Inside Su CasA
green gets real
Designer/builder Ted Owens constructed his Corrales, New Mexico, green home with sustainability in mind.
This article first appeared in Spring 2008 Su Casa
As we put this issue of Su Casa together, we found ourselves once again casting around for a synonym for green. Sustainable turned out to be the best choice, but in fact the words don’t necessarily overlap when it comes to home building–related matters. Some subtle shading differentiates the two: sustainable means an activity that can be carried on indefinitely, or at least passes the seven-generations test—that is, the world is left enough intact that our great-great-to-the-seventh-power grandchildren can enjoy the same conditions as we do. But I can think of green materials, say something mined from the earth, that wouldn’t be truly sustainable. Resources do eventually run out, given enough time and population. Green, on the other hand, implies a degree of sustainability while promising a healthy indoor environment and a commitment to less impact on the planet. Still, attempts to define green tend to slide off certainty into vague helper phrases like eco-friendly, nonpolluting, nontoxic—not that it’s a meaningless term, but it remains broad, subjective, and sensitive to context. Whether it’s all sustainable, well, time will tell that tale.
And that makes it hard for us consumers to align our purchases, from paper towels to custom homes, with our “live green” philosophy. As editors, we trip over this speed bump when we search for homes to cover in our Green Home column: a house might have some passive solar features, a concrete floor, and a claim of heavily insulated walls, but is it really green?
A sign of the green-building concept’s maturity, green-building guidelines have emerged that outline in great detail what green means in home construction. At Su Casa, we’ve taken on the Build Green New Mexico guidelines issued by the Home Builders Association of Central New Mexico as the definitive standard for our new Green Home of the Year Awards. Co-sponsored by Su Casa, Build Green New Mexico, and the Green Building Initiative, this program honors builders creating houses that meet tough requirements for lot development, energy efficiency, water efficiency, resource efficiency, indoor environmental quality, and global impact. Independent monitoring and verification assure the homes are built and perform as well as they claim.
How exciting, then, for our first awards competition to produce two stellar houses of such advanced green credentials that the jury granted them a co-award as Green Homes of the Year, with a house by Hale and Sun Construction representing affordable green and a home by Durano Construction representing luxurious green. And though we don’t yet have guidelines for green remodeling, a renovated adobe by Earth and Straw (our cover house) was so lovely and green it garnered an honorable mention.
In a sense, every remodel is recycling, an example of saving resources by working with existing material. Our two featured remodels in this issue (see “Character counts,” page 82, and “Enormous welcome,” page 72) show how a modest home near downtown Santa Fe and a grand adobe on the city’s outskirts came back to life under skillful and caring hands. And at the Sherman residence featured in “Perennial pleasures” (page 88), a green thumb and creative use of exterior space creates such nice outdoor living you’d never want to go inside from May to October.
As the world greens up this spring—yes, even the desert has chlorophyll!—consider how you might shade your world with real or metaphorical green. Maybe someday green will become just another color, when all houses are built to such environmentally conscious standards that none will be singled out above the other. That’ll be some green day.