Green Home Building

Sustainable Architecture Building and Culture

 
January 27th, 2012

The early history of humanity can be reconstructed as an almost limitless quest for earth architecture. The persons who found caves, and later converted them into living spaces, were of enormous significance in the development of human civilization. Would we not still live in the wilderness today if some of our ancestors had not found the cave, restructured it by selectively replacing stones, or had not appreciated the comfortable sheltering aspect of it?

In more recent times, we may look to the irregular holes at the oasis of Siwa in Egypt. Here, underground burial chambers hundreds (if not thousands) of years old that once symbolized ritual respect for the bodies of the dead have now been converted into living spaces. Like the Egyptians, the North American Indians may have evolved the kiva from burial chamber, to ritual space, to living habitat. Deeply rooted in existing ritual is the belief that entry into the kiva is a return to birth. Needless to say, the psychological effects of earth space in ancient times had a great impact on religious life while still providing a sense of security, and positive aesthetics.

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January 26th, 2012

A point of view

By Andy Cox 

 

 

A philosophy

 

Happiness is the vivid bloom

of lives lived in a rich loam.

Our humanity a humus for those to come,

but we too are the beneficiaries of

others amongst us or gone.

So, death is undone through life’s legacy,

ceaselessly so in our common soil,

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January 25th, 2012

The hot topic in real estate is green houses. Men and women are creating, acquiring, and remodeling existing houses to make them a lot more energy efficient, healthy, and have much less of an impact on the environment. Whilst it is a fairly recent trend in housing, it started in commercial developing far more than two decades ago as owners looked for ways to cut rising utility bills. The field rapidly grew beyond a concern with energy to incorporate materials, techniques, and merchandise that conserve scarce resources, recycle utilised materials, and stay away from the use of toxic ingredients and processes. As much better and cheaper goods and materials became accessible, green or eco-friendly building spread to residential construction.

Green constructing is fast becoming the norm for new commercial projects, but it is not clear how a lot of houses are in fact being built with energy saving and environmentally friendly features simply because the statistics still conflate commercial and residential markets.  In 2006, McGraw Hill Construction estimated that by this year green building would represent 10 percent of all construction and the president of the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) said last April that green construction had contributed 8 billion to the gross domestic item throughout the prior eight years. But in neither case do we know if residential constructing represents 20 percent or 90 percent of those figures. There is anecdotal evidence, nonetheless, that green developing is a growing factor in both new residential construction and remodeling. For example, the State of California just enacted the 1st statewide “green” building code and 6,500 builders have signed on to build Energy Star approved houses. USGBC’s LEED program which originally monitored green commercial construction now provides five levels of certification for housing. We can also assume that nonetheless massive green residence developing is right now, it will get bigger to what degree is still an unknown.

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