News

A big part of green design is how we use energy. It’s now possible to collect all the energy we need for buildings from renewable clean sources like solar, wind, geothermal, and from streams and rivers. In building design, our first step to heat or cool a building is to consider the exterior color. Dark colors absorb the sun’s energy, making buildings hotter, while light colors reflect the sun’s heat, keeping the building cooler. Therefore, public buildings which normally have a lot of people heating them up usually need cooling, so therefore should be light colored, while residences more often do better with darker exteriors. Our strategy usually is to first consider building colors, then incorporates the greenhouse effect (heat build-up through the windows), and finally by using collectors to heat air or water. We use floors and walls of concrete and masonry, and sometimes volumes of water in tanks, to store the heat so it can be used later. For insulation, we like spray foam. This rigid material is sprayed as a liquid from a gun into crevices and framing spaces.

It seems that germs can’t live on copper or copper alloys like brass or bronze, while they survive on almost all other building materials, including stainless steel. Doorknobs, faucets, countertops, handles, and table tops can all be made with copper. Using copper doesn’t cause microbes to develop resistance the way anti-bacterial soaps do; hospitals are switching to copper surfaces now to fight MERS and other deadly superbugs. This recent discovery has to do with the way copper’s electrons burst the cell walls of microbes, while still being safe for people and pets. In our projects, we’re moving toward copper touchable surfaces wherever we can.

The passive system uses an extremely tight building envelope that is highly insulated. We used to call this the “thermos bottle” concept. Mechanical equipment then controls air coming into the building, heating, cooling, or cleaning it. Heat from air leaving the building is captured by equipment and reused. Passive houses tend to be a lot more expensive than the type we design for the California coast. First of all, the windows required in passive houses need to be especially tight, of a type not general available in America. The special equipment to condition the air and capture waste heat is also quite expensive. Moisture created inside the house, from cooking, showers, laundry, and just by people breathing can build up and cause mold if not very carefully controlled.