1. Affordable Green

Many consumers typically associate green and energy-efficient homes and features with higher costs. However, the development of new business models, technologies, and the mainstreaming of high performance materials is bringing high-performance, healthy homes within reach of all homeowners. Leading the charge are affordable housing groups, including Habitat for Humanity and local land trusts, now building and selling LEED® for Homes- and ENERGY STAR®-certified homes across the country at price points as low as $100,000*. In the existing homes market, energy upgrades are now available through new programs that include low-cost audits and utility bill-based financing. Through such programs as Clean Energy Works Oregon, and Solar City‘s solar lease-to-own business model, no up-front payment is required to take advantage of energy upgrades.

2. Sharing and Comparing Home-Energy Use

As social and purchasing sites like Facebook and Groupon add millions more members, the sharing of home energy consumption data – for rewards – is not far behind. The website Earth Aid (http://www.earthaid.net) lets you track home energy usage and earn rewards for energy savings from local vendors. You can also elect to share the information with others on Earth Aid to see who can conserve the most energy. When coupled with other developments including home energy displays, a voluntary home energy scoring system announced by the Department of Energy, and programs including Oregon and Washington’s Energy Performance Score, a lot more people will be sharing — and comparing — their home energy consumption.

For the rest of the article go to:

http://www.housingzone.com/hz/article/top-10-green-building-trends-2011-selected-earth-advantage-institute

Bring on a heat wave or deep freeze. This cozy little house stays comfortable year-round without green gadgets or a typical HVAC system.

Nestled in seven pristine acres of Hudson Valley forest, this intimate little spec home is sustainable, but not in the way you might think. It has no solar panels, no geothermal system, and no wind turbines, yet it’s expected to consume only one-tenth of the heating and cooling energy used by the average three-bedroom home. How does it work?

Like a thermos.

Think of it as a 1,650-square-foot version of that super-insulated bottle that keeps your coffee hot or your iced tea cold, except in reverse. Its ultra-tight shell keeps extreme temperatures out, most of the time with little to no mechanical intervention. And its main power sources are things nature provides for free: sunlight, shade, earth, and breezes.

Created by architect Dennis Wedlick and custom builder Bill Stratton, the “Hudson Passive Project,” as it’s known, doesn’t follow the same certification playbooks most American green builders have come to rely on. Rather than adhering to LEED or similar blueprints for sustainability (“I equate LEED with the IRS,” Wedlick says. “It’s about as much paperwork and it’s easier to cheat … .”) the house is built to stringent standards set by the Passive House Institute in Germany. Under this rubric, certification is an all-or-nothing deal that’s wholly contingent on hard metrics (BTUs and pascals), not a points-based system. And the emphasis is on passive engineering and resource conservation. The design relies on simple architecture—not technology—to capture or shield the sun, depending on the season. The construction then ensures that not a single unit of precious thermal energy escapes before it is fully maximized.

For the rest of this article go to Builder Magazine Online:

http://www.builderonline.com/building-science/passive-resistance.aspx

Forget stocks. Don’t bet on gold. After four years of plunging home prices, the most attractive asset class in America is housing.

From his wide-rimmed cowboy hat to his roper boots, Mike Castleman fits moviedom’s image of the lanky Texas rancher. On a recent March evening, Castleman is feeding cattle biscuits to his two pet longhorn steers, Big Buddy and Little Buddy, on his 460-acre Bar Ten Creek Ranch in Dripping Springs, a hamlet outside Austin in the Texas Hill Country. The spread is a medley of meandering streams, craggy cliffs, and centuries-old oaks. But even in this pastoral setting, his mind keeps returning to a subject he knows as well as any expert around: the housing market. “I’m a dirt-road economist who sees what’s happening on the ground, and in 35 years I’ve never seen a shortage of new construction like the one I’m seeing today,” declares Castleman, 70, now offering a biscuit to his miniature donkey Thumper. “The talking heads who are down on real estate will hate to hear this, but America needs to build a lot more houses. And in most markets the price of new homes is fixin’ to rise, not fall.”

For the rest of the article click:

http://finance.fortune.cnn.com/2011/03/28/real-estate-its-time-to-buy-again/

The Architecture of Happiness is a delightful little book by Alain de Botton. If you are at all a fan of architecture you will also enjoy the read. De Botton is an unparalleled wordsmith. Below I have quoted some of my favorite lines from the book with little added comment.

Throughout the book he does not necessarily give conclusions or solutions, this is more his observations on architecture and his critique of architects … which really is more of a challenge. A challenge to architects to create beautiful spaces that have an positive effect on our psychology.

I start with the closing line from the book:

“We owe it to the fields that our houses will not be the inferiors of the virgin land they have replaced. We owe it to the worms and the trees that the buildings we cover them with will stand as promises of the highest and most intelligent kinds of happiness.”

From the back cover: “Virtually every page contains a sentence any essayist would have been proud to have written … Gentle affection pervades these pages, as does knowledge of architecture that is both broad and deep. A lyrical and generously illustrated monograph about the intimate relationship between our buildings and ourselves.” – Kirkus Reviews

“Those who have made architectural beauty their life’s work know only too well how futile their efforts can prove. After an exhaustive study of the buildings of Venice, in a moment of depressive lucidity, John Ruskin acknowledged that few Venetians in fact seemed elevated by their city, perhaps the most beautiful urban tapestry in the world. Alongside St. Mark’s Church (described by Ruskin in The Stones of Venice as ‘a Book of Common Prayer, a vast illuminated missal, bound with alabaster instead of parchment, studded with porphyry pillars instead of jewels, and written within and without in letters of enamel and gold’), they sat in cafés, read the papers, sunbathed, bickered and stole from one another as, high on the church’s roof, unobserved, ‘the images of Christ and His angels looked down upon them.’” (p 17)

“Then a new and contentious series of questions at once opens up. We have to confront the vexed point on which so much of the history of architecture pivots. We have to ask what exactly a beautiful building might look like.” (p26)

“What is a beautiful building? To be modern is to experience this as an awkward and possibly unanswerable question, the very notion of beauty having come to seem like a concept doomed to ignite unfruitful and childish argument. How can anyone claim to know what is attractive? How can anyone adjudicate between the competing claims of different styles of defend a particular choice in the face of the contradictory tastes of others? The creation of beauty, once viewed as the central task of the architect, has quietly evaporated from serious professional discussion and retreated to a confused private imperative.” (p28)

“The essence of great architecture was understood to reside in what was functionally unnecessary.” (p47)

“LeCorbusier recommended that the houses of the future be ascetic and clean, disciplined and frugal. His hatred of any kind of decoration extended to a pity for the British Royal and the ornate, golden carriage in which they traveled to open Parliament every year. He suggested that they push the carved monstrosity off the cliffs of Dover…

For LeCorbusier, true, great architecture – meaning, architecture motivated by the quest for efficiency …

If the function of a plane was to fly, what was the function of a house? LeCorbusier arrived (‘scientifically’ he assured his readers) at a simple list of requirements, beyond which all other ambitions were no more than ‘romantic cobwebs’. The function of a house was, he wrote, to provide: ‘1. A shelter against heat, cold, rain, thieves and the inquisitive. 2. A receptacle for light and sun. 3. A certain number of cells appropriated to cooking, work, and personal life’”. (p57)

“Modernism claimed to have supplied a definitive answer to the question of beauty in architecture: the point of a house was not to be beautiful but to function well’.” (p62)

“Of almost any building, we ask not only that it do a certain thing but also that it look a certain way, that it contribute to a given mood of religiosity or scholarship, rusticity or modernity, commerce or domesticity. We may require it to generate a feeling of reassurance or of excitement, or harmony or of containment. We may hope that it will connect us to the past or stand as a symbol of the future, and we would complain, no less expressive level of function were left unattended.

In a more encompassing suggestion, John Ruskin proposed that we seek two things of our buildings. We want them to shelter us. And we want them to speak to us – to speak to us of whatever we find important and need to be reminded of.” (p62)

“If there existed a dictionary … the dictionary would resemble the giant catalogues which provide architects with information on light fittings and ironmongery, but, rather than focusing as those do on mechanical performance and compliance with building codes, it would expound on the expressive implications of every element in an architectural composition.

In its comprehensive concern with minutiae, the dictionary would acknowledge the fact that just as the alteration of a single word can change the whole sense of a poem, so, too, can our impression of a house be transformed when a straight limestone lintel is exchanged for a fractionally curved brick one. With the aid of such a resource, we might become more conscious readers, as well as writers, of our environment.”(p97-98)

“Touring the cathedrals today with cameras and guidebooks in hand, we may experience something at odds with our practical secularism: a peculiar and embarrassing desire to fall to our knees and worship a being as mighty and sublime as we ourselves are small and inadequate. Such a reaction would not, of course, have surprised the cathedral builders, for it was precisely towards such a surrender of our self-sufficiency that their efforts were directed, the purpose of their ethereal walls and lace-like ceilings being to make metaphysical stirrings not only plausible but irresistible within even the soberest of hearts.” (p112)

“We might even, the early theologians suggested, come better to understand God through beauty, for it was He who had created every beautiful thing in the world: the eastern sky at dawn, the forests, the animals, and even more domestic items like a graceful armchair, a bowl of lemons and a ray of afternoon sun shining through a cotton window blind onto the kitchen table. In contact with attractive buildings, we could intimate some of the refinement, intelligence, kindness and harmony of their ultimate maker. In the eleventh century the Muslim philosopher Ibn Sina noted that to admire a mosaic for being flawless, ordered and symmetrical, was at the same time to recognize divine glory, for ‘God is at the source of every beautiful thing.’ In the thirteenth century, from across a divide of faith, Robert Grosseteste, Bishop of Lincoln, asked us to picture ‘a beautiful house, this beautiful universe. Think of this or that beautiful object. But then, omitting “this” and “that”, think of what makes “this” and “that” beautiful. Try to see what beauty is in itself … If you succeed, you will see God Himself, the Beauty which dwells in all beautiful things.’” (p118)

“Spending time in beautiful spaces, far from a self-indulgent luxury, was deemed to lie at the core of the quest to become an honorable person.” (p118)

“The architecture produced under the influence of an idealizing theory of the arts might be described as a form of propaganda. The word is an alarming one, for we are inclined to believe that high art should be free of ideology and admired purely for its own sake.” (p145)

“The theorists of the idealizing tradition were refreshingly frank in their insistence that art should try to make things happen – and, more importantly, that it should try to make us good.” (p147)

“Beauty, then, is a fragment of the divine, and the sight of it saddens us by evoking our sense of loss and our yearning for the life denied us [because of sin, resulting in the loss of Eden]. The quantities written into beautiful objects are those of a God from whom we live far removed, in a world mired in sin. But works of art are finite enough, and the care taken by those who create them great enough, that they can claim a measure of perfection ordinarily unattainable by human beings. These works are bitter-sweet tokens of a goodness to which we still aspire, however infrequently we may approach it in our actions or our thoughts.” (p149)

“[LeCorbusier scolds], ‘These things are beautiful because in the middle of the apparent incoherence of nature or the cities of men, they are places of geometry, a realm where practical mathematics reigns … And is not geometry pure joy?’

Joy because geometry represents a victory over nature and because, despite what a sentimental reading might suggest, nature is in truth opposed to the order we rely on to survive.” (p179)

“Architecture should have the confidence and the kindness to be a little boring.” (p183)

“In his In Praise of Shadows (1933) Junichiro Tanizaki attempted to explain why he and his [Japanese] countrymen found flaws so beautiful: ‘We find it hard to be really at home with things that shine and glitter. The Westerner uses silver and steel and nickel tableware, and polishes it to a fine brilliance, but we object to the practice. While we do sometimes indeed use silver for teakettles, decanters, or sake cups, we prefer not to polish it. On the contrary we begin to enjoy it only when the luster has worn off, when it has begun to take on a dark, smoky, patina.’ (p235)

In writing about LeCorbusier’s 1925 city plan, detailed in The City of Tomorrow and its Planning, le Botton comments, “And because such an environment is uncomfortable, there is always a greater risk that people will respond abusively to it, that they will come to the ragged patches of earth between their towers and urinate on tyres, burn cars, inject drugs – and express all the darkest sides of their nature against which the scenery can amount no protest.” (p245)

In a comment about front doors, which I totally agree and even go further in believing every home should have a full covered front porch, le Botton writes, “When we approach front doors, we appreciate those that have a small threshold in front of them, a piece of railing, a canopy or a simple line of flowers or stones – features that help us to mark the transition between public and private space and appease the anxiety of entering or leaving a house.” (p247)

“The failure of architects to create congenial environments mirrors our inability to find happiness in other areas of our lives. Bad architecture is in the end as much a failure of psychology as of design … those rare architects … create environments that satisfy needs we never consciously knew we even had.” (p248)

“We owe it to the fields that our houses will not be the inferiors of the virgin land they have replaced. We owe it to the worms and the trees that the buildings we cover them with will stand as promises of the highest and most intelligent kinds of happiness.” (p267)

Picked up a new book from Borders this afternoon.

Cottage: America’s Favorite Home Inside and Out.

I’m enjoying the read and ideas in pictures.

From the very first page:

“Cottages are all about connections—connections between the natural and the built environment, between indoor and outdoor living, and between tradition and innovation in construction. In a time when its common for family members to live in different parts of the country, if not in different parts of the world, a cottage can also be the family connection, everyone’s favorite home. Cottages are homes where memories are as strong a foundation as bricks and mortar. The often are built as legacies, connections with future generations.” (Introduction- “The Cottage Connection”, Cottage: America’s Favorite Home Inside and Out).

I relate with that statement. Homes should be thought out, designed for living in, for making connections with family and neighbors.

There are several styles of the American cottage. However, whichever  the style, the cottage tradition of making connections is one that should be continued into the 21st Century.

Click the following links for three articles on the state of the housing market. Three realities which I am building GANT Construction around.

Infill housing remains bright spot in gloomy market

Infill sites in established neighborhoods demand creativity in design, engineering and construction — and custom builders are rising to the challenge.

Survey: Housing market will see an increased demand for rental properties

Fifty percent of survey respondents said they would rent their next home, a 10 percentage point increase since January 2010.

Housing affordability hits it highest level in years

As a lifelong DUCK fan I am pretty excited about January 10th National Championship game.

Is this real? Or is it a dream?

Over the last 15+ years the Oregon Ducks have been building towards this goal. Mike Bellotti lead them to become a fairly consistent top 15 team and under the short tenure of Chip Kelly the Ducks risen to the top.

Kelly is an amazing coach who had developed this team into what it is today in just two years as head coach.

The potent offense nicknamed the “blur” offense by the media is fun to watch and very difficult to stop. The combination of intense training and very fast athletes make for very fast scores and lots of them at that.

Very fun to watch … keep it up DUCKS!

GO DUCKS!!! National Championship here we come!

5 Reasons it will be the best ever – Bleacher Report

And is it working! We are having the busiest Autumn ever! It is great to have plenty of work and great clients.

Call to schedule an estimate for your remodel and custom building needs.

541-221-5829 or gantremodel@gmail.com

Every home should have a welcoming front porch.

A front porch is a place to relax and make connections with family, friends, and neighbors.

A front porch is a place to welcome visitors into your home, welcoming them in out of the rain (in Western Oregon … Fall, Winter, and Spring) and in from the direct sun in Summer.

A front porch is a place of transition from the outside world to the inside.