Instead of just trying to build environmentally, some people now are trying to build as part of the environment.

New houses around the country are being built that attempt to incorporate the trees and grass and sun as part of the building blocks. Some of these loosely resemble treehouses we may have had as kids, which hope to include and be inspired by nature. They vary from small, one-room structures to advance, sophisticated design. Not that that necessarily means these new environmental houses are automatically environmentally-friendly. Some of the treehouses even have wood-burning fireplaces, which doesn’t seem like the best idea for a house set among the woods.

Homes that attempt to incorporate nature, trees, water and sunlight are particularly prevalent in the northwest of the country. Here, you’ll find cutting-edge examples of innovative architecture, like the Wilkinson residence outside Portland, OR.

The Wilkinson residence, built in 2004, has become the pinnacle of nature-inspired design. The circular wood and glass house feels as though it is literally part of the branches around it. With huge windows, glass walls and large patios sitting among the top of the forest, the trees are an integral part of the house. As the building rises, its upper floors expand and the line between inside and outside blurs.

Although Robert Harvey Oshatz — the architect of the Wilkinson residence — has a reputation as an organic builder, using organic materials, that doesn’t mean all nature-inspired designs are truly nature-friendly.

Building among trees or alongside a creek can have a highly detrimental impact on those trees or that creek. Construction, even construction done with the best of intentions, is usually not good for the soil or for plants that have never seen a bulldozer or crane before. How can an entirely new single-family residence be constructed without bringing in foreign materials? Without carting those materials through the brush, eroding the soil, destroying plants, and driving away animal life? How can that house be built without relying heavily on foundations and supports that weaken the trees and geological integrity of the site?

Using organic and environmentally-friendly materials is good. Using them from somewhere local is even better. But what if you used nothing but recycled materials to build a house?

Although the most recycled house would be a used one, when people home to build a new house they are finding some creative products to try. Recycled concrete and scrap metal can be come by frequently at the dump. Not only does it save energy, it saves money too. But, some people are even going so far as to try and build houses out of nothing but reused garbage – toilet paper roll walls?

Garbage walls are not as crazy as they sound. A Welsh company, Affresol, has developed a way to take plastic-based garbage, melt it down, and repour it as a type of wall material that is then covered in dry-wall on the inside and coating on the outside. Not that plastic is the most environmentally-friendly material out there, but at least it’s not in a landfill.

While most environmental designers are encouraging people to learn to live in conjunction with nature, not in opposition to it, many agree that really the most ecologically-sound city planning in our current society is highly dense city planning. The high-rise with hundreds of people could, because of transportation concerns, be doing more for the Earth than the fanciful treehouse on stilts.

But it doesn’t exactly inspire people’s eco-imagination.

To try and make the high-rise apartment complex a little greener, many people have started simple gardens on their roof tops. In New York, it’s not uncommon to find small gardens and trees on the roofs of otherwise boring buildings. It’s not quite a “living roof,” but it’s getting close.

One of the most important environmental aspects of a “living roof,” besides growing your own delicious tomatoes, is controlling water run-off. Water waste is a growing environmental concern and the most-environmentally friendly houses attempt to incorporate natural rain into the design.

In olden times people may have lived on farms, produced their own food and been highly self-sufficient. Sure, they burned coal, which wasn’t great for the planet, but if we had merely continued as self-sustaining, spread out, independent homesteads living in conjunction with the earth, then our planet could have gone on existing just fine for centuries. (Wait, it did!) But, at some point we stopped doing that. People moved to cities. The Industrial Revolution happened. Roads were built. Modernization brought higher standards of living and consumption to households. Now, the issue is figuring out what is most sustainable given our current lifestyles.

LEED certification and other green building certifications — which have been shown to increase the re-sale value of a home — have increasingly focused on issues like: using organic or recycled materials in the construction, preventing water pollution and run-off, utilizing energy-efficiency techniques to warm and cool the house, and providing energy through renewable sources. LEED does not focus on if the house is built in a pasture or a forest or on a hill. While a treehouse has the potential to be environmentally-friendly, it is not necessarily so.

In some areas of the country, large swatches of land have been protected from development and building by preservationists. These areas now serve as reminders of what nature once was. We are able to go walk through these parks and enjoy the view around us, but if we tried to build a house in that preserved land — however much we wanted to love and admire it — we would corrupt the beauty we hoped to be a part of.

>Written by d/visible contributor Kelly Dunleavy.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 12th, 2010 at 1:41 pm and is filed under Culture, Architecture, Art & Design, Community, Nature, Interior Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.