Radius Architects • Sustainable Design for People, Place and Planet

Resources

Websites

Carolyn Roberts' strawbale house near Tucson • www.houseofstraw.com Designed by Wayne Bingham with a color rendering by Radius Architects. An ambitious owner-builder tackling her first house while single-parenting 2 teenagers, working full time, and writing a book about the project. Features of the house include surrounding porches, earthen plasters, loft level, and adobe floors.

Visionary and practical solutions for restoring the earth • www.bioneers.org

DAWN/Out on Bale By Mail• www.greenbuilder.com/dawn/ "Developing alliances with nature." Toward that end, DAWN is promoting sustainable living for a better world and offering workshops and other Resources for Sustainable Building and Permaculture enthusiasts in the Southwest and northern Mexico.

Healthy House Institute • www.healthyhouseinstitute.com Help in understanding toxicity of building materials and finding alternatives to them.

Sustainable Building Sourcebook • www.greenbuilder.com/sourcebook/ One of the first and still one of the best in-depth documents on materials and methods for building green. Over 40 chapters on many important aspects of building sustainably, whether buidng new or remodeling, from rainwater harvesting to compost toilets, from radiant barriers to flyash concrete, from insulation to non-toxic termite control.

Books

A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings and Construction • by Chris Alexander, Sara Ishikawa and Murray Silverstein • This classic exploration of wide ranging design ideas has a profound understanding of how people use space, and has inspired much design work over its 30-year history.

Building Green • by Clarke Snell and Tim Callahan • An enthusiastic book whose subtitle is "A complete how-to guide to alternative building methods - earth plaster, straw bale, cordwood, cob and living roofs." With both a wide range of great photos of these techniques, and the tracking of a small cottage they built for the book, this book can teach a great deal about the thought and actions of a green builder.

The Straw Bale House • by Athena Swentzell Steen, Bill Steen and David Bainbridge with David Eisenberg • A classic how-to book in "the strawbale revolution," this books walks you through the building of simple bale houses, but the cost estimates are not from this century.

The Beauty of Straw Bale Homes • by Athena and Bill Steen • This book focuses on the surfaces, appearance and visual delight of bale houses, and presents recipes and application techniques for earthen plasters, lime washes and other finishes.

The New Straw Bale House • by Catherine Wanek • A recent project-based book presenting the widest range of "what contemporary strawbale can do," at all scales and in all climates.

The Not So Big House: A Blueprint for the Way We Really Live • Sara Susanka, with Kira Obolensky • For our homes, size matters profoundly, and Sarah Susanka presents a way of thought and many design solutions for enhancing enjoyment and interest without expanding the square footage.

Cohousing: A Contemporary Approach to Housing Ourselves • by Kathryn McCamant and Charles Durrett; second edition, with Ellen Hertzman • When a cooperative wants to plan a residential community together, this is the place to start, both for design and for interpersonal process.

The Energy Efficient Source Book • www.rmi.org Comes from the well-respected Rocky Mountain Institute, and has lots of good technical information about solar, wind, hydropower and other systems, and can help you understand and select these systems.

Ecological Design • by Sim VanDerRyn and Stuart Cowan • How to base design on living systems, using ideas like conservation, regeneration, stewardship, and groundedness in place.

Green Remodeling: Changing the World One Room at a Time • by David Johnston and Kim Master • A project-oriented hands-on guide to helping existing homes to become greener, with many useful checklists and resources.

The Inward Garden; Creating A Place of Beauty and Meaning • by Julie Messervy with photos by Stan Abel • The experiential connection we feel to nature is a deep force, and has many wonderful expressions in the wildly varying gardens from around the world. Julie's lessons for designers are drawn from these landscapes, and are offered as simple principles of design.