Several elements of SmartDwelling I, published recently in the Wall Street Journal’s Green House of the Future article, are highly visible. Two of the more important ones, however, can”t be seen at all... at least from the ground. See the grey roof just to the left of the Tower of Wind & Water? Those are the hot water solar collectors that provide hot water to the entire house. See the blue roof covering the two-story porch? Those are photovoltaic collectors that provide electricity to SmartDwelling I.

   Both sets of collectors are on low-slope roofs, so there’s no way you can see them unless you’re a long way from the house. They also occupy the entire roof... in essence, they are the roof. This means that even if you’re far enough back from the house to see the roof surface, you’re still unlikely to notice anything different.

   I tried this approach first on a design for a Green Shed at Southlands, a DPZ project near Vancouver. Southlands is a place where all of the people living there will be able to get all the food they need from food grown on the property. I blogged about the Green Shed here.

   Contrast this with normal collectors which are usually designed for the perfect angle of maximum solar efficiency, no matter how hideous that makes them look on the roof. This attitude of getting the engineering exactly right with not a thought for design likely contributed to the demise of the first green revolution that began in the late 1960s and died in the early 1980s. Read this post to find out why.

~ Steve Mouzon