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 composting […]
Green Kitchen Design Read More »
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, slate
Waste, Toxic Homes Read More »
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 a
Insulation Values For Selected Materials Read More »
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 oil
Great Natural Exterior Paint Read More »
Here is a great animation of the “trash islands” floating in the Pacific Ocean. Billions of pieces of plastic are collected by the currents and corralled into unfathomably large floating garbage heaps. People like to compare them to the size of Texas. I saw one person saying it was as much as three times the
Here is a design our architect intern Matthew Pethley sketched up for a row house we are designing in Bed Stuy. it is not what we eventually designed for them on but I wanted to share it because the ideas are really cool. It would make for a beautiful space. It addresses the issue that
Brooklyn Brownstone Design Read More »
Here are some of the latest earthship videos sent to me from the folks at earthship.com Comments on earthships and the Copenhagen summit. Here is another cool one: The one peeve I have with this last video is “What the world needs now is one Billion earthsips, immediately.” That sounds too much like old school
Michael Reynolds is one of my favorite visionaries. He is doing what Eco Brooklyn aims to do with eco brownstone renovations in Brooklyn – Build net zero homes out of trash – only he does it with earth ships in the Midwest and beyond. Check it out. Really cool. These are the only justifiable new
I think new construction is to building like heroin is to health. It should be outlawed as a threat to our well-being. There are enough old buildings for us to renovate. New construction is a needless act of arrogance and self destruction. There’s really not much more to say. I could explain why I guess
New Construction Should be Outlawed Read More »
We just went away and left our brownstone for two weeks. We turned off all the heat. The only appliance making heat was the fridge. And while we were gone NY got hit with one of the worst snow storms in history. How cold was our home when we came back? A balmy 60 degrees.
Brownstone: No Heat Needed! Read More »
