Green Home

Juan Carlos Quintas
Instructor: Mr. Hicks
Smart Home
Juan Carlos Quintas
Instructor: Mr. Hicks
Smart Home

Michelle Kaufmann is an architect, designer and advocate for smarter ways to design, build and live. Her firm, Michelle Kaufmann Studio, specializes in sustainable lifestyle design including single-family homes, eco-luxury resorts and multi-family communities. Her goal is to make it easier for people to build green and live a more sustainable lifestyle. She also shares this vision in the book Prefab Green.

CD245 Sustainable Construction and Design Final Project

Michelle Kaufmann is an architect, designer and advocate for smarter ways to design, build and live. Her firm, Michelle Kaufmann Studio, specializes in sustainable lifestyle design including single-family homes, eco-luxury resorts and multi-family communities. Her goal is to make it easier for people to build green and live a more sustainable lifestyle. She also shares this vision in the book Prefab Green.

CD245 Sustainable Construction and Design Final Project

Juan Carlos Quintas
CD245 Sustainable Construction and Design
November 26, 2012
Mr. Hicks

Smart House The Smart Home, located in Hyde Park, is designed to use the planets resources to its advantage. The house was designed by Michelle Kaufmann an architect, designer and advocate for smarter ways to design, build and live. Her firm, Michelle Kaufmann Studio, specializes in sustainable lifestyle design including single-family homes, eco-luxury resorts and multi-family communities. Her goal is to make it easier for people to build green and live a more sustainable lifestyle. She also shares this vision in the book Prefab Green. The smart design is built to human scale, using only what is vital, leaving it open and airy for efficient heating and cooling. The high ceiling, warm materials, and abundant light make this three story house even more spacious. This home contains an automated home system where the homeowner control heat, window coverings, lighting, and cameras, as well as track the consumption of utilities with the home. Many of the materials in the Smart Home were prefabricated, meaning that the production life of the appliances was shortened and made with less energy. Throughout the homes, materials and technology help save energy. The roof on this home helps to insulate, absorb water, and to lessen water runoff. Huge windows, sliding doors and sunshades help light heat and cool the house. Furthermore, the idea of water efficiency thrives throughout the home. Did you know that more than one-quarter of the drinking water is used to flush toilets! To save water the home is filled with water- saving technologies and appliances. Some examples of these water efficient technologies include low-flow shower heads and dual flush toilets that use less than a gallon of water. The water used in the sinks, such as when a person may be brushing their teeth, is used as water to flush the toilet because the water inside the toilet does not general need to be clean. Moreover, Smart Home was built by using non-toxic materials. A hearty environment is continued on the exterior of the environment with water recycling systems, native plants that adapt to Chicago’s climate conditions, pervious paving materials, and more. Besides these innovations that keep in mind the well-being of the planet, many interior design ideas are based off of an urban antique shop in the Andersonville neighborhood, Scout. Next, their approach is to take familiar rudiments that are simple and unadorned. These simple and unadorned elements are then given an interesting and sophisticated edge. The design of the home is not primarily based on style, but the feeling and the essence of comfort that the home appeals. Hidden within the subtle beauty is a technologically advanced system. A digital nerve center built into the household works continually and robotically to save the homeowner’s time, reduce energy consumption and create life more fun the amazing home automation system monitors energy usage by room and even by appliance, permitting the homeowner’s to fine-tune their consumption. The system can also serve as a digital dashboard. This digital dashboard can keep an entire family’s messages, calendars, and photos on one screen. These advantageous technologies are scattered throughout the house. In the master bedroom there is a fog resistant and waterproof mirror, but it also delivers the days’ time, temperature, news, and traffic. In the family study there is a Cryoscope cube that tells you what to expect from the weather. It also tracks the energy being produced by the home, whether in the rooftop solar film that collects UV rays this system is essential in this part of the country or the 45-foot wind turbine that minimizes electricity the average electricity bill using this systems is between $20.00 and $50.00 dollars a month. The automation doesn 't stop there. A media server can start a custom music playlist when you walk in the door. The house can regulate its shades when it gets too hot, and the whole house can be easily turn off the lights when people is not present in any of the rooms in the house or set to hibernation mode to minimize energy use while away or on vacation. The landscape is so beautiful surrounded by different Illinois native Midwest plantings that require low water this basically translates to the plant be able to coexists with other plants, animal and humans with little or no involvement at all, in the backyard of the house there is also two hives with approximately 60.000 bees that means that this bees are not only producing honey but also helping plants and flowers reproduce, this is good for the environment and the ecosystem. The Smart Home was constructed at the All American Homes ' modular construction facility in Decatur, Ind. The module construction took place on an assembly line and lasted approximately eight weeks. In this climate-controlled environment, All American is able to build homes 60 percent faster and in a more environmentally-friendly way than traditional on-site construction. Waste is reduced because much of the lumber arrives precut, reducing the need to dispose of excess waste in the field. Drywall scrap is trucked to local farmers to use in preparing soil for planting, keeping it out of landfills once finished on the factory line the modules where transported to the museum of Science and Industry site in early march 2008 Michelle design firm has been given the 2008 top award. Not only does the house itself lessen the eco-print on the earth but your own house can be modified to be economically friendly. In the summer, windows can be opened for cross breeze, and a ceiling fan can be installed instead of using an air conditioner. Not only do these fans serve to cool your home, but in the winter you can change the direction of the fan so that the warm air is brought down. The use of permeable materials lessens the toxic run off that carry into nearby sources of water. Allowing snow and rain to seep through the ground prevents this. Considering durable materials for your home, such as bamboo, cork or natural linoleum flooring, allows the production of these materials to have less of an impact. Controlling the temperature of your thermostat helps to save one percent of what it takes to heat your home when you turn it down.

Cited: http://michellekaufmann.com/ http://www.msichicago.org/

Cited: http://michellekaufmann.com/ http://www.msichicago.org/