Monday, October 16, 2017
the zero house is an attempt to meet the highest goals in sustainable building
www.designboom.com: zero house is a collaboration between the endeavour centre and ryerson university, in which students and faculty create a model building (one unit of a stackable townhouse design) that meets the highest goals in sustainable building. using a wide range of natural and minimally-processed or recycled materials, zero house provides its occupants with a zero energy bill, as the solar electricity generated on the roof (using unique BiPVco adhesive solar modules) fully offsets the building’s energy usage.
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I am continually amazed and excited that the push for sustainability is moving forward, fast. “Going green” with housing has been played with here and there, using solar panels and rainwater filters and insulation. However, the zero house truly takes this to the next level, and I hope this design will slowly become more and more affordable. The energy engineering used in this house is also extremely relevant to theater in my opinion. Theater is not a “green” industry in any way, as every show put on sucks a ridiculous amount of electricity for every aspect of tech. I’m not sure if it’s been done before, but I think engineers in the industry should start trying to create zero theaters. I can only imagine the impact that replacing even one or two theaters on Broadway with zero theaters; this industry’s footprint would shrink immensely and I would feel even better about creating my art.
I think that sustainable building is a really important thing for people to consider - especially in theater. Thinking about the current state of our environment, the forest fires in California, the hurricane in Puerto Rico, and the hurricane in Texas - it's more apparent, more now than ever, how climate change is impacting our world. The efficiency of building the zero house is also pretty reflective of how fast we move through productions. I know that School of Drama is attempting to be more green and I think that looking at festivals like EDIT in Toronto can be really influential in how we choose to build scenery. I wonder how we could implement more of this into the scene shop. The house also looks really beautiful and simple. It’s incredible to see really efficient and green houses.
The Zero house is built only out of Carbon material. One question I have about Zero house is how would someone furnish the Zero house in a waste freeway. Would it have to be built by the people who made the Zero house or would be able to be found in stores? Zero house is an interesting concept in that it makes me wonder how it can be applied to theatrical builds. The article mentions that the house has a zero energy bill and with many theatres worried about having enough money to function, I wonder what solar panels would do. Yes, the initial investment is a lot of money but to have a zero energy bill moving further is worth it for companies that aren’t in the red this would be a worthy investment. Another thing that the Zero house puts to into my mind is how to build stage scenery more efficiently. A lot of parts of sets are thrown out after one-off shows, I wonder if there are ways to cheaply and quickly build sets in a more reusable way. Yes, many things are show specific and can’t be reused/there isn’t the space to store things but possibly finding a new material or fastener could solve this issue?
I really like how this project set out to prove that this level of ecological responsibility when building is possible. Especially in the theatrical industry when our turn over of materials is so fast and can often be extremely wasteful, if we were able to achieve a higher level of ecological consciousness, we could do a lot of diminishing our negative impact on the environment. One thing that this article doesn't mention is the cost of this project in comparison to a project using the commonly used materials. I would like to know just how much variance there is between the to methods. Even if there were a large price mark up for the ecological materials, I think this is something that the theatrical community needs to start taking into consideration. Overall, I think this team certainly proved their point in proving that this level of ecological responsibility can be achieved.
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