sustainability
The American Institute of Architects has recently released its Framework for Design Excellence, a guidance tool consisting of ten key principles complemented by probing questions. This tool serves as a guidepost to help designers make advances toward a better built environment that is zero-carbon, promotes health, fosters resilience, and upholds equity.
Read MoreCamping, in its simplest form, is all about self sufficiency. Its about getting back to, and relying on, nature, and using your own skills to harness it. The modern take on camping can be far removed from the humble Boy Scout pup tent, but the goals should remain the same. A modern camp should harness nature, help in every way possible to preserve that nature that provides for it, and allow for its inhabitants to reconnect with nature. Here, we take advantage of what nature provides in abundance to make the Modern Camp a responsible answer to its challenging environment.
At the Modern Camp, a smooth metal or tile roof is preferrable to collect the water, and storing the water underneath the deck structure keeps it cool and protected behind the gabion wall and pool structure.
Though water is plentiful in Louisiana, it is still a resource to be controlled and utilized thoughtfully and carefully. Rainwaters can inundate both natural and man-made drainage systems and cause backup riverine flooding. Rainwater is also a natural resource as potable water with fewer contamination and taste issues, reducing the desire for treated bottled water. Rainwater collection is common practice in drier climates with unreliable precipitation, but we certainly see limited dry spells in South Louisiana as well. The water can also serve irrigation systems, to ensure your thirsty tropical plants don't burn up during a dry month or two.
These sorts of reservoirs will fill up quickly in our climate, however. The Aggies over at Texas A&M have a nifty Excel calculator to determine what your system needs might be. Once their retention abilities are maximized, it's important to avoid dumping the stormwater directly back into city or parish stormwater infrastructure, if any is present.
You can even incorporate condensation from your AC system. According to the Alliance for Water Efficiency, a central AC for an entire home can collect 5 to 20 gallons of condensate water per day, equating to more than 300 gallons per month in the summer!
Key to a sustainable and resilient home able to be used in a disaster are efficient mechanical and electrical systems that take advantage of natural resources. These can often be pricey, but Residential Energy Credits can be taken to be reimbursed for many of these systems that make the most sense. All of the systems below are currently eligible for 30% reimbursement, including install, from the Federal government (find out more here).
Geothermal Heat Pump - Using the earth, or large bodies of water, to help get rid of the large heat loads in Louisiana homes makes sense, and especially so with access to a large cycling body of water. Geothermal systems essentially replace the exterior condenser unit with a long tube that circulates water through either the earth or a body of water to dissipate heat in summer and absorb heat in the winter. On top of that, it eliminates the exterior equipment that is most vulnerable to the elements. Geothermal systems are eligible for tax credits as energy-efficient residential equipment, which I talk about a bit more below.
Photovoltaics - Solar energy is already deployed on many rooftops across Louisiana, and the technology is rapidly improving. Recent presentations by Tesla indicate that options will become more attractive, too, in the coming years. We envision a smooth PV tile that will also aid with potable water collection by not collecting as much dirt with fewer nooks and crannies. With promises of a 22% efficiency (compare to ~10% now), and improvements in battery storage capacity, the loud, very heavy, fossil-fuel guzzling generators will no longer be needed to keep a livable structure during a grid outage.
Google's Project Sunroof is an attempt to analyze and quantify all the roofs in America for their potential for solar panel installation. The numbers they come up with in terms of savings should probably be vetted with your local installer, but it's a good benchmarking tool for making a decision, and interesting to fly around the city and see the potential for solar. It would be great if they could detect via their satellite view those surfaces with panels already installed so that we could see how a city is doing at optimizing its potential for solar harvesting.
Not deployed here but also available are credits for solar water heating, small wind energy production assemblies and fuel cell technology. You can learn more about these credits from the IRS by learning about Form 5695. Louisiana's own solar credit has expired, but power providers like Entergy and Cleco still have some incentives available at the local level.
The percentage of the US population projected to live near a coast is expected to approach 50% by 2020. The draw of these places is clearly stronger than the fear of the growing dangers generated by a heating and rising ocean - a testament to the inevitability of coastal architecture's importance. Building to co-exist with hazards has created great architecture throughout history. We think that good buildings respond to disaster not by retreating from it, but adapting to and learning from disaster; and that resiliency is what ultimately makes a place great over time. This is the first in a series on our study for the Modern Camp, a prototype for development in a changing coastal Louisiana and the importance to not reacting to hazards, but to owning and integrating them into a design.
Crucial to all development in coastal Louisiana, and increasingly the coastal United States, is the elevation of the structure above the constantly shifting, and sometimes sinking, ground. FEMA guidelines are a good place to start, but many cities and parishes are looking at these as minimums that may be appropriate now, but insufficient in the future. Local governments may require a set distance ABOVE what's already required by FEMA - this is called 'freeboard'. Depending on where you are, your elevation could be the top of your lowest floor, or the bottom of your floor structure (if elevated). A good starting point to check the status of land you're looking to build on is LSU's Flood Maps project. In our case we have a minimum elevation of 11 feet, on land that is generally around 2 feet, creating a challenging opportunity to address a welcoming entry to a home 9+ feet off the ground.
To avoid having the gigantic staircase look of many elevated camp homes, we decided to break up the upward travel into segments. Grading the site to get a higher starting point, we have an initial ramp to an elevated platform, from which you can choose which entry to use. One ramps up towards the bayou views and the dog-trot guest house, while the stair entry heads around toward the main house entrance. The natural inlet is spanned with a boat house structure that provides access from both the boat's raised storage position and fully lowered position.
FEMA published a residential guide in 1984 (FEMA 54) and an updated version in 2010 (FEMA 4969) that outlines general best practices for building homes in high-risk coastal areas. Some of these principles can be seen already employed in vernacular camp design in the area. Piles extending up and through an elevated floor, for example, provides a rigid structure tied together by the floor structure than can be braced beneath the floor with sufficient room and protection. As piles are already generally needed throughout the Louisiana coast, continuing this structural system above ground makes sense. Locating the piles outboard of exterior wall envelopes alleviates some of the tolerance issues with locating piles exactly where walls need to go. Cantilevers for exterior walkways is an old strategy for increased efficiency when using a pole-frame system - less piles, more floor area. The guides are a good primer on basic strategies to consider with regards to site, structure and systems in a hazardous and changing environment.
In an emergency situation, with surging water, protection of what cannot be elevated is important. Siting behind natural berms and breakwaters is the cheapest option, but in order to site the building with water access, construction of a barrier will be necessary. Many of the homes along the bayou utilize sheet piling to retain the land and hold back the water, however, the issues here are evident in the many rusted out walls that can be seen. Steel and maritime environments do not mix without significant expense. Oysters do, however. In a strategy already deployed in many places along the Delta, oyster shells from restaurants are collected and repurposed as ballast for open cages called gabions, typically filled with rocks for civil projects at inland locations. These oyster-shell filled gabions are an effective seawall and protect the structure below flood elevation, as well as an utility lines, vegetation, vehicles, or anything that has to remain at grade. Any equipment that can be located high, is located high by using space-efficient systems in attic space, well above the reach of flood waters.
We'll continue later with our strategies on both passive and active energy efficient design in our series on our study of the Modern Camp!
