30 Energy Efficient Houses You Can Build

This book is about how to build tomorrow's house -- today. How to build a house that is energy efficient, solar heated, uses every inch of space well, is designed for the people who plan to live there, is elegantly simple, and yet doesn't cost a small fortune.

This book is about how to build tomorrow's house -- today. How to build a house that is energy efficient, solar heated, uses every inch of space well, is designed for the people who plan to live there, is elegantly simple, and yet doesn't cost a small fortune.

This book is the second of four dealing with bioclimatic design and construction by focusing on the most basic and polyvalent of modern environmental systems: the bioclimatic greenhouse, the “Swiss-army chainsaw” of architecture. More specifically, this second volume focuses on how the structure of bioclimatic wooden greenhouses may be designed and built. In more general terms, it helps us consider how to design and build the structure of bioclimatic, low-energy architecture, with low environmental impact. This multi-volume book covers both free-standing greenhouses that can naturally heat and cool themselves, and lean-to greenhouses that support the natural heating and cooling of buildings; this includes both agricultural greenhouses and greenhouses suited to host people. As a result, it is a trans-disciplinary work deriving its areas of concern from a broad range of study areas, spanning from environmental, to constructional, to structural, drawing the clarity of the approach from the fact that the topics are presented by a single author with a single voice and a designer’s mindset. To achieve this, the book adopts a composite set of explanatory strategies and communication registers – including extensive support by 3D construction drawings and examples – and presents not only stateof-the-art solutions, but also experimental ones.

This book is the third of four dealing with bioclimatic design and construction by focusing on the most basic and polyvalent of modern environmental systems: the bioclimatic greenhouse, the "Swiss-army chainsaw" of architecture. More specifically, this third volume focuses on how the envelope of bioclimatic wooden greenhouses may be designed and built. In more general terms, it helps us to consider how to design and build the transparent and opaque enclosures of bioclimatic, low-energy architecture, with low environmental impact. This multi-volume book covers both free-standing greenhouses that can naturally heat and cool themselves, and lean-to greenhouses that support the natural heating and cooling of buildings; this includes both agricultural greenhouses and greenhouses suited to host people. As a result, it is a trans-disciplinary work deriving its areas of concern from a broad range of study areas, spanning from environmental, to constructional, to structural, drawing the clarity of the approach from the fact that the topics are presented by a single author with a single voice and a designer's mindset. To achieve this, the book adopts a composite set of explanatory strategies and communication registers – including extensive support by 3D construction drawings and examples – and presents not only stateof-the-art solutions, but also experimental ones.