September 4, 2005 (RALEIGH, NC) — The Green House: New Directions in Sustainable Architecture, a new book from the Princeton Architectural Press by Alanna Stang, executive editor of I.D. (Interior Design) magazine, and Christopher Hawthorne, L.A. Times architecture critic, is now in bookstores and includes a house in the Bahamas designed by Raleigh, NC-based architect Frank Harmon, FAIA.
As anyone who has not been living on Mars during the past decade is surely aware, the term “green house” no longer refers solely to places for horticultural pursuits. Today’s “green” houses are part of an emerging architecture that is “as aesthetically compelling as it is environmentally friendly,” the book explains. “Leaving behind the clunky, mud-caked constructions of the 1960s and 1970s, the more than 25 remarkable residences featured in The Green House not only tread lightly on the land but also provide exalted spaces in which to live.”
The authors searched around the globe to find “outstanding examples of sustainable design [that] represent nuanced responses to the most diverse and challenging ecological conditions.”
Frank Harmon’s Taylor Vacation House in the Bahamas fit the criteria. Designed to blur the line between indoors and outdoors in this lush, tropical setting yet “zip up” tightly to withstand extreme weather conditions, it embodies the principles of sustainability in an innovative, regionally specific manner. For example, Bahamian homeowners must provide their own drinking water (there are no freshwater wells in the coral reef islands). Therefore, Harmon designed the house as a tall cube topped by a soaring “inverted umbrella” roof that shields the wide-open interior from the hot summer sun, makes the most of prevailing breezes for natural ventilation, and captures rainwater, which is then directed to huge cisterns below. After one or two of the region’s frequent downpours, the cisterns are full and ready to provide water for drinking, bathing, cooking, etc.
The Taylor House was completed in 2000. In 2003, it was named Residential Architect magazine’s “House of the Year.”
The Green House: New Directions in Sustainable Architect is available at area bookstores. To read more about it, visit Amazon.com.
To see and read more about the Taylor Vacation House, visit Frank Harmon’s website (www.frankharmon.com) and click on “projects.”