Figure 19. Michelle Kaufmann's mkSolaire house with a 'nutrition' label (see text).
Here's another little aside while I put together another post. To a small extent, I've been following the housing industry in the US over the past couple of years and one of the few names that come up in discussions of environmentally-aware construction is that of Michelle Kaufmann[1]. She's an architect based in Northern California and she aggressively pursued a plan to design and build high-quality, energy-efficient homes in a kind of modular framework. In the last five years her company realized some 40 single family homes in this style. Sadly, the economic downturn has forced some of her supplies to close and has made this aspect of her work unsustainable. In her own words, as published on her blog[2]:
“However, we have always known that to pull off our mission, it requires scale. We always believed it would be our company to do the scaling. We were well on our way to do so. However, in this current economic climate, scaling for a small company has proven to be difficult.”
A visit to her site makes clear her commitment and thoughtfulness to improving building quality. While there are not a lot of hard numbers on her site, last year she published a white paper[3] presenting the idea of what she called 'nutrition' labels for houses (similar to the European Union energy label[4]). Figure 19 above shows an example of this. With her dedication and her interest in this area, I'm certain she'll be forging ahead with her new projects.
[1] Her website is here → Michelle Kaufmann Designs
[2] The blog post is here → The end of one dream and the beginning of another
[3] The PDF can be downloaded here → Nutrition Labels for Homes
[4] Wikipedia entry → European Union energy label
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