Green Building : Jetson Green

Georgia Manufactured Home Gets LEED Platinum, Skips Costly Green Gizmos

When you think of manufactured homes, you might think of the ranch house with vinyl siding that you gingerly pass on the interstate as it travels on the back of a wide-load truck.  You might also think about a LEED Platinum home and imagine a roof spotted with photovoltaic panels, windmill in the front yard, and geothermal dug deep into the ground.  The newest offering from New World Home turns both of these ideas on their heads.

Bike Arc Modular Bike Park System

Commentators take pot shots at the bike storage and showers credit available in the LEED Green Building Rating System, but I've always liked it -- it's hard to ride a bike to work when there's no bike rack.  Certainly bike transportation is good for the environment, and Bike Arc has designed a modular bike park system that I believe will be huge in the next few years.  The company incorporated the system into several designs to suit different needs: the Rac Arc is low profile, the Umbrella Arc saves space (see video below), and the Tube Arc and Half Arc versions protect vehicles from the elements. 

Frugal Smart LEED Discovery Center

This is a new urban nature center, the Discovery Center at the Chattahoochee Nature Center (CNC), which will open Saturday, June 20, 2009.  Although the initial goal was to achieve LEED Silver, the 10,000 square-foot facility will likely achieve LEED Gold as a result of an early and collaborative effort by owner CNC, architect Lord, Aeck & Sargent, landscape architect EDAW, and general contractor Genoa Construction, et al.  Here's what it's all about:

Green LDS Church History Library

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was kind enough to send us an invite to their media day for the super fresh Church History Library.  This cutting-edge building is the embodiment of a mammoth effort spanning several years -- 15 years of planning, 4 years of construction, and countless hours tagging, archiving, and moving millions of artifacts and records to the new location.  With several temperature controlled and sub-zero vaults, a building like this would generally use a lot of energy, but the design prioritized energy-efficiency and LEED certification.

First LEED Platinum Home in Virginia

This modern, award-winning abode is the first LEED Platinum home in Virginia.  Located at 5803 16th Street North in Arlington, the home was built by Metro Green and designed by Kaplan Thompson Architects (the firm that also designed the popular net-zero energy Bright Built Barn).  Although it's a little bigger than the ones we tend to mention -- 3,825 square feet with a tight footprint -- I think the home is worth mentioning for a number of reasons.  First, annual heating and cooling costs are $180 and $125 respectively!  In addition, 5803 has the following green elements:

LEED Platinum Newark Center, Energy Conservation by the Numbers

Green building detractors often point to the lack of hard numbers on how green buildings actually perform in the real world.  As time goes on we'll have a better information as to how all LEED Platinum buildings perform, but for now, we have this success story.  Ohlone College's Newark Center for Health Sciences and Technology is celebrating a year of energy conservation and has the numbers to back it up.  The 128,000 square-foot facility was completed in early 2008, and received LEED Platinum in August of 2008.  It's the first community college to receive such a high certification, and after operating for one year, here's what the numbers tell us:

3716 Springfield House by Studio 804, LEED Platinum and Off the Grid

This is the first of a new series of articles from Robert McLaughlin, founder of House Virescent and co-founder of KCmodern, who will report on green building efforts in Greensburg, Kansas and Kansas City.

Studio 804, the graduate level design-build studio from the University of Kansas School of Architecture and Urban Planning, followed up its successful Modular 1,2,3,4 houses and the 547 Art Center in Greensburg, Kansas with the 3716 Springfield House.  It's another great looking house seeking not only to be LEED Platinum, but to be off the grid as well.  Also known as the Buffalo House, the Kansas City, Kansas project attempts "a holistic approach to sustainability" and uses active solar and wind technologies to power itself.

Seattle Ellis Residence Seeking Platinum

In Bainbridge Island, Washington, there's a slick modern home under construction that was designed by Coates Design for owners Ed and Joanne Ellis.  Although Seattle has roughly 13 LEED Platinum homes as of today, the Ellis Residence has been designed to achieve LEED Platinum and could be the first single-family residence in the Western Puget Sound region to achieve such a lofty designation.  As you can tell from these renderings, the home has a number of active, passive, and green elements in store:

Modern LEED Platinum Madison Street

Three of the six homes at Madison Street just received LEED Platinum certification, making them the first Platinum certified homes in Tennessee.  Developed and designed by Christian Rushing and built by Collier Construction, this modern green project recently received the award of Green Development of the Year by the American Planning Association's Tennessee Chapter.  Rushing says it doesn't cost more to build green, it just requires better decisions and smarter skills.  Here are a few of the homes' green features:

Animal House In St. Louis, LEED Platinum for Dogs and Cats

The Animal House Fund is a public private partnership whose mission is to replace St. Louis City's Animal Care and Control facility with one that is more adoption friendly, thereby reducing the number of strays that are put to sleep.  As a public/private partnership, the funds to build the facility are privately raised, and the new facility will then be handed over to the City of St. Louis.  The current building was built in 1941, and intended to stand a mere two years as a place to gather and put down animals that had been abandoned during World War II.  The new building will set a new standard.