Essential Sustainable Home Design: A Complete Guide to Goals, Options, and the Design Process (Sustainable Building Essentials Series, 5) - Softcover

Magwood, Chris

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0865718504 ISBN 13: 9780865718500

Verlag: New Society Publishers, 2017

Inhaltsangabe

Design Your Dream Sustainable Home with Confidence
Part of the Sustainable Building Essentials series, Essential Sustainable Home Design is the complete guide to envisioning, planning, and designing a high-performance, environmentally friendly home. Learn how to turn your ideas into a practical, buildable plan while maximizing energy efficiency, durability, and comfort.

What You'll Learn

• Clarify Your Vision: Define goals, priorities, and pathways to bring your sustainable home project to life.
• Smart Decision-making: Use a criteria matrix to compare materials, systems, and design options for optimal performance and environmental impact.
• Integrated Team Approach: Work effectively with architects, designers, engineers, and code officials to keep your project on track.
• High-performance Building Science: Understand the fundamentals of thermal comfort, energy efficiency, moisture management, and durability to inform design choices.
• Practical Planning Tools: Streamline logistics, material sourcing, budgeting, and construction protocols to turn vision into reality.
• Material and System Guidance: One-page summaries and ratings of popular sustainable building materials and systems help you make informed, confident decisions.

Written by Chris Magwood, a leading sustainable building expert, this guide blends practical methods, design strategies, and building science for both DIY homebuilders and professionals. Whether designing from scratch or improving existing plans, this handbook gives you the confidence and tools to create a truly sustainable home.

Explore the full Sustainable Building Essentials series for practical, illustrated guidance on natural building techniques, high-performance walls, and sustainable construction systems.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Chris Magwood has designed and built some of the most innovative buildings in North America, including the first off-grid, straw bale home in Ontario which became a fifteen-year research project into the implementation of sustainable building materials and technologies. Chris Magwood lives in Peterborough, Ontario.

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Design your own sustainable home

MANY PEOPLE DREAM of building a beautiful, environmentally friendly home. But until now there has been no systematic guide to help potential builders work through the complete process of imagining, planning, designing, and building their ideal, sustainable home.

Essential Sustainable Home Design walks potential homebuilders through the process starting with key concepts, principles, and a project vision that will guide the house to completion. Coverage includes:

• How to clarify your ideas and create a practical pathway to achieving your dream
• A criteria matrix to guide design, material, and systems decisions
• Creating a strong, integrated design team and working with professionals and code officials to keep the project on track from start to finish.
• Key building science concepts that make for a high-performance, durable building
• Primer on building logistics, material sourcing, and protocols to ensure that the initial vision for the project comes to fruition.
• One-page summaries and ratings of popular sustainable building materials and system options.

Ideal for owner-builders and sustainable building contractors working with clients aiming to design and build a sustainable home.

Chris Magwood has designed and built some of the most innovative, sustainable buildings in North America, including the first off-grid, straw bale home in Ontario. He is co-founder and director the Endeavour Centre for Innovative Building and Living and co-editor of the Sustainable Building Essentials series. Chris is the author of Essential Prefab Straw Bale Construction , Essential Hempcrete Construction , Straw Bale Details , More Straw Bale Building , and Making Better Buildings .

"It's all here. Everything you need to know about designing a sustainable home, for you, your family and the planet. Easy to read and understand while tackling a myriad of complex subjects."
- Martin Hammer, architect, co-author of the Straw Bale, Light Straw-Clay and Tiny Houses appendices in the International Residential Code

"Finally! An up-to-date overview of the most important approaches and questions to address when making a more sustainable home."
- Ben Falk, MALD, author, The Resilient Farm and Homestead and Whole Systems Design, LLC

"An intelligent synthesis of all things "green," presented in an easy-to-understand format to help future home owners make the best choices for every stage in creating their new home."
- Paula Baker-Laporte FAIA co-author, Prescriptions for a Healthy House and The EcoNest Home

"Both comprehensive and concise."
- David Eisenberg, Director, Development Center for Appropriate Technology

"I will be referring prospective clients and colleagues alike to Essential Sustainable Home Design ."
- Tim Krahn, LEED AP, P. Eng.

New Society's Sustainable Building Essentials Series aims to provide the highest quality information on sustainable building methods and materials. Editors Chris Magwood and Jen Feigin have scoured the world of sustainable building to bring you the techniques and systems that deliver measureable benefits in terms of greater energy efficiency and reduced environmental impact. Written by the world's leading sustainable builders, designers, and engineers, these succinct, user-friendly handbooks are indispensable tools for any project.

Aus dem Klappentext

Design your own sustainable home

MANY PEOPLE DREAM of building a beautiful, environmentally friendly home. But until now there has been no systematic guide to help potential builders work through the complete process of imagining, planning, designing, and building their ideal, sustainable home.

Essential Sustainable Home Design walks potential homebuilders through the process starting with key concepts, principles, and a project vision that will guide the house to completion. Coverage includes:

• How to clarify your ideas and create a practical pathway to achieving your dream
• A criteria matrix to guide design, material, and systems decisions
• Creating a strong, integrated design team and working with professionals and code officials to keep the project on track from start to finish.
• Key building science concepts that make for a high-performance, durable building
• Primer on building logistics, material sourcing, and protocols to ensure that the initial vision for the project comes to fruition.
• One-page summaries and ratings of popular sustainable building materials and system options.

Ideal for owner-builders and sustainable building contractors working with clients aiming to design and build a sustainable home.

Chris Magwood has designed and built some of the most innovative, sustainable buildings in North America, including the first off-grid, straw bale home in Ontario. He is co-founder and director the Endeavour Centre for Innovative Building and Living and co-editor of the Sustainable Building Essentials series. Chris is the author of Essential Prefab Straw Bale Construction , Essential Hempcrete Construction , Straw Bale Details , More Straw Bale Building , and Making Better Buildings .

"It's all here. Everything you need to know about designing a sustainable home, for you, your family and the planet. Easy to read and understand while tackling a myriad of complex subjects."
- Martin Hammer, architect, co-author of the Straw Bale, Light Straw-Clay and Tiny Houses appendices in the International Residential Code

"Finally! An up-to-date overview of the most important approaches and questions to address when making a more sustainable home."
- Ben Falk, MALD, author, The Resilient Farm and Homestead and Whole Systems Design, LLC

"An intelligent synthesis of all things "green," presented in an easy-to-understand format to help future home owners make the best choices for every stage in creating their new home."
- Paula Baker-Laporte FAIA co-author, Prescriptions for a Healthy House and The EcoNest Home

"Both comprehensive and concise."
- David Eisenberg, Director, Development Center for Appropriate Technology

"I will be referring prospective clients and colleagues alike to Essential Sustainable Home Design ."
- Tim Krahn, LEED AP, P. Eng.

New Society's Sustainable Building Essentials Series aims to provide the highest quality information on sustainable building methods and materials. Editors Chris Magwood and Jen Feigin have scoured the world of sustainable building to bring you the techniques and systems that deliver measureable benefits in terms of greater energy efficiency and reduced environmental impact. Written by the world's leading sustainable builders, designers, and engineers, these succinct, user-friendly handbooks are indispensable tools for any project.

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Chapter 2 Decision-Making

Most books about home design jump right into the process of actually putting a house design to paper (or, in the modern context, to a software program). We're not going to get to that stage for a while. Of course, this is an essential part of designing a sustainable home, and it will be covered here in reasonable detail, but designing a sustainable home requires much more than putting lines onto a drafting board in the right order. It needs to start not with drawings, but with goal setting.

The fact that you are reading a book about sustainable home design indicates that you have an interest in setting a goal for your project that in some way addresses key issues of personal and/or societal sustainability. However, each of us probably means something different when we use such a term - and the words we use may themselves be different. Terms such as sustainable, healthy, eco-friendly, natural, green, environmentally-sensitive, and net zero are often used - sometimes interchangeably - to describe the kind of better home an owner desires.

Measurable outcomes as the basis of decision-making

It just won't work to begin your home design based on a couple of turns of phrase and a vague notion of what they mean to you. This book is not a treatise on semantics, so we're not going to try to define any terminology for you. Instead, we are going to focus on defining the actual goals that you are setting out to achieve when you use such terminology. Rather than relying on simple taglines, we're going to focus on well-defined goals and measurable outcomes. If you can knowledgeably set the targets you'd like your project to hit, your chances of succeeding are vastly increased.

Understanding Your Objectives

The unique intention of this book is to help you understand, define, and refine your objectives so that you can make informed choices - from initial siting considerations, through personnel decisions, and down to the level of individual material and system selections. It is critically important to acknowledge that your goals can be undermined by poorly informed choices at any stage of your project. If you fail to set appropriate goals at the "meta" level, then the chances of your project succeeding are greatly reduced, and if you do not ensure that each individual choice you make - throughout the process - adheres to the goals you've set, the results will likewise be undermined.

For example, it is the goal of many homeowners to create an energy-efficient home. At the

"meta" level, this would involve setting a hard target - for example, meeting current Energy Star or Passive House standards. With this kind of clearly definable goal, it becomes possible to make informed and appropriate design, material, system, and personnel decisions. In this case, the clear goal of meeting a particular efficiency standard would narrow down the selection of design professionals to those trained to meet that standard, and it would help with the selection of insulation materials, doors and windows, and mechanical systems appropriate to meeting the standard. Any choice that would subvert the larger goal is easily discarded in favor of one that harmonizes with the overall intention of the project.

Much of this book is dedicated to helping you set these overarching goals because clarity on the relatively small list of guiding issues greatly simplifies the very large list of decisions that need to be made during a design/build project.

Learning to think "sustainably"

The mechanics of decision-making are quite straightforward: we weigh up all the pros and cons of competing choices, and we choose the option that has more pros than cons. The process is no different when you are aiming to make a sustainable home, but the way in which we draw up the list of pros and cons includes some factors that are very often overlooked. We have to check some deeply ingrained biases if we are going to make the best choices.

New ideas versus established solutions

When considering new solutions, our approach tends to be one of two extremes. There are those of us who are inclined to accept the promises of a new solution without applying much rigor toward finding out if the promises are true, and there are those of us who tend to dismiss the promises of new solutions, also without the application of much rigor in our examination.

One of the first questions I am often asked when discussing new approaches to building is: "Does [insert name of material or system] really work?" This is an entirely appropriate and important question to ask, and it's not unusual that we should have this question when faced with something new. The "new solution paradox" is that we typically only ask it of new solutions, and completely fail to question existing, accepted solutions. There is an assumption that the ideas, materials, and systems we use commonly have somehow been "proven" to work, that they have been rationally measured and found to be the best means to achieve a particular end. In the realm of building materials and systems, however, development, testing, and establishment of industry standards have been far from rational and well-proven processes. As most readers of this book are already aware, most of our accepted solutions have not been developed with any coherent ecological principles or human health ideals in mind.

We tend to expect new ideas or technologies to live up to unrealistically high standards, while at the same time normalizing existing ideas or technologies that are inherently, deeply flawed. If we're interested in making improvements in our buildings, it is critical that we hold both "accepted solutions" and "alternative solutions" to the same standards, using the same criteria before coming to conclusions. It is great to try to be objective about the choices we make, but it is essential that we apply the same objectivity to all our choices, including those that are so normalized that we don't see them as choices, but as inevitabilities.

Assessing inevitable flaws

There is no such thing as an idea or technology with no flaws. Recognizing this simple point is key to being able to consider new ideas fairly and thoroughly.

To prepare our minds for considering new building material ideas, it is helpful to think about one of the most trusted materials in the North American construction industry: wood. We rely on structural wood framing for a huge percentage of our residential and commercial buildings, and we use wood for finishes on the interiors and exteriors as well. Yet this trust in wood comes from the fact that its use is "normal" for us. If we were to try to introduce wood as a brand new building material today, it would face an uphill battle. Skeptics would raise all kinds of issues, pointing out that wood:

• Burns easily
• Rots naturally when exposed to moisture
• Is eaten by a wide range of common insects
• Is a great growing medium for mold
• Expands and contracts considerably depending on moisture content
• Twists and splits when drying
• Has strengths that vary widely depending on species and growing conditions
• Has strengths that vary widely depending on milling, drying, and storing processes
• Is often grown far from where it's used

Yet wood has come to serve us very well as a building material; along with its flaws, it also has a wide range of great properties that encouraged us to work to overcome all the flaws. We've now normalized it and built an entire successful industry around a highly flawed material. And though building codes and the lumber industry can provide plenty...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: New Society Publishers
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2017
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0865718504
• ISBN 13: 9780865718500
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 224
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Anja's; service@anja-karge.de; ; Von-Gumppenberg-Str. 94; Pöttmes; 86554; Deutschland