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We are now accepting checks to buy oysters. Here’s the deal: around the corner from lies the heavily polluted Gowanus Canal. The industrial landscape of this former tidal creek is surreal in its bleakness – but to us it offers the exciting possibility of a rock bottom wasteland that has nowhere to go but [...] Eco Brooklyn’s show house is now home to a beautiful new landscape which has been certified by the National Wildlife Federation as a Certified Wildlife Habitat. Nestled among many homes in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn, NY this garden provides a home for a wide variety of shrubs and perennials that have invited in a number [...] Green design is a broad term. In an attempt to narrow it down, we are looking at how green design and “universal design” or lifespan design are linked. First of all, you’re probably wondering what universal design means. Here are the seven principles that define universal design, according to North Carolina State University [...] When doing an eco renovation of a brownstone there are two key factors: maximizing space and maximizing light. A New York brownstone floor is not the largest of spaces so one way to expand the space is to add a deck off the parlor floor. But this creates a problem with the other important [...] Last week a judge dismissed Henry Giffords law suit against USGBC. Gifford had pointed out that energy audits of LEED buildings showed no greater energy savings than normal buildings of the same class, and in fact LEED buildings showed WORSE energy savings in many cases. Green Source Magazine speaks about it here. USGBC countered [...] Eco Brooklyn’s business model is to salvage as much as possible. We believe this is the true definition of a NY green contractor in a city with such abundant and high quality trash. We recently salvaged what we thought was marble. We cut it down to make all the bathroom and kitchen counters for [...] As a New York green contractor the truth is that our work is very much about things not in NY. Each time we salvage wood from a dumpster we aren’t saving a NY tree. We are saving a Canadian of Brazilian tree. As a company we may be acting locally but our vision is [...] Eco Brooklyn is a Design/Build firm specializing NY brownstone renovations but our design aesthetic and process is very different from other firms. The reason for this is almost completely due to our sourcing. Your typical firm will design something and then build it, sourcing whatever materials are best suited to achieve the form and [...] I just read the book “A Natural System of House Design, An Architect’s Way” by Charles Woods. I was interested in it from Wood’s involvement with Malcolm Wells, a great natural architect and the pioneer of earth covered building. Before I start my review I need to make clear that I see Woods as [...] 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 [...] 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 [...] Here is an interesting PDF giving key facts about green roofs. The most interesting thing is a study they did comparing an R18 insulated roof with a non-insulated green roof. The green roof was a lot cooler in the summer. They also give costs and life assessment numbers. Very interesting. Read the green Roof PDF [...] Despite what we think, planet earth is not run by humans. We have only been on the earth a couple minutes if the earth’s life were an hour. The global weight of insects far outweigh humans in body mass. Here is a great diagram of the world Biomes. It is a way of looking at the [...] Good design is probably the most effective green building technique there is, more than how much you salvage, what chemicals are not used or what technology you put into the house. Good design is what makes a house green or not green. With this green builders perspectivein mind, reading the classic book The Design of Everyday [...] 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 [...] We are building an ecological garden at the Brooklyn green show house. The idea is to harmoniously combine various elements – xeriscape, native plants, edible plants, natural pool, animal friendly plants, permaculture, to name a few – so that the garden is both bountiful and natural to the environment. The garden will be a [...] 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 [...] Sheet rock isn’t very green. It requires a lot of heat to make it and the ingredients are not great. I’ve had little luck finding sheet rock alternatives. Plaster and lath is one but the labor costs make it hard to compete with sheet rock. The best I do so far is use salvaged sheet [...] One of the things Eco Brooklyn is focused on is eliminating the use of concrete. Concrete is normally used in the following areas of the brownstone: the foundation footings, the cellar floor, front sidewalk. Concrete and its ingredient of cement is not green. It produces massive amounts of CO2. So we are eager to [...] It is striking that despite the many green building going on in the US that there still remains some blaring gaps in our knowledge and available products. I encountered another of these gaps recently in my search for a good front door for a Brooklyn Passive House style brownstone. I was looking for something [...] Fans are inherently energy efficient since they reduce your need for an energy hog air conditioner. But for those of us constantly pushing the envelope we want to know what the most energy efficient fan is. Right now my favorite is the Sycamore Fan. The main reason I love it is that it is [...] A client of mine just came back from England raving about her friend’s natural paint company Annie Sloan. Paint, a substance you put onto another surface, usually acts as protection and an aesthetic. Natural paint can be many things but needs to have the same basic elements: a binder, a base and optional color. [...] 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 [...] I just uncovered a New York Times article on earthen floors. It is cool because it mentions the person who is consulting with Eco Brooklyn on some earthen floors in Brooklyn and Harlem. Her name is Sukita and she is very knowledgeable in earthen floors. Here are more cool pics. We have done [...] 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 [...] When people say green kitchen design they usually mean recycled glass counters or something. But the actual design of the kitchen doesn’t change much. For me a green kitchen design alters the behavior of the inhabitants so that they better the environment without extra thought or effort. For example we all know recycling and [...] The other day I passed by a Manhattan condo renovation and saw they were throwing out good stuff: metal studds and flooring. The contractor told me it was a 3,000 sq.ft. condo that right before the current gut reno it had just been gut renovated! It had high end everything: Poggen Pohl German kitchen, [...] The table below gives R values of various building materials. To obtain a wall or ceiling assembly R-value you must add the r-values of the individual components together (this won’t give you an entirely accurate R value if you’ve got thermal bridging but it is good enough for rough estimates). If we are building [...] We’ve been experimenting with exterior wood paint with some great results. The research is based on the traditional Scandinavian red paint, which is a base of linseed oil with various things added. One description: Centuries ago, European farmers sealed the wood on their barns with an oil, often linseed oil, which was a sort of tawny-colored [...] |
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