Tag: Green Design

Brookesmith
01/10/08 2:42pm

The Brookesmith Shipping-Container House

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Construction Materials, Green Design and Development, Home Design, Homebuilders, New Construction, New Construction: Residential, Transportation
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House Made of Shipping Containers at 206 Cordell St., Houston, Under Construction

That house built out of shipping containers on Cordell St. in Brookesmith looks like it’ll be ready for delivery soon. Yes, this was a spec house — and yes, there already is a buyer.

Last year, Numen Development owners Katie Nichols and John Walker used shipping containers to construct the Apama Mackey Gallery on 11th St. in the Heights — because the gallery owner wanted a structure she can move when the property owner kicks her off the land. But the house Numen is building on Cordell looks like it’s going to be around for a while. It comes with its own, uh . . . doublewide lot, and it’s right across the street from a meat-processing plant.

After the jump: drawings, models, and an earlier construction photo of this neat little three-bedroom, three-bath, 1,851-square-foot package!

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Construction Materials
10/09/07 4:19pm

Planting Grass Over Their Heads

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Environmental, Gardening, Green Design and Development, Institutional Buildings, Renovations
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Green Roof at UH’s Burdette Keeland Design and Exploration Center

Will something like this be coming soon to a home near you? Up now: a green roof atop a renovated building that will serve as a fabrication shop for architecture and industrial design students at the University of Houston. Unlike most of Houston’s (few) commercial and institutional buildings with a planted roof, this one has a slope to it.

Photo of Burdette Keeland Jr. Design and Exploration Center: Green Team Houston

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Demolitions
08/24/07 7:43pm

MainPlace: Hines’s 46-Story Green Pipe-Wrench Dream

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Downtown, Green Design and Development, Highrises, Office Buildings, Proposed Developments
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View of MainPlace, Hines’s Proposed 46-Story LEED Silver Office Building on Main Street in Downtown HoustonIt rises dramatically from the center of Downtown to face the morning sun. And the renderings sure make it look like a sleek, giant pipe wrench, the business end looking out over Houston’s industrial east side. Yep, there’s nothing the head office won’t be able to fix!

It’s MainPlace, a 46-story, one-million-square-foot green spec office tower, planned for most of the block surrounded by Fannin, Rusk, and Walker, at 811 Main.

The developer is the Hines CalPERS Green Fund, established by Hines and the California retirement fund to develop “sustainable” office buildings around the country. The core and shell, they promise, will be given a LEED-Silver rating by the USGBC. Don’t worry too much about all that, though: tenants will presumably be free to decorate their interiors with the usual endangered rainforest hardwoods and petroleum-based finishes.

That’s a five-story atrium up there on the 39th floor, facing a “sky garden.” Enjoy those trees in the rendering while you can; eventually, the engineers will start to think long and hard about hurricanes. More details and lots more zoomy pics, including closeups of that pipe-wrench jaw sky garden, after the jump.

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Commercial Real Estate
06/07/07 9:36am

A Clever Way To Develop Property Temporarily While You Wait for a Bigger Deal

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Construction Materials, Demolitions, Development Strategy, Green Design and Development, Houston Heights, New Construction, Proposed Developments, Retail
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Shipping Container

Here’s a building method that seems well-suited for Houston: It’s fast, it’s temporary, and it involves both shipping containers and fine art. Remember the demolition permit for the site on 11th Street in the Heights we mentioned a few days back? By Friday, it’ll have a completed building on it, according to ‘stina, who wrote in her LiveJournal Wednesday:

Today, the shipping containers will be delivered and installed to the new site of the 1400 square foot gallery, and you can see for yourself what this form of construction looks like. They started this morning with merely a few spread footings and grade beams and they’ll finish this evening with all the containers set and a good portion (if not all) of the roof in place.

It’s the new Apama Mackey Gallery, pieced together out of three shipping containers by Numen Development. The gallery will occupy the site for a few years, until the landowner is ready for a more permanent development in that location. Then Mackey will be able to move the gallery to a new lot she hopes to find in the meantime.

Some of the project’s green features, according to ‘stina’s report:

  • From conception of the idea in March, it has been three short months to a nearly final product!
  • The Mackey Gallery is built to be moved and reassembled with less than 5% waste.
  • Custom panelized roof and floor system utilizing Structural Insulated Panels (SIPs are extremely energy efficient and virtually eliminate the need for traditional framing while dramatically reducing waste and build time.)
  • Clerestory panels and office windows made from Polygal. (An insulated polycarbonate that is more energy efficient than glass, yet less expensive and more secure.)
  • The job site for the Gallery will need NO dumpsters because the building process has so little waste.
  • Even the parking lot will be made of Permeable Paving squares which are green, and reusable.

Photo: Flickr user Ross Dunn

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