1932 First Avenue
Suite 200
Seattle, Washington 98101
206.956.0883
Suite 200
Seattle, Washington 98101
206.956.0883
Harrison Architects
Blog
"Ultimate Garages" in The Boulevard Magazine
Two of our projects, the Sproull-Radke Green Roof Workshop, and the Barbat-Harrison Garage, appear online in the June issue of The Boulevard Magazine, which covers art, fashion and design in New York City and Long Island. I haven't seen the print version yet. It may only have the Green Roof Workshop.Here's a link: http://www.boulevardli.com/index.php/design/124-the-ultimate-garages.html
RH
Passive House (Passivhaus) in the Northwest
I have just completed the first of three 3-day sessions of the Passive House Consultant Training. It was a compelling introduction to the principles and techniques of this approach to radically reducing the energy used in buildings--to the point that the house can be heated with the equivalent of a hair dryer! We are going to use this approach with two of our current projects, and hope to incorporate this into all of our projects going forward. Here are a few highlights:• Typically when we design energy-efficient houses, we start with our more or less standard (to us) approach to the envelope of the house, and then size the mechanical system to suit the heat loss of the envelope. With Passive House approach, it's the other way around: we start with a fixed amount of energy that can be used for heating, cooling, lighting and plug loads (4.75 kBtu/SF/year), and design the envelope to make that work.
• Insulation varies with the climate, but in Seattle will likely be in the range of R-60 for walls, ceilings and slabs. Walls will be about a foot thick, offering lots of potential for design of the exteriors.
• The detailing of the ways wall, floor and slab meet each other will be different, primarily to eliminate thermal bridges.
• The houses will be very tightly constructed. Air infiltration and leakage will be less than 0.6 ACH@50 (air changes per hour at 50 Pascals. Typical construction is the range of five or six ACH@50.
• In the heating season, lots of fresh air will be supplied by a heat recovery ventilator.
• Windows and doors with a U-value of 0.09 will probably be imported from Germany. There are currently no manufacturers in the United States making windows or doors that qualify, though Serious Windows does come close.
• We will optimize passive-solar and internal heat gains. At this level of efficiency, the warmth generated by the refrigerator (and other appliances) must be accounted for! This also means careful study of shading, to prevent over-heating. Interestingly, the Passive House will not have a huge bank of south-facing windows, and no windows elsewhere, like the stereotypical "passive solar" house.
• We will be modeling the energy gains and losses using a program called the Passive House Planning Package, a sophisticated Excel-based spreadsheet.
• Sometimes referred to with its German spelling, Passivhaus, to distinguish it from "passive solar" houses.
• Inspired by work in the United States, but developed in Germany. So far there are only a dozen or so Passive Houses built in the US, but over 10,000 in Europe.
RH
Not So Big Remodeling
Sarah Susanka's latest book, Not So Big Remodeling is out in local bookstores and available online. (Purchasing through the online link benefits Lake and Park School, which my son attends.) On March 16th, 2009, USA Today published an article featuring the book and the importance of "living better, not bigger." You can click here to read the article.
About the book, Sarah Susanka says "It is wonderful exposure for a subject whose time has definitely come. With the economic downturn and the desire to make our homes more energy efficient and sustainable, there are many homeowners who are looking for ways to make their existing homes more closely coincide with their dreams of "Home." Co-author Marc Vassallo and I are hopeful that this latest book in the Not So Big House series will help answer those questions."
There is a special Not So Big Remodeling page on the Not So Big website.
And that's a photo of the Thein Durning Renovation on the back cover! We are very excited to have one of our projects featured in this book.
RH
O Ecotextiles on Top-10 Green Building Products List
Northern Lights from the O Ecotextile Collection - the same drape and luminosity as silk velvet.
Seattle-based O Ecotextiles, debuting in the U.S. this year, has been added to BuildingGreen’s 2008 Top-10 Green Building Products by the editors of Environmental Building News and GreenSpec®. This seventh annual award recognizes the most innovative and exciting green building products added to the GreenSpec® Directory during the past year or covered in Environmental Building News. For O Ecotextiles, being an “organic textile" means not just that a fabric uses organic fibers in the yarn, but that every step of the production process has been certified eco-friendly. The company produces elegant, sumptuous organic fabrics for residential and contract / hospitality design use.
The O Ecotextiles Collection - made from bamboo, hemp, abaca, ramie, linen and silk – offers 17 fabric choices and multiple colorways, plus custom. Their mission (which clearly parallels our approach to architecture) is to change the way textiles are made by proving that it's possible to produce luxurious, sensuous fabrics in ways that are non-toxic, ethical and sustainable, resulting in a fabric which is safe to bring into our homes. Their worldwide production partners do not support the sale and use of the thousands of chemicals used regularly in textile production that poison our soils, pollute groundwater, and devastate eco-systems. O Ecotextiles’ production partners treat their wastewater so it doesn’t degrade waterways. Their products do not contain toxic chemical residues. They are continuing to work on decreasing their carbon footprint. O Ecotextiles is currently available in select design centers and retailers throughout the U.S., as well as in London, and through Harrison Architects' interior design partner Barbat Design. Contact Frith to arrange a showing of the fabrics.
-RH
Healthy Toys
The good folks over at Washington Toxics Coalition have launched a new website: HealthyToys.org, a consumer guide to toxic chemicals in toys. A great resource for this time of year.RH
G/MAG on Green Roof Workshop
Gwen Cassidy over at G/MAG has blogged about Jim Sproull and Susan Radke_Sproull's Green Roof Workshop, calling it "A Guy’s Ultimate Garage Wet Dream." Have a look:http://gliving.tv/architecture-design/listen-up-dudes-check-out-the-ultimate-garage/#more-869
Amanda came across this post while researching materials for our micro-ecovillage project in Honolulu. I hadn't seen this site before, and spent a couple hours clicking through it. You'll find bits on fashion, design, food, vehicles, music and Hollywood's green celebrities. The well-designed site nicely manages to allow that green can be sexy.
RH
The Northwest Green Home Primer
National green building force-of-nature and friend Kathleen O'Brien of O'Brien and Company, along with co-author Kathleen Smith, have written a book on getting a green home built in the Northwest titled The Northwest Green Home Primer. Harrison Architects contributed to several sections, including the section on working drawings, and the one on rain screen wall construction. The rain screen wall section was illustrated with photos of the Harding Home under construction. The book is available from Timber Press in Portland. I think it is going to be a great resource for homeowners of our area interested in building green.-RH
Running the Numbers
Today I came across a series of images I feel compelled to share, called Running the Numbers, by Chris Jordan. Chris is a photographer here in Seattle. You might say he's an Andy Goldsworthy of American trash; making statistics of our consumption visible and real with his painstaking photographic assemblages that manage to be horrible and beautiful at the same time. Here is his artist's statement and one of his images, reproduced here with his permission.Running the Numbers
An American Self-Portrait
This series looks at contemporary American culture through the austere lens of statistics. Each image portrays a specific quantity of something: fifteen million sheets of office paper (five minutes of paper use); 106,000 aluminum cans (thirty seconds of can consumption) and so on. My hope is that images representing these quantities might have a different effect than the raw numbers alone, such as we find daily in articles and books. Statistics can feel abstract and anesthetizing, making it difficult to connect with and make meaning of 3.6 million SUV sales in one year, for example, or 2.3 million Americans in prison, or 410,000 paper cups used every fifteen minutes. This project visually examines these vast and bizarre measures of our society, in large intricately detailed prints assembled from thousands of smaller photographs. The underlying desire is to emphasize the role of the individual in a society that is increasingly enormous, incomprehensible, and overwhelming.
My only caveat about this series is that the prints must be seen in person to be experienced the way they are intended. As with any large artwork, their scale carries a vital part of their substance which is lost in these little web images. Hopefully the JPEGs displayed here might be enough to arouse your curiosity to attend an exhibition, or to arrange one if you are in a position to do so. The series is a work in progress, and new images will be posted as they are completed, so please stay tuned.
~chris jordan, Seattle, 2007
Plastic Cups, 2008
60" x 90"
Depicts one million plastic cups, the number used on airline flights in the US every six hours.
Partial zoom:
Detail at actual print size:
Others in the series include Barbie Dolls, depicting "32,000 Barbies, equal to the number of elective breast augmentation surgeries performed monthly in the US in 2006," Plastic Bottles depicting "two million plastic beverage bottles, the number used in the US every five minutes." and Cell Phones, depicting "426,000 cell phones, equal to the number of cell phones retired in the US every day."
Please have a look at his website for more. http://www.chrisjordan.com/
-RH
How Green is Your Renovation?
Over the holidays I participated in a "roundtable discussion" on green renovation that appears in the April issue of Metropolitan Home. You can read it online here: <http://www.pointclickhome.com/metropolitan_home/articles/met_eco>.
"Roundtable discussion" is in quotes because the interview was conducted via e-mail. Each of us answered questions from the interviewer and cc'd the other participants, so we had a chance to respond to the others' comments, in a way. The answers were then edited and assembled together to simulate all of us sitting around a table talking. While necessary to fit the wide range of answers into a magazine article, the editing removed some of the subtleties of all of our responses, as you will see. But it's great to see Met Home stepping up to the green table, as it were. I was an avid reader of Met Home when I lived in New York City, and have always appreciated the aesthetic sense of the editors. I'm very pleased to have been part of this!The questions were all good ones. Here is one of my full answers:
MH: What are three very important things people should think about when they begin planning a house (or apartment) renovation?
The first question I ask a prospective client is "Have you talked to a real estate agent?" The most environmentally friendly solution to the problem of a house or apartment that doesn't fit current or future needs is to move to one that does! Chances are there is another person or family out there for whom the current house will be perfectly fine. No renovation at all has the least impact. Almost any major renovation is going to require that the owners move out of the house while the work is being done, and then move back in once the work is complete. (Or brave the chaos and inconvenience of living in a construction zone.) Buying a new place they only need move once. A major house renovation is likely to take at least six months and probably more like a year to design and permit, and then another six months to a year to build. If they can find an appropriate place to buy, they could be into their new home and comfortable within a couple months. I suggest they take the amount of equity they have in their house, add it to the amount they were planning on spending on the renovation, and then see what they can find out there on the market for that total. Only after they've done that, and looked hard at the scope of work they're undertaking and their connection to the immediate neighborhood and local community, do we start talking about a renovation.
The second question would be "How long do you plan on living in this place?" Virtually all of my clients plan on living in their houses the rest of their lives. That suggests possibilities and considerations that wouldn't come into play if they imagined they'd be moving on to another home in five years. For example "payback period" for green choices and "resale potential" become relatively meaningless, while "aging in place" becomes quite important.
The third big question is "Should this be a renovation or should we deconstruct the house and start from scratch?" (Obviously not an issue for apartments...though there were a few in New York City I would have liked to deconstruct...) Of course I would not suggest this route to the owners of a house with significant merit, either architectural or sentimental. When I first started my practice in Seattle this was a last resort--we would do all we could to keep as much as possible of an existing house. These days I am much more likely to consider deconstruction right off the bat. Two things have changed: a sense of urgency about climate change, which suggests a rigorous consideration of the energy use of a building over its lifetime, and the spectacular increases in the cost of construction over the last four or five years. If we are extending the usefulness of a house by another hundred or so years, we had better do all we can to reduce its energy consumption over that period. The bulk of houses that are coming up for renovation these days (50's and earlier) were built at a time when energy use was not really considered. It is much easier and less expensive (even in initial capital costs) to build a high performance house from scratch than to renovate one to the same standard. The systems of these houses are reaching the end of their useful life. A renovation of a '50's or earlier house invariably includes replacing all of the main systems of the house--plumbing, heating and electrical--which require ripping in to many of the interior walls, as well as replacing or upgrading windows and roofing. We are left then, with a shell of 2x4 studs often needing considerable futzing with to accommodate the new design, a shell that can only fit R-13 insulation unless we remove the original siding to add rigid insulation on the exterior. At that point, deconstruction is a better path.
OK, if I had four questions the fourth would be "How much is enough?" But I'll leave it at that for now.
-RH
Green Above, Chrome Below
Well, in fact there's not a lot of chrome on any of the bikes in my garage, but it's a good headline, eh?Our green-roofed garage appeared on Dwell Magazine's blog on Monday.
http://www.dwell.com/daily/blog/15753362.html
-RH