Haiti ReadyHome and the Building Back Better Communities Competition & Housing Expo

Watershed was proud to have attended and designed a home for the Building Back Better Communities Housing Expo in Haiti. The Watershed-designed ReadyHome Haiti model home was on display at the Expo during July 2011. This home, as well as the other 60+ residences that were on display for the Expo, will one day house Haitian families. All of the model homes are part of a seed project to build permanent housing for the over one million people who were made homeless by the January 2010 earthquake.

.  .

• Solar control at building envelope to mitigate heat gain and loss through effective use of insulation, air sealing, claddings, shading elements and vegetation.

• Use of solar energy for passive heating and lighting through proper orientation, building geometry, thermal mass, spectrally selective and strategically-placed glazing and reflective materials.

• Cooling and comfort is achieved primarily through passive ventilation, solar control and integrated landscape such as vegetated roofs and appropriate plantings.

• Solar harvest (electric and thermal) is integral to building form and, ideally, to the building skin.

• Water management is integral to the design: envelope detailing and construction is climate-appropriate, water harvest is a central component and all overflow is delivered back into the natural system in a biologically-beneficial manner (i.e. rain gardens, ponds, etc.)

1. Extraction:Ascertain the process of harvest and acquisition of the raw materials that comprise the recipe. Understand the associated energy use, toxic effects, atmospheric, watershed and habitat impacts as well as resultant waste stream.

2. Manufacture: Understand the energy and chemical inputs (i.e. catalysts) as well as the associated waste stream.

3. Transportation: What distance has the product or material traveled and by what means? Specifically, consider the energy and atmospheric effects of this component.

4. Installation: What materials, chemicals and amount of energy are required to set a certain component into place?

5. Use: How durable is the material, product or component? During its service period, is it off-gassing noxious fumes, or in some manner is it creating a deleterious effect on the users or other living organisms?

6. Disposal: At the end of its useful life, can a material/product be recycled, re-purposed, re-used or otherwise flow back into an organic cycle? Or, like PVC (which cannot effectively be recycled), is it simply stopping off for a visit on its way to the landfill?

Currently, however, over half of the power used in U.S. buildings (excluding embodied energy) is delivered via the coal-combustion system which, by the time the chemical energy is transformed through various stages to electrical power for use at the outlet, is operating at 10% efficiency. This fact is, of course, the underpinning of the sensibility in solar energy harvest – - the energy conversion is direct and generally more efficient (8% – 22%, depending on the technology), occurring at the point-of-use with zero pollution. The supreme irony is in the fact that the chemical energy value of coal originated with solar energy (i.e., coal is the fossil remnant of ancient vegetation).

Furthermore, on-site solar harvest supports “distributed generation” of electrical energy – - that is, there is an opportunity for decentralization to mitigate the need for more coal-fired (as well as nuclear, natural gas and oil) generating capacity; part and parcel to this fact is the benefit of “peak-load shaving” whereby the system is producing its highest output during to peak demand periods (e.g., maximum solar output tends to occur simultaneous to the time that air conditioning is in highest demand).

From a stewardship standpoint, solar investment is a true “offset” to conventional power production – - coal-derived juice is literally being replaced with solar-induced electricity so as to significantly reduce our overall energy footprint. Solar (along with other ‘renewables’) is commonly known as an “alternative” to fossil fuels, all of which are stored solar energy in chemical form (or as the author Tom Hartmann refers to it, “ancient sunlight”), and which depend on an extractive process that is increasingly expensive, dangerous, toxic, socially unjust and energy intensive unto itself. Aside from the seemingly obvious question of why conventional fuels are the primary platform, our present arrangement has us essentially living off our children’s savings account instead of our daily income stream – - clearly, this reality defines any building that is dependent on fossil fuels as inherently unsustainable.