design, build, learn. repeat.

CHP / CDS

It turns out that Virginia’s New River Valley has its very own design studio. It’s part of a non-profit community development corporation called Community Housing Partners (CHP) that works throughout Virginia and the surrounding region. The Community Design Studio (CDS) is located in Christiansburg, VA, about 8 miles from my house in Blacksburg. And I went and moved 800 miles to work at a design studio in Biloxi, Mississippi! I must be crazy. I found out about the CDS through its connection to the Rose Fellowship Program. The Rose Fellowship is a three-year architectural fellowship supported by Enterprise Community Partners …

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Construction Demonstration Pods

Building a house is a mysterious process for most people, and hurricane-resistant building is even more daunting. Even professional builders can be confused by the many building codes, insurance requirements, engineering calculations, and best practices that apply to residential construction on the Gulf Coast. With that in mind, the GCCDS recently embarked on a project to build three full-scale construction demonstration pods for the Mississippi Home & Garden Show on March 19-21. The pods were part of a Resiliency Expo organized by the Community & Regional Resilience Institute, a research initiative supported by the Department of Homeland Security, Oak Ridge …

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USGBC 2010 Natural Talent Design Competition

A group from the GCCDS is entering the United States Green Building Council’s 2010 Natural Talent Design Competition. This is a competition for emerging professionals or students to design an efficient green house for an elderly client in the Broadmoor neighborhood of New Orleans. Ultimately, four designs will be chosen for construction, and these will be evaluated based on the project criteria to choose a ‘winner’. Meeting these criteria will be no easy feat. Here’s an idea of the difficult (some might say crazy) program requirements: 2-bedroom, 1.5-bath, 720-880 SF house LEED Platinum $100,000 construction budget Elevated 7 feet above …

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A Low Impact Woodland Home

Head over and check out A Low Impact Woodland Home — a beautifully crafted, organic, environmentally friendly house in Wales. Its approach to green building is about as far from LEED as you can get. Imagine how it would be to live in a house you had designed and built yourself, in four months, for only $5,000? In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to …

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Green Building