Red Hook Green Shoots for Zero
With any luck, ground will be broken on New York City’s first sustainable zero-energy homes within the next three months. The new 4,000-square-foot building will be on Dikeman Street in Red Hook and is being designed by Dumbo-based Garrison Architects. “Bringing to bear exciting new building materials, improved wind and solar technologies and more energy-efficient…
With any luck, ground will be broken on New York City’s first sustainable zero-energy homes within the next three months. The new 4,000-square-foot building will be on Dikeman Street in Red Hook and is being designed by Dumbo-based Garrison Architects. “Bringing to bear exciting new building materials, improved wind and solar technologies and more energy-efficient HVAC and home appliances, as well as state of the art sustainability strategies, Redhook Green will be a powerful answer to the question of what urban centers can do to reduce our dependency on foreign oil via renewable resources and to significantly reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, said the building’s developer, Jay Amato, in a press release. You can read more details aboutRed Hook Green, as the project is called, on its website.
NYC’s First ‘Zero Energy Building’ Coming to Red Hook [A View from the Hook]
Red Hook Green Press Release [PR.com]
cmu and lilbitoluck: I read further down on their website, and it seems the 4000 is for one housing unit. The “studio/office/garage” space takes up approx. 800sf. This is basically a single-family home (a rather large one at that as others have pointed out) in the guise of a manufacturing space.
I really like the internal courtyard and its placement between the main house and the work/studio/garage unit. The overall design of the building is clean and modern. As a unrepentant modernist, I think something like this would look good in any neighborhood, but it will be an especially nice addition to Red Hook because of the more industrial and wide open landscape of the area.
On the down side, however, i totally agree with gagneur about the brick wall. The rendering makes it look like a very unfriendly facade and I don’t buy their ‘contextual argument:
“While the brick ground floor provides the structural support for the modular buildings, the walls for the garage and the green space, it also works to blend with the historical nature of the many neighboring Civil War era warehouses.”
All of the neighboring civil war era warehouses have windows and doors at the street level. Granted, some of them have been bricked in since they were built, but even a small window into the courtyard or some articulation of the wall would be a lot nicer than a huge flat expanse of brick.
A large net-z house has a bigger footprint than a small one, so that’s what I meant “by definition”. Being truly green is a lifestyle choice as well as raw numbers; for one thing, there’s the embodied energy in building larger. And life-cycle costs.
That said, I stand corrected did not realize the 4000 was for all units.
Rob: Don’t talk rot. You don’t understand that using 2-4x energy per capita as other parts of the world have brought us to this point? Other countries (at least the developed ones) have much more stringent codes on energy use.
it mostly pisses me off cuz they ruined my favorite color. green! grrrrrr! now my fav. color is blue by default. ugh. that’s why i buy blue contact lenses. i refuse to have green eyes!
*rob*
*rob*
your the man!!!!!
I’m in total agreement.
All this Green Crap they are throwing at us to make us believe we are doing something good for the planet, but we pay for it dearly…it ain’t cheap !!
am i the only one who doesnt give a crap how much ‘energy’ they use? i mean HELLO we’re human beings on a planet, ENERGY is life, and we are SUPPSOED to deplete this energy of all it’s resources so um HELLO, we can EVOLVE!? why people want to stick around HERE forever doing the same stuff people did 2000 years ago is MING-BOGGLING.
and newsflash, no matter how many energy efficient buildings you build, there will be 100x more energy depleting ones in other countries. so we basically will just shift it to other parts of Earth.
focus your ‘energy’ on things more important.
green = stupid & short-sighted.
*rob*
BTW, here’s a cool chart comparing changes in average refrigerator size versus average refrigerator energy use. http://www.treehugger.com/refrigerator%20use%20versus%20time%20and%20price.jpg
CMU, I don’t think you thought your comment through. You wrote,”Wanna bet it has central a/c, a humongous fridge…,” I assume, because you view them as large energy drains. If the house can have them and still be net zero energy, then what’s the problem?
That said, net zero energy houses tend to be extremely well insulated. As a result, theses houses only need small, low powered HVAC equipment to hand any heating and cooling needs. As for fridges, they vary widely in efficiency. The size of a refrigerator does not tell you much about how much energy it consumes.
Point of clarification, the 4,000 sq. ft. building is multipurpose, not a single family home. From their website:
“This approximately 4,000 square foot facility will house a studio/workshop, offices for a digital business, garages and an apartment, as well as outdoor green space. The form of the house is inspired by the shipping containers stacked along the adjacent waterfront. Modular units, proportioned similarly to shipping containers are stacked and shifted to create a variety of terraces and overviews to take advantage of the areas amazing harbor views.”
Luxury green living truly is more marketing than anything. A block long brick wall closing it off from the neighorhood and the garages are not a plus for the neighborhood.