Aug 29, 2011
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Green Building Design: A Conscious Way To Conserve Energy & Other Resources In Costa Rica

With growing efforts becoming made all over the world to reduce one’s carbon footprint in the environment and to conserve energy, it should come as a no surprise to see substantial development of green building designs in Costa Rica.

Green constructing designs are eco-friendly designs that aid sustain natural resources even though lowering one’s carbon footprint on the environment. Usually, a green home is a home created which uses much less energy by means of incorporating greater insulation in the house, use of LED energy conserving lights as nicely as maximizing natural ventilation so as not to depend on Air conditioning. A typical green house is also designed to collect all grey and black water from toilets, showers and washing machines to feed into a recycling tank where tough solids are naturally broken down and purified water is the end product. This recycled purified water can be reused back into the garden or back into the house for flushing toilets.

Green constructing designs also make use of sustainable constructing supplies. Sustainable constructing supplies are those that are composed of renewable resources or the ones that are manufactured with environmentally friendly processes and use recycled or recyclable products, all the even though reducing admittance to greenhouse gases. Typically in Costa Rica, green houses are constructed employing locally manufactured cement block as nicely as fast growing hardwoods such as teak that have been farmed for construction purposes.

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Aug 28, 2011
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Las Casas Verdes – Green Building in Austin

Las Casas Verdes “Will be the initial Eco-Responsible Solar neighborhood in Texas and the South.”

“Twenty single family members houses will incorporate, as regular attributes, the most recent in solar, wind and water energy systems to move toward zero energy usage. All houses are architecturally created and will meet the strict standards of the Austin Green Building Program”. (as quoted from LasCasasVerdes.com)

This is positive news for Austin. Several developers claim green home construction by adding some additional insulation to the attic or perhaps including a high efficiency furnace and a programmable thermostat. The Las Casas Verdes development is walking their talk by making environmentally friendly, energy saving houses appropriate from the drawing board to completion.

If the developers are able to successfully obtain their objectives and simultaneously make a profit, this could lead to a green constructing revolution in the Texas market. Hopefully we’ll see other builders jumping on the bandwagon marketing similar subdivisions.

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Aug 27, 2011
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Time for a greener architecture

For a lot more articles like the one below please visit us at Plymouth architects

The Gestalt school identified numerous principles of use to artists and architects, but the most essential is that of balance – that is, the continually shifting balance that balances all opposites inside the constantly shifting matrix of reality. Interestingly the principles of form discovered in the natural world are not dissimilar to the Gestalt principles that also operate in the unselfconscious human building traditions I referred to at the beginning of this article. Vernacular developing traditions have evolved slowly over lengthy periods of time and therefore possess some of the coherent organic order found also in Nature. As in animal architecture, vernacular architecture possesses an inherent beauty: the beauty of integrity and unity. Such beauty emerges from the totally balanced integration of a system, its function and use into the broader realms of Nature.

So have we stumbled onto the reason why so numerous modern human-produced environments fail to come up to the good quality of some older towns and cities? At root the dilemma appears to lie in the spiritual posture that we adopt with Nature. Numerous folks would now accept that as humans we are completely co-terminal with Nature. However, in claiming ownership, as we do, of that component of Nature that we call ‘self’, we not only separate ourselves from Nature but also separate ourselves from our own environments. Yogis tell us that the transcendental world of the spirit – the world of unity and pure consciousness – supports the relative world at every point. They tell us that the transcendental realm is a world with out qualities however gives rise to and sustains all qualities. They tell us that it is to be found in the ‘gap’ between the distinct states of consciousness: waking, dreaming and sleep in the silences in music between syllables in spoken language and even between our thoughts. The excellent 19th-century Indian holy man Ramakrishna Paramahansa was as soon as asked, “Where do I locate God?” His reply was, “Look between two thoughts.” This gap between perfectly balanced opposites is where life and spirit enter the relative world. It is also the essential middle ground between a subject and an object that defines the ‘mean’ and gives the meaning.

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