The Stars, Our Destination...
Sunday, April 01, 2007
Transmaterial...
...is a catalog of innovative, computationally intensive, and green building technologies. For those of us who don't shell out money for catalogs like this, there is a companion blog that has a handful of interesting things. My favorite is the marquis camouflage, pictured below. Link.
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4 comments:
very interesting book Pete. I ordered a copy of it and intend to check it out further. thanks for the info.
Ber and I are planning on buying a place this fall and are intrigued by green building materials, etc. I'm curious to see what all it covers.
Mmmm. There are better books out there for residential green materials. Transmaterial certainly will make a good coffee table book, because it has a lot of cool stuff, and maybe it will have a few things here and there.
I'm in a green building class. It is very in depth.
How extensive do you want to renovate?
A good place to go to start thinking about how you might want to approach a green or energy efficient renovation is to check out the US Green Building Council's LEED for Homes (Leadership in Energy & Environmental Design) rating system. It's a good starting point because it suggests strategies & goals. Link.
Oh, i didn't mean i ordered it strictly for the green material information. It just sparked my interest, so i ordered a copy.
We aren't looking to do any heavy renovation due to the time involved. We've found that having a place LEED certified is really freaking expensive, so places don't do it. We checked out this "green living" place in the West Loop that made me laugh. The units, while expensive as all hell, weren't even build with green materials aside from bamboo hardwood flooring. Every green option was an 'upgrade'. The selling point was the lobby/hangout area where everything was recycled/etc. They had free wi-fi down there and tried to promote social activity among residents. Freakin hilarious.
Good. Transmaterial looks like a super-cool book, I was just making sure that you knew that the stuff in it is highly experimental.
There is absolutely a trendiness to the green building thing that leads to silliness like that apartment building.
I'm not recommending getting a building certified, rather LEED can serve as a useful menu of approaches and considerations. In construction costs a green building doesn't necessarily cost more than a conventional one, but I can see that residences would only bother with LEED certification in the snootiest of neighborhoods.
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