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Being a green builder is a constant search for more ecological ways of doing things. That’s why we listened when Justin Hall-Tipping told us that in the future, all energy could be sustainable, green, and free. Justin Hall-Tipping, CEO of Nanoholdings, gives a TED talk about the energy applications of carbon nanomaterials. It’s worth a watch, [...] The Native American concept that all our actions today will effect seven generations to come is profound. Green builders understand this naturally. We build homes that may last hundreds of years, protecting families for many generations. Each nail, each brick is a respectful nod to our ancestors who taught us the wisdom of sustainable [...] Unable to sleep at 4am in New York I came accross this video of an abandoned town renovated by a small group of utopians. It is one of the most inspirational green building stories I have seen in a long time. So often green building is housed withing the capitalistic context where it is just another product [...] Here’s to every immigrant worker in the world. Did you ever think that countries were created to create cheap immigrant workers? Here at Eco Brooklyn we love immigrant workers. Not because they are cheap labor. Eco Brooklyn pays based on talent alone, not nationality, race or sex. And if you have a family [...] First 2000, and now 2012: Years in which people think the world might possibly end. The world probably won’t end with a bang, but might just crumble beneath the accumulated consequences of our actions. Meanwhile, American politicians’ opinions of science, especially climate science, are at an alarming low. Sometimes TV makes me wonder if [...] Check out this petition on change.org. We think their proposal to turn an abandoned tract of land into green space will benefit many New Yorkers. The Rockaway Beach Branch Committee is petitioning the New York City Council to turn an abandoned 3.5 mile stretch of the old Rockaway Beach Branch railroad into a green [...] The two best building systems I know of right now are the Earthship and Passive House methods. Right now Eco Brooklyn is lucky enough to be involved in two jobs that involve both systems, one a NY earthship and the other a NY Passive House. Earthship building is best for non-urban parts of the [...] I have tolerated Mayor Bloomberg because he has done some good things for New York’s ecology. He isn’t the mayor of Copenhagen, Denmark. Now that is a city worth looking at in terms of ecology and social planning. But Bloomberg could have been a lot worse. His plan NYC is an acceptable plan, the bare minimum [...] As a New York green contractor you learn very quickly that “natural” does not mean “good”, nor does it mean “bad”. Case in point: the mushroom. Mushrooms are some of the most beneficial human foods available. But you eat the wrong one and you will die. Not good, not bad. Powerful, yes. So the [...] This NYC government web page lists the times, zip codes and dates that helicopters will spray pesticides over the city. They call it the “Aerial Larviciding Schedule”, and define Aerial Larviciding as: Dropping natural bacterial granules by helicopter to marshes and other large natural areas to kill mosquito larvae before they grow into adult mosquitoes. [...] I was speaking with a green building intern today about how green building has a different set of priorities than say a normal corporation. In fact from a green building perspective the priorities of a normal corporation are criminal, suicidal and simply bad business in the long run. I see it as a perspective [...] Here is an excellent pdf on Passive House. It shows the construction methods and results of a group of Passive House buildings in Hannover, Germany, giving a great insight into how Passive House works. PEP-Info1_Passive_Houses_Kronsberg As Passive House builders in New York this information is invaluable to us. In NY we are definitely experimenting [...] Green framing focuses on building walls that use less wood but are still structurally sound. This technique is called the Advanced Framing Techniques, or more specifically Optimum Value Engineering (OVE). As a New York green contractor we are not concerned so much about exterior stud walls since most of our jobs are in brownstones [...] We are over half a year through 2011 and I thought I’d give a short report on our company’s progress. Things are great! We started the year in rough times. 2010 was a year where we took on too many projects and didn’t have the management skills to handle them. Getting clients is not [...] Small changes on a large scale make a huge impact. This is a simple concept and if applied it will improve the countless number of buildings that make up our total global infrastructure. NYC claims around 975,000 buildings and they account for 79% of this cities green house gas emissions. When it comes to [...] A couple blogs (1 , 2 , 3 , 4) have picked up the goings on at 22 2nd street, the Eco Brooklyn green show house and my home. What sparked the interest is a recent screw up by the DOB where they gave me a permit to build a storage room in my front yard [...] Eco Brooklyn just came out of a renovation of a four story brownstone where the budget was very tight. We took the job full of idealism believing we could make green building affordable to somebody with a small budget. It ended badly. We had to hire workers willing to charge lower salaries which resulted [...] As part of our service in the green renovation of a brownstone Eco Brooklyn looks at the brownstone plot in its entirety. This means we don’t just gut and renovate the interior. We also look at how the interior effects the exterior. As a NY green contractor we look at the whole system, from [...] I just read Garden Up, Smart Vertical Gardening for Small and Large Spaces by Susan Morrison and Rebecca Sweet. Humans have become very good at building up with cement and metal. We cover large parts of the planet with buildings of all sizes. We all see the value of building upwards in this way [...] The year has ended and a new one has begun. I have prepared a state of the union statement for where Eco Brooklyn has been and where it is going. Here goes…. 2010 was a turning point for Eco Brooklyn: we became too successful for our size. Up until last year our love for [...] An interesting thing is happening here at Eco Brooklyn. It seems our mission of radical green building without compromise has tapped into something that people really resonate with. This week it dawned on me as my phone was ringing off the hook that there are two forces pulling on Eco Brooklyn. On one side [...] Eco Brooklyn is expanding into natural landscape design and ecological pools. In this process I have been reading a lot and hiring new employees knowledgeable in this field. One book I have found very helpful is Bringing Nature Home: How You Can Sustain Wildlife with Native Plants by Douglas W. Tallamy. It is a must [...] The book Good House Cheap House: Adventures in Creating an Extraordinary Home at an Everyday Price doesn’t set out to be about green building. It aims to show nicely designed and affordable homes. But it ends up showing good green building as well. The many case studies in the book show a pattern. Firstly all [...] Green Home NYC is featuring Gennaro Brooks-Church as a guest speaker. He will be speaking on two key concepts he coined: Build It Forward and the Zero Brownstone. More info below on the event next week. August forum: Working with contractors (AIA credit)August’s forum will discuss working with contractors in both residential and [...] Broadly speaking there are two kinds of green building books: one looks to the latest scientific innovations for solutions and the other looks to revive ancient techniques. Lets call them the futurists and the traditionalists. In the futurists camp you have high tech, in the traditionalists you have low tech. Futurists design houses with [...] On the Eco Brooklyn job sites we have certain green building concepts that we use. They are mostly coined by me to help the crew and clients understand what Eco Brooklyn’s core goals are. They are easy rallying points to help us all stay on track. These terms can be searched on this site [...] The book Green from the Ground Up, Sustainable, Healthy, and Energy-Efficient Home Construction, offers everything its title promises, and yet that very same title shows how wrong the authors are. It is 330 pages full of intelligent “green” building techniques covering everything from efficient insulation techniques to natural ventilation. The book is a fantastic overview [...] We did two jobs over the past week on wood floors. They started out really ugly. And they ended up amazing. We finished them with 100% pure tung oil so they are really natural. The first job was to remove some paint that a previous owner, in their infinite and unfathomable intelligence, had painted [...] Here is an article on Eco Brooklyn in today’s NY Times Blog. http://fort-greene.thelocal.nytimes.com/2010/06/29/sustainable-brownstone-101/ The general gist is that green building can be affordable. They say Eco Brooklyn “practices guerrilla green-building techniques” to achieve this, which involves a lot of dumpster diving and salvage. We try to set up more formal ways of collecting material but it [...] The term Zero Brownstone is an idea I came up with during our experimentation of making the greenest brownstone renovation possible. The Zero Brownstone is based on two concepts during the deconstruction and renovation of the brownstone as well as in the finished home: Zero Waste and Zero Consumption During Construction: Zero Waste - During [...] |
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