It should be easy to be green
Issue #28
Architect Michelle Kaufmann is a trailblazer in designing prefab, eco-friendly homes
By Elizabeth Barker
Published: June 1st, 2006 | 1:01pm
After spending six grueling months in search of a Bay Area dream home without a nightmarish price tag, architect Michelle Kaufmann and her contractor husband Kevin Cullen decided to take matters into their own hands. “We built ourselves a simple little green box — very clean and sustainable and high-performance,” says Kaufmann, now 36. “And pretty soon our friends started asking, ‘Can you do this for us?’” Now, just two years later, that simple green box has been reproduced in 19 sites across the country — including a life-size replica on display until June 2007 at Washington, D.C.’s National Building Museum.
As a pioneer in modular green building, the Oakland-based Michelle Kaufmann Designs has created affordable homes by using prefab technology, eco-friendly materials, and energy-conscious design since 2002. “I’m trying to make green design more accessible to more people,” says Kaufmann, a Princeton grad and former project architect and designer for Frank O. Gehry in Los Angeles. “I want everyone to know that you can do green building without being some crazy California people living in a straw bale house.” With their plentiful natural light, slate tiling, high ceilings, and airy rooms, Kaufmann’s Glidehouse (the design modeled after her own home) and Sunset Breezehouse (a newer model co-designed by Sunset magazine and constructed on 21 sites) certainly exude a very un-hippie elegance. But for Kaufmann, each home’s good looks can’t outshine its healthy feel.
Designed to “blur the boundary between the interior and the exterior,” Kaufmann’s creations fulfill her original goal of fashioning “a home design that embraced the environment and that was an alternative to the inwardly focused McMansions.” Of course, the Glidehouse, Sunset Breezehouse, and MKD’s custom designs don’t just embrace the environment on an aesthetic level. In addition to including water-saving bathroom fixtures and energy-conserving heating/cooling systems, each home can be built to incorporate bamboo flooring, recycled glass tiles, and other Earth-positive features. The result? A cleaner space that Kaufmann says “makes it much easier to have a relaxed, meditative state of mind” — not to mention drastically slashed energy bills or a level of indoor air quality that exceeds the performance standards American Lung Association’s Health House Program. “It feels really good knowing that we’re living in a healthy home, with no off-gassing paints or materials, and where we can watch the solar meter spin backwards as we put electricity into the grid,” she says. “And living in a house that only uses natural light during the day is much healthier mentally than homes that require artificial light.”
Just 10% of U.S. homes are currently built using modular technology, but Kaufmann hopes that more designers will soon get turned on to prefab’s lowered environmental impact. With each home fabricated in advance, construction generates significantly less waste and creates less site damage than on-site building. Going modular also calls for nearly a third less construction time, as well as reduced material costs (Kaufmann’s finished projects currently range between $175 and $240 per square foot, but may be more expensive in higher-cost areas like San Francisco). The money factor is crucial to Kaufmann, whose firm “approaches building as a craft, making the most out of a tight budget.” To that end, MKD seeks out inexpensive and industrial materials that are “treated in a way that creates a harmonious space and brings out their beauty.” The Glidehouse’s corten steel siding, for example, bears a “velvety rust-colored finish that nestles quietly into the landscape.”
That fusion of beautiful and budget-conscious should bode well for the eco-minded and modestly salaried among us who may one day want a green home to call our own. “As more people are doing green design, it becomes more affordable,” Kaufmann says. “We need this to be the standard approach to building.”
For more information, visit mkarchitecture.com.
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