Arranging and installing the plants presents [...]]]>

This weekend we get a special treat: we’ll be taking delivery of over 250 tropical plants and installing two indoor living walls. It’s the culminating step in a complete renovation of Area Yoga Studio in Downtown Brooklyn and promises to transform the character of the space.

Arranging and installing the plants presents lots of artistic and technical challenges, but a lot of the success of the green wall has taken place quietly over the last few months, in the careful process of plant selection.

We enjoy pushing the envelope of green contracting in New York City, and we like to think outside the box in our species choices too:  the challenge is to avoid the tired old themes of corporate and institutional plantscaping without compromising ease of maintenance and good growth.

We start with a process of elimination based on temperature range, the space available, the access to sunlight and the budget.

Then we look at the things we can control, like light and water, and base our plant selection on what we can provide in a sustainable way. In this case we’re using T5 fluorescent lights, which have a great balance of energy efficiency, affordability and strong, broad-spectrum light for plant growth.  Water for the green wall is recycled from the sink of a nearby bathroom, reducing the building’s water use as well as the outflow to our overburdened sewer system.

Next we list what functions we want the plants in our living wall to perform. Where an outdoor green wall installation would consider the effect on insulation and shading, in this case we were looking mainly for air purification, and managed to include plants that reduce levels of formaldehyde, benzene, ammonia and others.

This brings us to the most gratifying step in species selection: aesthetics. A complex palette of leaves and flowers that will add a sense of depth to the space has to be balanced with need for a meditative atmosphere of concentration. It is a yoga studio after all. At the same time the plants and their built context have to be matched: a challenge in New York when most of the viable indoor plants are native to the faraway tropics.

And finally we have to source our plants. We try to get everything as locally as possible, but there’s only one place in nature where conditions match the low light and moderate temperatures found in a New York City building: the understory of a tropical forest. That’s where almost all houseplants come from, and it means that our closest source is Florida.

Transporting plants over those distances is decadent in energy terms, but it does give us an opportunity to advance state of the art green design. We may have brought the plants a long way, but we’re using them to experiment with indoor living systems for grey water purification, and creating a magical space for Brooklyn yoga students to rest their eyes in shades of green while they practice.  We think that’s work that needs to be explored, if anything to ultimately decide the process is not ecological enough.

So that’s how we arrived at the following list. They’re a beautiful bunch of plants and we can’t wait to get their hands on them.

Anthurium,  assorted colors

Bromeliad Guzmaniam, assorted colors

Gold Dust Croton

ZZ

Dracaena Dragon Series,  assorted varieties

Aspidistra

Spath

Aglaonema, assorted varietes

Spider Plant

Dens Orchid

Bird’s Nest Fern, Japanese and Kangaroo varieties

Nephthytis Allusions, assorted colors

Philodendron

Hoya

Pothos

So come take a class at Area Yoga on Montague street in Brooklyn and check out the new indoor living wall installation. It promises to be magical!

Sketchup has [...]]]>

Google Sketchup is an architectural design tool. As a New York design/build firm we use it to show clients 3D renderings of our jobs. We’ve used it for all sorts of things – decks made out of salvaged glass sheets, natural pools, salvaged kitchen cabinet layouts, store layouts, green roofs, buildings…you name it.

Sketchup has some green related tools, specifically:

• Evaluating solar potential – See shading and sun exposure on your design based on its geographic location and time. Useful.
• Exploring sustainable solutions (their words not mine) – They claim Sketchup is green because some green design companies use them. If a green company buys gas is the gas station green?
• Simulating energy performance – There are some green related plugins you can use to simulate different scenarios, but they are third party, not Google.

Conclusion: Google Sketchup was built for deigners and does a good job, but the fact that green designers use it has everything to do with them being designers and little to do with them being green.

Google’s attempt to associate itself with the green design movement is weak. I like Sketchup as a design tool but as a Green Designer I am not impressed by their feeble attempt to greenwash the product.

We thre this together in a couple hours to show the client of an ecological toy store

It is easy in Sketchup to show the space from different perspectives

We were then able to use the Sketchup plans to design the Formaldehyde free FSC green shelves

The store is always packed and we'd like to think that our design contributed to that success.

The clients had a beautiful garden in the back yard of their brownstone in Bedford [...]]]>

Spring gardening is upon us and as a New York soil remediation company we are getting a lot of calls from clients wanting to remove lead contaminated soil from their back yards. We just finished a job last week.

The clients had a beautiful garden in the back yard of their brownstone in Bedford Stuyvesant. Several years of careful work had brought a happy profusion to the space, with native plants nestled close to roses and figs, carefully placed tall grasses creating a tiny ‘secret garden’ area,  and a raised bed providing fresh vegetables every summer.

But when their adorable son reached 18 months old, they decided to have the soil tested before letting him play in the garden – and they were very glad they did. The soil was contaminated with 2500 ppm (parts per million) of lead, enough to make it unhealthy for adult contact and very dangerous for a child. To put the number in perspective: uncontaminated soil has about 10ppm of lead; in the Netherlands, 40ppm or more is considered unacceptable; in the US, the EPA advises remediation in children’s play areas at 400ppm!

Lead has found its way into our urban soils mainly from paints and (pre-1980s) automobile emissions, and like other heavy metals it is very persistent and will be there for many years to come.  It can poison us either through direct contact with the soil or by eating plants that have grown in it, and it causes damage to the brain and nervous system, behavior problems and slow growth in children, as well as reproductive problems in adults.

Unfortunately, almost all soil in New York City (and other major metropolises like Detroit) are contaminated with heavy metals.  A $35 soil test from Brooklyn college will tell you what heavy metals you have and in what quantities, but it’s safe to assume contamination if you’re gardening in the city. Luckily there are several options for remediation, and as an ecological contractor, we can find solutions that work with your situation and budget.

The fastest and most affordable methods involve switching to container or raised bed gardening with fresh soil; the least expensive but slowest option is phytoremediation, where plants that take up heavy metals from the soil are grown and removed several times over 2 to 5 years; and the fastest and most pricey involves removing and replacing the existing soil.

In this case, we worked with the clients to find a custom solution that would quickly have their garden ready for their son to play in. The whole area was covered with a layer of compost to bind with lead and alkalinize the soil (making heavy metals less available to plants):

Remediating a back yard with high lead levels.

Then a layer of landscape fabric was laid as a root barrier. This also creates a break between clean and toxic soil in case the client goes digging later.

Remediating lead contaminated soil with root barrier

Six inches of fresh soil were brought in to go on top of this, and extra was added to recreate the raised vegetable bed. Many plants were carefully transplanted and preserved so the garden wouldn’t have to be started completely from scratch.

Adding clean top soil over isolated lead contaminated soil.

We then laid the border, the bluestone and built a nice little deck in the back out of old growth salvaged wood. We planted native will grass instead of laying sod. It should be sprouting in the next couple weeks.

A lead free garden

Thanks to his parent’s green thumbs and a little bit of help from Eco Brooklyn, our client’s son will grow up with a safe and beautiful garden for play and exploration, but most gardens and back yards in New York have not been tested or remediated, and we can only guess at the long term effects of lead exposure for us and our children. So if you’re gardening (or thinking about it), be sure to get a soil test, and call us for a consultation if you’d like to find out more about remediating your soil.

The book is organized into eight sections:

Education

Enterprise

Water

Energy

Mobility

Food

Well-being

Play

There were plenty of great ideas that could be applied to [...]]]>

I read the book Design Revolution, 100 Products That Empower People by Emily Pilloton to see if any of the designs could apply to a New York green contractor.

The book is organized into eight sections:

Education

Enterprise

Water

Energy

Mobility

Food

Well-being

Play

There were plenty of great ideas that could be applied to a New York city home – cool solar panels/wind harvesters in the form of leaves, composting toilets that normal people would use, all sorts of bike ideas, and a food composter that looks like an espresso machine.

The most interesting thing for me was the Eco-Machine, designed by Todd Ecological, a company founded by John Todd. An Eco Machine, also known as a living machine, uses plants and microbes to filter waste water. This has direct applications for New York ecological landscaping and green construction.

A Brooklyn brownstone, instead of passing its sewer to, say, the Gowanus Canal it would pass it to a series of water gardens in the yard. These gardens would be beautifully designed to fit into the an environment used by children, adults, pets and Williamsburg hipsters.

The key is in the design of combining function and aesthetic, something a good eco-landscaper could do. The end result of the Brooklyn Brownstone living machine is a lush yard full of healthy plants and a NY sewer system that is not overloaded.

This is not unrealistic. It is very practical and possible. It is also illegal. Great ideas move faster than massive bureaucracies like the Department of Buildings and Department of Environmental Protection….

A living machine system in Florida

As an ecological landscaper who uses gray water and rain water runoff to feed the garden the idea of a living machine takes it a step further. Very exciting stuff and something I plan on implementing at an undisclosed brownstone near you.

Green building is a symbiosis of many levels that forms a harmonious whole, and architecture in older societies like [...]]]>

The book Japan Style – architecture + interiors + design, by Geeta Mehta and Kimie Tada contains lush photographs by Noboru Murata and is an inspiring insight into how traditional Japanese buildings are deeply green.

Green building is a symbiosis of many levels that forms a harmonious whole, and architecture in older societies like Japan is filled with a complex structure that covers an astounding array of natural, social and spiritual perspectives.

The book does a great job at showing these levels.

I am especially drawn to the book because the homes are on small lots in urban environments, and as a New York green contractor I know very well what it means to build green on small urban lots.

Unlike your typical New York homes, the Japanese homes in this book are expansive and deeply connected to nature. They are not expansive in size, in fact the homes are minuscule compared to US standards, rather they are expansive in style.

And this is the genius of traditional Japanese architectural design. The photographs show rooms and vistas as broad as a mansion, yet the square footage is not. This real feeling of space and airiness is achieved through intelligent placement of openings onto the garden, the use of fine building materials and a sparseness of design that was modern many centuries before Modernism became popular.

So much of Japanese traditional building echoes today’s green building ethos. The materials are all natural. The floor plans are small. Rooms are used for multiple uses. There is a deep connection between the home and the natural surroundings around it, both in terms of design and materials. The buildings follow the credos of “Less is more” and “form follows function”.

But most importantly for me the design is based on the understanding that our home is, like our body, a temple full of spiritual power. This element turns a collection of building materials into something more than rooms and walls. By being built with an understanding of the spiritual element of design, these homes not only give protection to the body but give support to the soul.

Green building is about natural materials, low embodied energy and energy efficiency. But it is a sack of bricks without the meaning behind it, which has many levels, from political, ecological, social, cultural and yes, spiritual. This meaning is something the traditional Japanese builders, with the benefit of a deep and old culture, drew from and imbued into their work.

The result is a home that nourishes on so many levels. My green contracting work in NY is a world apart from traditional Japan, but in this postmodern world where green building is both simultaneously drawing from cutting edge technology on one side and centuries old techniques on the other, there is a place for traditional Japanese building techniques on my tool belt.

A green builder, if anything, is somebody with a large tool belt.

With a clear focus on Big Sur homes Olsen highlights homes that were built along the same style as the Slow Food Movement, where meaning, lifestyle and experience are just as important as the finished “product”, [...]]]>

The book Handmade Houses, A Century of Earth-Friendly Home Design, by Richard Olsen is inspiration for any green builder.

With a clear focus on Big Sur homes Olsen highlights homes that were built along the same style as the Slow Food Movement, where meaning, lifestyle and experience are just as important as the finished “product”, that is if it ever gets finished – which is rare since how can you finish an experience, it just melds into another.

The green building movement as embodied by modern forward thinking perceptions of society and the environment are very much founded in the 1960′s and 1970′s hippie and counter culture movements that founded so much of what we are today.

Call it 70s hippies’s can-do attitudes, where you Turn on, tune in, drop out, the homes in Olsen’s books are more about a lifestyle than about construction, and if it is about construction it is about building a lot more than just structures but rather the culture that needs those specific structures.

The homes are all “dropped out” in the wilderness, often with views of the Big Sur. They have the vibe of being built by somebody who smoked some really good grass, took a walk on the beach, found some driftwood and said, “Man this wood is beautiful, lets make something out of it.”

And thirty years later they are almost there, their homes an evolving work of art that are full of memories from raising children, hosting friends and living life.

An example of one person's creative home making

The book is an inspiration for me, a New York green contractor. My parents were hippies. We lived in homes like this during my childhood and I draw from that when we build.

My own house, the Eco Brooklyn show house for ecological building, could be in this book. An old hippie architect MISHA SARADOFF walked through it and exclaimed with glee, “I love it! You are doing everything WRONG!”

WRONG in terms of budget, formal architectural theory, schedule, and everything else that matters in mainstream capitalist construction. Misha once talked me out of becoming an architect for the same reason.

The Brooklyn green show house lower duplex with fire escape catwalk, cement floor and earthen walls

Stairs from old growth pine, clay wall and a boulder we found while digging out the cellar. We call her Lucy.

But the show house is RIGHT from the standpoint of Olsen’s book. More work of art for the living than house, the Eco Brooklyn show house, like the homes in Olsen’s book, is part experiment, part evolution of human need, part creative expression, part collection of found materials.

My one critique of the book is that it portrays itself as an international look into handmade houses, but the truth is that the view is California white centric. Even the homes in other countries might as well be on the coast of Big Sur.

Certainly these homes are worth looking at but to the book as a history of “Handmade Houses” from the past century and not even mention the MILLIONS of hand made homes across the globe by poor dark people is myopic at best.

But the book still has value. With this kind of book you can see the home as an expression of the people who live in it. In this case it is not the home as a commodity that you buy off the shelf. All these homes are unique, just like people are unique. The homes are an expression of people seeking happiness in the world as themselves, something you can’t buy but have to discover for yourself.

The book is about design, history and aesthetics, the main aesthetic being Wabi Sabi. The book is not about building techniques. You don’t have any discussion about energy efficiency, construction ratings or any of the other things people are obsessed with today. The book takes a larger look at cultural trends, specifically the green building trends that can be traced to the 70′s.

[Building] is all about the human consciousness to me. Its about our evolution more than the buildings themselves.

Sitting in NY city watching this fellow green builder in the woods of Washington, I can’t help but long for those sounds of birds [...]]]>

Check out this dude. A real druid. A magical builder. Sunray Kelly

[Building] is all about the human consciousness to me. Its about our evolution more than the buildings themselves.

Sitting in NY city watching this fellow green builder in the woods of Washington, I can’t help but long for those sounds of birds and water in the stillness of the trees. I think a green builder carries that longing in their heart no matter where they build. I know I do. I may be a New York green contractor but I often build with the woods in mind.

You can take a green builder out of nature but you can’t take nature out of the green builder.

Inspired By… SunRay Kelley from Shwood Eyewear on Vimeo.