May 8th, 2008 — inspiration
May from ISA passed on a link to a site where a couple is blogging about their process of designing and building a SIP/Modular Hybrid home. The site is www.GouinGreen.com and is meant to be a play on “Goin’ Green” as the couple’s last name is Gouin.
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May 5th, 2008 — inspiration
…Rural Studio is a remote program of the School of Architecture at Auburn University in west Alabama. For the past few years, their students have been designing and building low-income housing for only $20K in materials and labor ($10K ea). There is a Rural Development loan available through the federal government where very low income people in rural areas are able to borrow a maximum of $20,000 for home repair or construction.
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April 17th, 2008 — inspiration, design
…the point of this post is the plywood stairs proposed by ISA. They have gained inspiration from the plywood stairs built in the Chicken Point Cabin by OSKA Architects. Their project uses a lot simple materials such as plywood and concrete in the same theme as our project.
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April 10th, 2008 — inspiration, design, planning
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The basic idea of a Passive House is to reduce the energy usage of a home by 90% over traditional code built homes. I grabbed this definition off of a site which will hopefully become clearer later in the post: “A Passive House is a building for which thermal comfort can be achieved solely by post-heating or post-cooling of the fresh air mass, which is required to fulfill sufficient indoor air quality conditions without a need for recirculated air.” […]
January 22nd, 2008 — inspiration, design
Well we’ve been getting a lot of feedback on the new facade debuted last week. I have also been running it by anyone who will listen to me and provide input as well in my offline life. I also have a meeting with the local neighborhood committee - The East Kensington Neighbors Association - to solicit feedback on the design prior to knocking on doors of the neighbors to introduce the project and seek further feedback before the design is finalized.
As stated before the new facade is the combination of a few factors that all happened within a 24 hour period and the team has not officially discussed the outcome yet.
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January 18th, 2008 — inspiration, design
If you’ve glanced at our plans today you’ve noticed we are spec’ing out a lot of plywood for flooring, storage, doors and even wall coverings to cut costs. I am always searching for innovative uses of plywood in modern architecture and design for this reason and stumbled upon PLY Architecture today via Materialicious today. Stop by the PLY site and peruse some of their projects. It’s worth a visit if you love good design with inexpensive materials.
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January 15th, 2008 — floorplan, inspiration, design, planning
When I saw this inspirational house on a Inhabitat Prefab Friday post a few weeks ago, it reminded me of our house. Actually it made me think of what our house might look like if we were forced to cut costs in the design as much as possible.
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January 12th, 2008 — inspiration, design
Most of the inspirational homes I find are from the visually fantastic blog - materialicious. Do check it out if you haven’t been there before. Also click through the other links below the images here to see more images on each home.
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January 9th, 2008 — development, inspiration
This inspirational project was completed by architect Edward M Baum and developer Diane Cheatham in Dallas in 2004. As I review the Dwell article detailing the project I am reminded at the similarities to our current project. The project was a prototype for building modern and affordable homes on Dallas’s standard building lots of 50′ x 150′. They were able to fit four, one-story, 1,700 square foot homes on two of these lots and build them for roughly $100 psf using mainly materials sourced from local big box retailers like Home Depot and Lowes…
January 5th, 2008 — energy modeling, inspiration, design, planning
Over the Christmas break I went on what I am now referring to as my “Zero Energy Design Binge.” I started thinking about the through wall air conditioner we are considering to handle the cooling demands for the home and thought it would be fantastic if there was a way to economically eliminate the cooling demand altogether via passive design. This thought quickly put me into research mode and when I couldn’t find anything in stock at my local Borders or B&N, I found an 800 page e-book on the subject from www.ZeroEnergyDesign.com…