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02 March 2009
Someone doesn't understand what "Green" means.→[More:]It may be dickish and intolerant of me, but I hope everyone involved is crushed to death under the weight of their own carbon footprint(s).
Who knows. It might be housing a family of 30 (one of those where the kids get married and live with the parents, and then have kids of their own, etc). Sounds about right.
Pretty cool aquariums, though aquariums aren't really green at all, are they? Just pretty fish, lots of electricity and chemicals. And harvesting the living rock and the coral that makes a salt tank look so good is damaging to the environment. Too bad. An aquarium makes for an excellent TV replacement. Maybe more aquariums = fewer TVs, which might even out in the end.
I can't believe the reclaimed wood amounts to 105 acres of forest. And that's just the reclaimed wood, not including the sustainably farmed wood. That house is huge!
Some of the justifications are *hilarious*: "I just had to install that third pool because it might lower my air conditioning costs!"
That's an awesome and laudable way to build and live. I have a friend who does that sort of construction up in Ithaca, NY, and I'm all for it. There's a drawback to the linked house, though: you'd have to live around all those Oberlin people.
The greenest house is a rehab of an existing structure. New LEED construction is nice and everything, but the green involved is more of the currency variety than the ecological variety. We should be doing everything we can to avoid new construction, from an environment-only standpoint.
You could fit almost fourteen copies of my apartment in there, holy yikes that's huge! We renovated a 100 year old structure with reclaimed stairway parts, previously used floor wood, sinks, tiles, windows, doorposts and even toilets and bathtubs from genbyg which salvages old building parts that can be re-used. That's greener. (we can't do much more on our electricity though, but use less of it and choose only windpower electricity. Had we bought a farm house as we were thinking from the start, solar power would have heated our water and the tile oven would have spread heat to our radiators.)
photo by splunge
photo by TheophileEscargot
photo by Kronos_to_Earth
photo by ethylene
