03-12-2014
Human, Environment, Infrastructure: Resiliency in the +3L House
FXFOWLE's design group B-Sides was awarded third place in the United States Green Building Council's Emerging Professionals Design Competition, R3build. The competition tasked students and young professionals with designing a single-family home to withstand extreme weather events for areas most susceptible to increased storm intensity, frequency, and sea level rise. Teams were asked to consider the applicability of their design to modular, off-site construction to further take advantage of time constraints in rebuilding efforts following natural disasters. Teams were also asked to meet LEED for Homes Gold v4 requirements.
Team B-Side's design, +3L House, featured a fractal approach to building strength. Like a tree utilizes repeating shapes where branches sprout from trunks, twigs sprout from branches, and where rectangular plant cells line up in rectangular layers, their design drew strength from repetition at scale. Repetition with slight modification at each level is what carries genetic codes forward, and what allows a community to move forward after a devastating storm.
The design for the +3L House was heavily influenced by sustainable strategies. The lower the building's loads are, the more feasible it is to satisfy them during times of distress. The solar thermal and solar power systems would provide noticeable comfort during times of natural disasters, in addition to a substantial reduction in utility bill costs year round. The solar thermal system projects a reduction in domestic hot water load by 60-80%. The remaining load would be produced by a heat pump water heater, which can harvest waste heat from the laundry equipment and closet space. The solar power array would provide enough electricity to offset the remaining power for hot water production, and a large portion of the space conditioning power requirements.
Congratulations to +3L House designers Christina Galati, Jenny Kim, June Kim, Emily Scott, Lauren Zailyk and Nicole Ceci, an engineer at Steven Winter Associates.
Team B-Side's design, +3L House, featured a fractal approach to building strength. Like a tree utilizes repeating shapes where branches sprout from trunks, twigs sprout from branches, and where rectangular plant cells line up in rectangular layers, their design drew strength from repetition at scale. Repetition with slight modification at each level is what carries genetic codes forward, and what allows a community to move forward after a devastating storm.
The design for the +3L House was heavily influenced by sustainable strategies. The lower the building's loads are, the more feasible it is to satisfy them during times of distress. The solar thermal and solar power systems would provide noticeable comfort during times of natural disasters, in addition to a substantial reduction in utility bill costs year round. The solar thermal system projects a reduction in domestic hot water load by 60-80%. The remaining load would be produced by a heat pump water heater, which can harvest waste heat from the laundry equipment and closet space. The solar power array would provide enough electricity to offset the remaining power for hot water production, and a large portion of the space conditioning power requirements.
Congratulations to +3L House designers Christina Galati, Jenny Kim, June Kim, Emily Scott, Lauren Zailyk and Nicole Ceci, an engineer at Steven Winter Associates.