New Ideas in Green Architecture: Pre-Fab Homes

The latest in green architecture puts a new, Earth-friendly spin on what was once considered an old idea: the prefab home.

The mkHearth is a preconfigured green architecture home that is also a sustainable and modular re-imagining of the traditional American farmhouse. Designed by green architecture expert Michelle Kaufmann, the new homes are suitable in all climates and in both city landscapes and rural areas. Like most examples of green architecture, the mkHearth is built with renewable and recyclable materials.

The mkHearth uses both modular technology and prepackaged green architecture solutions that can create livable and elegant homes, which can be used to build multi-family developments. The mkHearth is also a great example of today’s green architecture philosophy because it’s more efficient than most traditional homes today. The house is built around a central hearth, a fireplace-like unit that efficiently circulates both heat and air throughout the house.

The green architecture house also boasts a rainwater catchment system and it is designed to capture the maximum amount of natural sunlight. 

Offering More Sustainable Buildings with Green Architecture

The idea of green architecture may be getting a lot of press lately, but it’s really not a new idea. Green architecture has been around about as long as, well, architecture. That’s because some of the core tenants of the green architecture movement, using local and energy-efficient materials, conserving space and taking into consideration things like local climate have always been important to architects. 

The number of sustainable buildings keeps growing every year. And so has the green building industry. As a $5 billion industry in 2005, green architecture revenues this year are expected to pass $12 billion.

And if Edward Mazria has his way, the green architecture will only continue to expand. Mazria has initiated the 2030 Challenge, a project that seeks to eliminate the fossil-fuel-based energy use in all U.S. buildings by 2030. That sounds like a pretty tall order, even for the booming green architecture industry. But Mazria says that the goal can be reached by building smaller houses that use less energy. 

Of the entire greenhouse gases consumed by the house building process, 25% are produced by furnaces and water heaters. The rest is produced by local utility companies which generate utilities such as electricity.

According to Mazria, we could reduce 50 percent of greenhouse emissions by implementing green architecture that focuses on reducing heating requirements for houses. The easiest way to do this is to reduce the house size. Then, greenhouse emissions can be reduced by modifying old houses and buildings to be more energy-efficient. Also, and perhaps the most simple green architecture technique, Mazria suggests that houses orient their main living quarters southward, so sunlight can be tapped during the day.

The last step for better green architecture, and the one that will probably require the most work, is to switch from old heating, cooling and hot water equipment to energy equipment fueled by renewable resources.

Mazria sees this green architecture challenge as potentially successful because it takes a mixed approach to building greener homes. There’s no single solution. It won’t be easy for green architecture to reduce greenhouse emissions, but most agree that multi-pronged approaches like Mazria’s are the best shot.