Is Product Placement the Future of Sustainable Architecture?

Most buildings have a long lifespan, and in this age of environmental uncertainty it is more important than ever that the buildings we design are sustainable. However, many believe this change isn’t happening quickly enough. Enter Free Green, an American sustainable housing design firm, with an innovative solution which could speed up the transition to sustainable residential architecture.

Whilst many consider the role of the architect to be key in building design becoming more sustainable, the reality is that only 5% of homes have an architect involved in their design. But with 30% of homes built coming from stock plans, many of which are years old, Free Green believe that for housing design to become more sustainable, newer, greener stock plans will have a more positive impact than architects ever could.

In order to reach the biggest audience possible, and to provide the company with a unique selling point, Free Green decided to give away their sustainable stock plans at no cost. To generate income from their idea, product placement, a method normally used in film and TV, was integrated in all their plans.

Essentially, companies that produce sustainable products for housing construction can pay Free Green to have their designs featured with the hope that a percentage of those who use the plans will buy their goods. In order to qualify for a place on Free Green’s plans, all product must pass a selection of third party sustainability tests, as well as meet the company’s approval.

David Wax and Ben Uyeda, the company’s founders, believe:

Design isn’t a product or service, it’s a medium, and no one has ever looked at the house plan as a form of media.

Users can modify house plans online, with changes presented in a way that is easy understand. For example, improve a building’s insulation and you could see that the expense will increase mortgage repayments by $50 a month, but save $100 a month in energy bills, a method of presentation that Wax and Uyeda believe will encourage uptake of green housing improvements.

Since launching, over 44,000 plans have been downloaded and Free Green have become the world’s largest provider of house stock plans. Is product placement the future of sustainable architecture? It’s certainly worked for Free Green.

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The Urban Office That's More Than Green

Hamburg’s Office for Urban Development and the Environment has recently unveiled this colourful and energy-efficient office, set for completion in 2013.

The concept of the building is ‘seven houses’, which are contained within the high rise unit and two wings. The rainbow colour scheme references the importance of the number seven in the design of this building.

This building follows a common contemporary architectural theme by making the space suitable for multiple uses, with the ground floor featuring exhibition spaces, restaurants, an amphitheater, a library, and a conference centre, as well as plenty of office space on the floors above. The glass facade creates well-distributed natural light, but is also thermally insulated to protect the interior from intense sunlight and insulate during the colder months.

The building has access to gas power, but mainly sources its energy from photovoltaic panels and geothermal energy to minimize energy consumption.

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The Bauhaus, the Box, and the City

Part 8 in the Series: ‘Can the Box Make the World a Better Place?’

After the demise of the Bauhaus in 1930s Nazi Germany, many of its professors moved to America where it became evident that the future of Bauhaus design was in the city. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Director of the Bauhaus when it closed in 1933, relocated to Chicago. It was here that the box got bigger, and the modern city was born.

The steel frame had revolutionised architecture. Exterior walls no longer needed to be load bearing, resulting in the birth of the skyscraper. Like many American cities, Chicago was built on a grid plan, and the square plots were ideal for box-like architecture.

In Chicago, Mies van der Rohe realised the Bauhaus belief in the box for housing on a much larger scale, with the Lake Shore Drive Apartments (see above), one of his earliest projects. It was a simple modernist design, inspired by his view that ‘less is more’, that went on to be a template for glass and steel skyscrapers around the world. By building twenty-six stories high, Mies van der Rohe had created mass housing capable of accommodating over 400 people. Considering the relatively small plot, this building was more spatially efficient than anything the Bauhaus had achieved in the past, and a perfect example of literally expanding the concept of box-like design.

However, we can expand the box even further by looking at the grid plan found in both Chicago and New York. Like the box, it is formed by a repetition of squares or rectangles. Mathematically, a box is a cuboid. Unfold a cuboid and you are left with its two-dimensional net, consisting of six squares or rectangles. Therefore, the grid plan is effectively the net of a box, repeated.

The simplicity and rigidity of the grid plan was intended to encourage prosperity after the chaotic, undisciplined growth of early American cities, but was met with much criticism. The third American President Thomas Jefferson, concerned about the predicted growth of New York, said: ‘When we get piled upon one another in large cities, as in Europe, we shall become as corrupt as Europe’. Whilst surveying the land that was to become New York’s grid plan, John Randall was pelted, attacked by dogs, and even arrested. Later urban planners simply stated that the grid was inorganic and unimaginative.

However, present day New York has the largest economy of all American cities, and Chicago the third largest. This would seem to suggest that the grid plan has encouraged prosperity as planned, and been an economic success. But with our world continuing to urbanize, is box-like design still the way forward, or do we need to re-think our cities? That question and more will be explored in Part 9.

Image courtesy of tobesch on flickr

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