Green Redux

Yes, it has been awhile since we’ve updated Green Redux, but we’re back! The past several weeks have been a filled to the brim with lots of exciting events, both personally and professionally, so while it may appear we’ve been slacking, we’ve just been completely otherwise occupied getting new projects off the ground.

I’ve been busy with my new post as Managing Editor of Inhabitat, which coincidentally kicked off with the start of spring design events in Milan and New York (if you haven’t kept up, check out Inhabitat’s great coverage of Milan Design Week, Designers & Agents, BKLYN Designs, and ICFF). And, Scott has taken on the exciting role of new dad (again) to my new nephew, born in April.

While in New York for the International Contemporary Furniture Fair, I had the good fortune to meet up with Lloyd Alter of TreeHugger, whom I’ve enjoyed reading for quite some time. And, to my delight, my regular daily scope of his writing today turned up a great post that deserves a mention.

Lloyd and I have quite a few shared interests including prefab homes, preservation and sustainable development - he’s been a proponent of building reuse through a fairly regular column called Another One Bites the Dust. His latest post, Donovan Rypkema: LEED stands for Lunatic Environmentalist Enthusiastically Demolishing, highlights the absurdity of destroying old buildings in order to build new “green,” particularly in the name of LEED.

That’s not to say that the USGBC’s program hasn’t made a significant contribution to the momentum of green building initiatives, it has. However, just like every good idea in theory, LEED has its challenges (and critics) in practice. But that’s a post for another day, today is about Lloyd’s great report on Donovan Rypkema from the 2008 Heritage Conservation conference, so be sure to check it out. And stay tuned here, we’re back to our regular program. Cheers!

The New York Times captioned this photo as “the somewhat forbidding exterior of of David Yocum and Brian Bell’s architecture office in Atlanta” but to me it says home. And it is, to bldgs - the architectural firm of David Yocum and Brian Bell - and to Yocum and his wife. All gorgeously adapted 1,850 square feet of it. Read more

A recent renovation in downtown Roanoke, VA, has nabbed the first US Green Building Council LEED certification in the city. The State & City Bank Building, originally built in 1905, was converted from commercial to mixed-use with five residential condos, six offices and street-level retail space. The building is also the first LEED-certified historic, multi-story conversion from commercial to residential condos in an urban setting. Read more

Sears Catalog Homes were one of the first successful forays into prefabricated, factory built housing. For over thirty years in the early 20th century, the company shipped mail-order construction components for architect-designed prefab homes by train to tens of thousands of families. It’s estimated that between 70,000 and 75,000 homes were sold. The houses were available in over 400 versions, many of which still stand today upholding the sustainable design principle of a long lifecycle of usefulness and value. Read more

The National Trust New Orleans field office director, Walter Gallas, blogged last week that, indeed, public housing demolitions have begun in three of the four public housing developments slated to be razed. At current, HUD is spending $762 million to tear down over 4,600 public housing subsidized apartments. All at a time when the Gulf Coast, and the nation, is facing one of the worst affordable housing crisis in American history. Read more

While to many the term historic preservation conjures up images of drafty, energy inefficient dwellings, renovation of old buildings can maintain the principles of 3R living: reduce, reuse and recycle. Preservation and green building have many common goals such as material reuse and creating a long, purposeful life cycle. Preservation is about sustainability.

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Chicago has its share of bungalows. They make up a third of the city’s single-family homes with the characteristic single attic dormer and a charm that is undeniable. Some 80,000 bungalow-style homes grace the streets of the Windy City, most built in the early 20th century. The appealing vintage dwellings are part of a new city program aimed at bringing the bungalow back in exquisite green form. Last year, as one of many green citywide initiatives, Chicago launched the Green Bungalow Initiative to restore these historic homes with sustainability in mind.

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