Modern Passive House Design | Karuna House | Newberg | Oregon | HOLST

Karuna House is an ambitious residential project designed to meet a combination of the world’s most demanding green building certifications. Built in response to its location on a south facing slope overlooking the Willamette Valley’s rich agricultural land, Karuna House provides spectacular views of majestic Mt. Hood and the Cascade Range to the east.

Heating, cooling, and hot water are supplied by an efficient heat pump system, and a heat recovery ventilator provide the Passive House with a continuous supply of fresh, preheated air. The home’s super-insulated building envelope is expected use 90% less heating and cooling energy than a typical home......more

Energy Efficient House | House 19 | Amersham | England | Jestico + Whiles

House 19 is designed as a carbon neutral, energy efficient home in the ancient historic town of Old Amersham, nestled in the Chiltern Hills. The house fuses traditional forms and local materials in an elegant and modern way to make full use of the natural aspect and orientation of the site.

The development of a simple plan and section has delivered a house of exceptional quality whilst at the same time bringing together the most comprehensive range of passive and active energy-saving features in a well-considered, thoughtful assembly of light-filled spaces, suited to 21st century living.......more

LEED Platinum House | Tiburon Bay House | Butler Armsden Architect

In 2007 our client set out to build the highest performing LEED Platinum house possible and found the perfect site in the form of a dilapidated house on a sloped lot on the north side of the Tiburon peninsula. The entire team was tasked with setting an example of just how far this energy saving architectural exercise could be pushed to set an example of great design and great performance at the same time. The floor plan of the house is centralized around a vertical stair to minimize circulation for people and utilities.The rooms are then allowed to spiral away from this core to take advantage of the views and the garden. An exterior bridge that serves as an outdoor living space also connects the garden to the house and solves the difficult problem of entering a house on a fairly steep uphill site. All of the materials used in the project are recycled or sustainable and in some cases, like the retaining walls, were salvaged from the foundations of the original house. Electricity and hot water are solar powered, and there is even a complex water reclamation system that is technologically ahead of the local building codes.......more

Sustainable House | 2 Bar home | Menlo Park | California | Feldman Architecture

The 2 Bar home in Menlo Park, California represents a very cost-conscious design and implementation of green materials and technologies for a couple with two young children. The new residence replaced an awkward and inefficient structure which sat in disrepair with a smart, sustainable, open home that embraced the family’s indoor/outdoor lifestyle.
The 2 Bar concept floats a bedroom bar above and perpendicular to a living bar, an arrangement that allows both spaces to open up to more light than the typical box. The lower, living level features accordion and lift/slide doors which allow the house to open to a generous backyard and garden. A private, green roof with deck allows the upper level to also have a connection to garden and landscape. The horizontal slats that clad the upper bar create a simple and elegant rain screen and provide operable panels over the windows that can be easily moved to control light and privacy. A compact and efficient layout, along with several sustainable materials and systems, were included to meet the clients’ concern for cost and environmental consciousness, including sustainable flooring and a photovoltaic array.......more

Green Dwelling | BOUCHER GRYGIER SHIPPING CONTAINER HOUSE | Leger Wanaselja Architecture

The shipping container is the standard for shipping goods from place to place. Built to exacting specifications to withstand tremendous loads and, with refrigerated units, to maintain low internal temperatures efficiently, these vessels of commerce make excellent building blocks for architecture. Even after many trips around the globe, they still easily meet or exceed the building codes for construction. As a net importer, the US ports are filled with them.........more

Low Energy House | The Holm | Solway Firth | Scotland | Simon Winstanley Architects

This house is located in an idyllic setting in the Galloway hills just off a quiet ‘A’ road and a few miles from the Solway Firth. It was designed for the potter Will Levi Marshall and his family. The site was a large, relatively flat, wet paddock surrounded by mature trees. The house sits on the north east corner of the site to allow for south west facing living area. The paddock has been planted with wild flowers, so the timber building appears to sit lightly on the ground. The pottery sits at right angles to the house forming a court area and screening off the private garden. Both buildings have a semi industrial feel, softened by the cedar cladding. The house is organised in an L shaped plan; one length providing open plan living space which includes a kitchen, dining area and living space; and the other containing bedrooms, utility and a study. The living area has an expressed structure with a steel frame and exposed douglas fir joists with plywood decking. The southern elevations are fully glazed and allow the owner to open the house to the landscape. The entrance is located in a glass link between the living space and the bedrooms, so that as you approach the building there are views through to the garden.....more

Passive House | Villa Nyberg | Borlänge,Sweden | Kjellgren Kaminsky Architecture

Kjellgren Kaminsky has produced Swedens first series of passive houses sold as type houses in collaboration with Emrahus, our goal is to make this environmentally friendly building technique available for all. Villa Nyberg is the first one to get built. The villa has been customized for the Nyberg family and is situated in Borlänge, central Sweden.
Passive houses are extremely well-insulated buildings that are largely heated by the energy already present in the building - people and our household equipment generate a lot of energy. Our energy simulations show that this villa will have an energy consumption for heating of only 25 kWh/m²year........more

Scraphouse | Civic Center Plaza | San Francisco California | Jensen Architects

Designed in collaboration with Public Architecture and other local design firms for World Environment Day 2005, this green demonstration home is built entirely of salvaged materials. Erected on the Civic Center Plaza adjacent to San Francisco City Hall, ScrapHouse showcases the creative use of previously discarded materials. Some materials were re-invented for their intended purpose, such as a chandelier using several discarded lamps. Other solutions present scrap in innovative ways. One wall, composed of 500 old phonebooks stacked vertically, provides both insulation and surface texture. Rethinking a standard single-family home, the ScrapHouse facilitates design discussion and community awareness about the possibilities to “reclaim, recycle and re-use.”....more

Sustainable green eco house

Here is yet another project that’s promises sustainability in grace. It’s a Fab Lab House that’s the ideal example of green living! From Institute of Advanced Architecture of Catalonia (IAAC), the Madrid based project assures to generate three times more energy than it consumes. If you wonder why this eco-chic fab house designed this way then I would want to tell you that it’s for a reason. Actually, it’s a sustainable, self-sufficient structure whose form follows energy. Wanna go for this green home? Well, it’s currently available for sale. The smallest model will cost you 45.000 €. And if you wanna go for a bigger one, the prices vary accordingly.
More at Hometone

Cloud9 | Villa Bio-Sustainable House | Barcelona, Spain

For the architectural tourist, the very mention of Barcelona brings to mind the fantastical world of Antonio Gaudí. Despite the 21st-century gloss of a sleek, high-tech, economic hub, Catalonia’s capital city’s greatest design export remains the eccentric turn-of-the-(last)-century designer. From high above the city in Gaudí’s Park Güell, a hallucinatory vertical landscape of tiled grottos and organically unfolding gardens, the view is bullied by the Sagrada Familia, the architect’s über-basilica, which has been under construction since the 1880s. In the Eixample—a neighborhood of broad avenues and octagonal intersections developed to connect the city’s ancient center with once-outlying towns—the sidewalks in front of Gaudí’s Casa Batlló and Casa Milà are clogged with throngs of ice cream–eating tourists.

A few blocks away from these celebrated structures, in an alien cube set within a garden courtyard, Gaudí’s heir apparent, Enric Ruiz-Geli, is quietly plotting the next Catalan design revolution. Ruiz-Geli’s firm, Cloud9, works at the outer reaches of designand technology’s intersection—turning complex, data-powered projects into effortless and eminently livable buildings. At 38, Ruiz-Geli is transforming Le Corbusier’s dream of machines for living into living machines.

Ruiz-Geli’s most recently completed project, the Villa Bio, is situated a little over an hour outside of Barcelona in Llers, a green, hilly, sun-bathed sprawl near Figueres (hometown of everyone’s favorite mustachioed surrealist, Salvador Dali). The area reads like a textbook Mediterranean suburb and feels oddly similar to California’s faux-Mediterranean enclaves—from the gleaming new terra-cotta tiles and white stucco walls down to the perfectly manicured lawns, swimming pools, nosy neighbors, and stringent normativa (or community building rules).

The Villa Bio is trapped in a contextual oxymoron—given the neighbors, it’s utterly out of place, but one look at the natural surroundings tells you which house fits right in. Two years in the making, it was no easy task to make the most of client Carles Fontecha’s small piece of land. The sloping coiled snake of a plan, with underground garage and a 50-foot cantilevered section, is no small feat of engineering. The result is economical, beautiful, and environmental. The Villa Bio is a firework of astute solutions that exemplify what the sustainable suburban home of tomorrow can be today.

Read more: DWELL

House On Evans Avenue | Austin, Texas | Rick Black Architect

This very compact house was pushed up against the zoning setback of its found half lot in central Austin. The opportunity to build small gave us the chance to explore some ides about relationship between relative scale and absolute size, such as the balancing of intimate space with monumentally.
The house achieved a Five Star Rating from The Energy's Green Building Program. It is constructed with combination of structural steel and light gauge steel framing, clad with autoclave aerated concrete and metal siding. Interior finishes including stained, painted pine siding,carrera marble and magnesium oxide wallboard.
A ground source ( geothermal) heat pump air conditions the house with two wells of 190' deep each.
House Data:
Description: 1073 sf /3 bed/1.5 bath residence
Completed:2008
More house designs at Rick Black Architect

Mileikowsky's House, Linkebeek,Belgium | Samyn and Partners

This is a mixed-use construction for a cinematographer that includes production and workspaces as well as a residence.The construction includes the street level of an existing small house. It now houses the entry hall, a large office and a kitchen ; the lving-room and the stairway are in the extension to the building.The professional studios occupy all the cellars as well as part of the second floor.The remainder of this floor includes the master bedroom with its bathroom, as well as five children's rooms and sanitary installations. They are equipped with a mezzanine protected by textile netting that leads to the glassed-wall facade. The building presents curved and vegetalised facades that are very private and closed to the neighbours to the north, the east and the south. In contrast, the west facade is entirely glass-walled as if it were one huge partitioned window.Immense translucent white polyester curtains in widths of 1.6 m suspended from the top of the structure to the ground floor run along this great « window » to ensure shade in the summer months.Initially conceived as a wall of ivy with a painted copper roof, the vegetalised facade is finally composed of a selection of exotic plants chosen by the botanical artist Patrick Blanc, and extends to cover the roof.It was necessary to determine the structure, the insulation, and the water-tightness of the envelope and resolve some building physics issues in order to receive the necessary support systems, irrigation and fertilisation systems for the plants that are set into a felt support stapled to rigid PVC panels.

600 sqm; (1999-2007)
Client : BOOLY.
Architecture : Partner in charge : B. Vleurick.
Associates : S. Bessalah, B. Darras, Ph. Gaube, I. Hankart, P. Hendrix, A.S. Petit.
Structure : SAGEC for execution.
Services : Samyn and Partners.
Consultant: Wall planting: P. Blanc (Paris)
Text and images from Samyn and Partners