Green Living: The Case Studies

1. Wing House | David Hertz, a passionate advocate of sustainability, became an environmentalist in the late 1970s after surfing in polluted Santa Monica Bay. The buildings he has created during the last two decades are models of thoughtful, environmentally sensitive design. The most ambitious of his future projects is Wing House, which he hopes to build high in the Santa Monica Mountains on the fire-scarred ranch once owned by designer Tony Duquette.

In a major recycling effort, pieces of a decommissioned Boeing 747 will be flown to the remote Ventura County site by helicopter and used to enclose separate structures. The 2,500-square-foot wings, each supported by four concrete columns at different heights, will cover the living areas and terraces, and the horizontal stabilizers will be the master-suite roof. The air cavity in the wings will provide insulation, and the flaps, when activated, will offer shade and natural ventilation. Window glass will be set into the concrete floor and rammed-earth walls will absorb the winter sun’s low rays.

In a 1991 BBC television documentary, British architect Norman Foster extolled the 747 as the ultimate technological building site, and Hertz discovered that he could buy an entire plane for the cost of scrap, or about the same price as a Mercedes-Benz. Like the Native Americans who used every part of the buffalo, he plans to incorporate sections of the fuselage into an art studio, animal barn and dining pavilion. The nose will be tilted on end to serve as a meditation pavilion, with the cockpit windows as a skylight.

Americans discard enough aluminum to replace the nation’s commercial air fleet every three months, and Hertz was pleased to find a productive use for this material--as he has for the carpet waste used in Syndecrete, the lightweight concrete that he’s produced for the last 20 years. Duquette, who assembled fantastic structures from found objects, would surely applaud.

2. Beitcher House | Warren Wagner describes the residence he’s designed for Bob and Carol Beitcher as the latest in a series of “prototypical two-story solar houses.” Beitcher, the chief executive of Panavision, had commissioned Wagner to design the facade of an office building eight years ago. As he was embarking on building a new house, the CEO says, his four children persuaded him to make their new home ecologically responsible. It’s located in Santa Monica, which recently introduced guidelines on sustainable design, but the architect had to negotiate zoning modifications in order to maximize the house’s solar exposure.

“Most of my clients are very enlightened people who want to do the right thing for the environment, but also demand a very high level of design,” says Wagner. “In a climate as benign and sunny as that of Southern California, all cooling and most heating can be provided by informed design, and it costs little more to use green building materials.”

The Beitcher house, now under construction, has a first story of stuccoed concrete block walls, while the second is clad with western red cedar. A sheet-metal roof appears to float above a clerestory that pulls in natural light and vents hot air. The house presents a closed face to the streets on the north and west, but opens up to the south and east through glass sliders. A passive solar system warms water for radiant floor heating, electricity is generated by photovoltaic panels, and gray water is used to irrigate the garden. The western red cedar is sustainably farmed, as is the bamboo used on the first-floor ceiling and the palm wood used for the second-story’s floor.

Wagner, who has tried to balance efficiency and elegance in the 30 houses and additions he has completed in his 12 years of practice, first embraced these issues in the 1970s as an associate of Edward Mazria, who wrote “The Passive Solar Energy Book.” “He emphasized function over aesthetics,” says Wagner. “One without the other is not good.”

3. Mill Street Lofts | Though many principles of green design were first explored in California in the 1960s, they have been more widely adopted in Northern Europe, and especially in Germany, where the climate is harsher and there are no oil reserves. Stefan Behnisch collaborated with his father, Guenter, in a Stuttgart firm that earlier had designed buildings with green features for the 1972 Munich Olympics and the German Bundestag in Bonn. He and partner Christof Jantzen opened an office for Behnisch Architects in Venice and recently completed the Genzyme biotech headquarters in Cambridge, Mass., which received the U.S. Green Building Council’s highest rating.

“Sustainability is a holistic thing,” says Behnisch. “At Genzyme, the additional construction cost will soon be covered by energy savings, but the building is also a more desirable place to work.”

Linear City, an L.A.-based developer, selected the firm’s design for 120 live-work units called the Mill Street Lofts in a downtown warehouse district, with groundbreaking planned for next spring. The partners developed models that make the best use of the confined and gritty site. “Building in context means respecting the culture and the proportions of the streetscape,” Jantzen says. They discarded curvilinear schemes as “too vain” for the raw industrial setting, and settled on a block of apartments, raised on a podium of underground parking. These are set back behind a row of townhouses that maintain the street line, and are angled to exploit views of downtown. To reduce the sun’s radiant heat, small air-conditioning units will supplement the cross-ventilation, and solar chimneys will vent and cool the buildings. In addition, the site has been grassed over, and a “sky” garden is planned for halfway up the 13-story building. How refreshing: a downtown building with green space.