered, you can have all the hot water you want," she said. "As long as you have cradle-to-cradle design, we say, celebrate abundance." Responding to a question about house size and ecological footprint, Ewing reiterates another favorite McDonough saying: "We're not in the business of telling people to be less bad," she said. "We're about 100 percent more good." Ewing cites a recently designed 4,500-square-foot residence that incorporates geothermal energy sources, radiant floor heating and sustainably harvested wood -- a house that apparently catalyzed a local market for sustainably harvested lumber. A smaller residence, she said, would not have had the same impact on the local green economy.
