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 Things …
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 read …
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 the …
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 classic example …
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. The …
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 complex …
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 of …
The book Graywater, the Next Wave is one of many graywater books I have read in my ongoing search for a viable graywater system for Brooklyn brownstones. The book offers a great beginners introduction on how to build a residential graywater drainage system. It doesn’t answer my questions thought. Firstly because they flat out state …
Check this PowerPoint out. It is cool. It shows images of the earth and other celestial entities. It gives a really great perspective of our place in the universe, both as a small spec in a vast ocean and as a very beautiful, fragile gem. EnglishAstronomie2
The boat Plastiki is a boat built entirely out of salvaged plastic. I presume it is a play on the original boat called Kon-Tiki that THOR HEYERDAHL built out of reeds. You have to check out their site. Check out the pictures and the vids. They are on such a high that it is really …
