Space and light and order
Posted 8 months, 4 weeks ago at 23:40. 0 comments
Kris hasn’t posted anything in a while about our ongoing house project, so I’ll pick up the slack. We’ve chosen our architect! It was not an easy decision.
I’m generally a fan of the slant at treehugger, but their piece today about 7 Fabulously Green Celebrity Homes rubbed me the wrong way. While it’s fascinating to learn about how Johnny Depp is spending millions to make his own private island more energy efficient, that does little to help everyone else who doesn’t happen to live on that private island. I would hope that given $20 million, I too could also design an eco-home.
Cost is a very real concern, and played heavily in our recent architect choice. We first narrowed the field down to two candidates.
We loved the design aesthetic of our initial front-runner. He had some green design experience, but all of his previous green work had been on large projects with correspondingly large budgets. No doubt he would have designed us a beautiful eco-home, but a demonstration home that costs three-quarters of a million dollars to build (nevermind appraisal value after the fact) isn’t really demonstrating the right things IMO.
In the end, we went with an architect who has much more experience in residential green building. Her name is Jane Thompson. Her previous projects were much more sane price-wise, and in line with what we are planning to do. Our one nagging concern, however, was the lack of any obvious design elements that linked her projects together….the lack of a “Jane Thompson” signature, if you will. We chalked this up to her ability to design what the client wanted rather than imposing her own aesthetic, but we didn’t want to completely sacrifice form at the altar of function. Why bother even hiring an architect if all you want is a super-insulated box?
Late in our architect decision process, we visited her firm’s new office, currently under renovation in New Edinburgh. The new office incorporates an impressive array of green building principles that we expected — mixed-use space at street level (apartment dwellings + green building community resource centre), library and office space on upper levels, top-notch insulation and passive solar planning, and a multi-level green roof with rain water collection — but the roof also follows a beautiful, huge, glorious curve that spans the entire back half of the structure. We were pretty much sold, right then and there.
She’s not hurting for work, but we’re still pushing her to get a website going. It’s in the works, apparently.
