Alternative building materials Green construction can include mainstream features, like a green roof, or more unique material, such as wood pallets. In general, though, what makes a building eco-friendly? Are the materials that go into the structure and is the attention paid to energy usage in its design?
Green builders use recycled or low-impact components to create energy-efficient homes, and you can construct green homes in any number of ways, using materials like reclaimed shipping containers or even clay and straw. In this article, we'll look at some unique, eco-friendly alternative housing ideas.
In green construction, cob refers to a mixture of earth and straw similar to the adobe homes you might see in the American southwest. Cob is an inexpensive, versatile material that allows builders to shape walls any way they want. While adobe is usually formed into bricks or blocks, cob is unique in that it's applied in large handfuls to form the structure.
Typical cob homes have unique, rounded features and almost look like they're made out of clay -- that's probably because they basically are! And cob is sturdier than you might think: Some cob homes built in England in the 19th century are still around today.
Bales of straw are also natural and inexpensive, and they provide excellent insulation. This makes straw-bale construction an economical green-building method. Since straw is a byproduct of grain farming, it often goes to waste, so using it in construction is a great way to reuse it.
Straw-bale construction is versatile, too. Since you're using the straw bales either to construct the frame or as insulation in conjunction with a wooden frame, the house itself can look however you want. And no big bad wolf is going to blow down this house of straw -- in most straw-bale construction, recycled steel beams or bamboo rods support the bales.
Shipping-container homes are gaining popularity. They can be cheaper to build than conventional homes and use fewer raw materials, and the finished structure has a modern, industrial look. Green builders can use one shipping crate to build a relatively small, single-family dwelling or combine crates for a larger house or even bigger structures, such as apartment buildings and schools. For example, Container City in London, built in 2001, turned 20 shipping containers into 15 eco-friendly live-and-work spaces [source: Trinity Buoy Wharf].
Their efficient size makes these mini-homes inherently green, and some enthusiasts even make them even more eco-friendly with green insulation, radiant heating, solar panels and rainwater-harvesting systems.
Architectural firm I-Beam Design came up with the idea of creating as an affordable and eco-friendly solution for disaster relief housing. They first designed the pallet homes as an entry in a contest to solve housing problems for refugees in post-war Kosovo, but you can also use pallet wood to create something more permanent.
Used wood pallets are readily available and cheap. A small 10-by-20-foot (3-by-6-meter) shelter would cost around $500 and require about 80 pallets [source: Embrey]. It's easy to imagine combining several of these small shelters and reconfiguring them to form a unique, energy-efficient home. And if you do decide to remove the building at any time, the materials are easy to recycle.
A green roof is more than a cool architectural feature. It can help manage storm water runoff by providing a permeable surface, and it can help offset the urban heat-island effect. Rather than absorbing and storing heat like a regular roof, a green roof reflects heat and can help lower a building's cooling costs. They are also great insulators and can reduce both air and noise pollution.
On a home, the most practical type of green roof is an extensive roof, which can support a variety of small plants. Because these roofs are designed to support only a few inches of soil, they don't require much maintenance, and you'll have a new kind of eco-friendly garden to enjoy.
“Container City is a series of shipping container architecture and a trademark of "Urban Space Management". It is principally a means of utilising standard forty-foot equivalent unit shipping containers, at the end of their life, to produce flexible accommodation and offices at low cost.” - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Container_City
“at the end of their life”.
It means we give a new life of these structures.
The shipping container architecture in “Container City” is not “absolutely eco-friendly architecture”, because process of recycling of its elements (like containers and etc.) are not “Eco”.
The cob homes are not “absolutely eco-friendly architecture”, because their building equipment (heating, lighting, cooling, cooking, mobile communication, TV, radio, RES like PV systems, active solar system and etc.) is not “Eco”, for the present.
Green building refers to a structure and using process that is environmentally responsible and resource-efficient throughout a building's life-cycle: from siting to design, construction, operation, maintenance, renovation, and demolition.
The essence of green building is an optimization of one or more principles as Passive solar design, Energy Efficiency, Water Efficiency, Passive and Active solar thermal system and etc.. Also, with the proper synergistic design, individual green building technologies may work together to produce a greater cumulative effect.
Is this way of thinking reasonable ?
What I propose as alternative ?
The Building skin is not only the element that determines the architectural space, but also influences the development and support of the living comfort in the inhabitable spaces. Due to the physical-chemical characteristics of the Building skin, it implements a specific communication between inside and outside architectural space aiming to obtain the desirable heat/acoustic insulation, ventilation, natural illumination, etc.
My investigations show that the characteristics of the functional system “architectural object” overlap those of the “human organism” [see “Architecture as Biomimetics”]. Thus each architectural object could be considered to be biomimetics of the structure, organization and function of certain biological organisms and systems.
Abide by these contention the Building skin as biomimetics of the human skin [see “ Innovations and architecture“] must be designed as a “huge receptor field”, capable of indicating, controlling and reacting to the aggression of the surrounding space. This field has to form suitable values of the components that influence the living comfort in the architectural spaces. It should be composed of smart materials (thermochromic glasses, thermobimetal elements, memory shape materials, piezo elements, etc.) implemented together with traditional sensors and actuators in the control system. Processing jointly the two types of Building skin materials is imposed because there are many different climate conditions in various geographical areas. Only smart materials/elements in the Building skin couldn’t react properly to the changes in all various weather parameters. That is the reason to implement a Hybrid system adding the traditional automated control. In this research we suggest an easy changeable and adaptable control system, which could reflect the needs of adequate reaction to the changes in weather parameters. A combination of Neuro-Fuzzy logic is proposed, aiming to combine easy understandable /applicable fuzzy logic with the adapting capabilities of neural networks.[see ”Biomimetics architectural system based on a neuro-fuzzy-network“]
I think that it is a future.
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Rossen_Savov2/?ev=hdr_xprf
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