Antony Stefan Architect

This essay describes the design strategies featured in the Adelia Avenue House, Goodrich Avenue House, and Gillespie Avenue House.

An Efficient Layout

These green home designs find a balance between domestic comfort on one hand, while limiting size on the other. Efficient floor plans form the essence of green living: every square foot of the home needs to be climate controlled, generally consuming fossil fuel resources and polluting the atmosphere in the process. Where the building itself is concerned, all of it exists through the extraction, manufacture and transportation of material resources. Simply by reducing their size, these designs reduce the impacts that buildings and their construction place on the environment.
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Introduction

Sometimes it is hard to tell that you are in Sarasota. It would be difficult to count how many miles of our civic rights-of-way eerily resemble those in Jacksonville, Atlanta, Indianapolis or Los Angeles. While travelling our public thoroughfares, it is all too common to see the same signs, color themes and products competing for attention, repeated over and over. The cadence and melody may vary but the refrain does not: a Bed Bath and Beyond begets a Taco Bell signals a Jiffy Lube ahead. (more…)

While working on the Geraldson Community Farm Barn, we undertook an Integrated Water Management Plan (IWMP) that scientifically addressed water supply sources and consumption demands in the Barn facility. We incorporated a variety of water conservation strategies in the Barn including a gray water recovery system, rainwater cisterns and low-flow fixtures. Steven Suau, of Progressive Water Resources, was a member of the team and brought valuable design optimization tools to the discussion. (more…)