Best Green Houses
Truro Residence and Modern Lake House
Truro and Orleans, Massachusetts
ZeroEnergy Design
By David Sokol,Via:greensource.construction.com
Cape Cod immediately calls to mind images of rugged, shingle-clad saltboxes and weather-beaten Greek Revivals. Yet the Cape is also home to stunning works of Modernism, which embrace the elements in a manner befitting a vacation land. Indeed, The Cape Cod Modern House Trust was incorporated in 2007 to protect Jack Hall’s visually featherweight Hatch Cottage (1960), the Kugel/Gips House (1970), a dynamic bundle of volumes by Charles Zehnder, and other examples dating from this period.
Both legacies continue to this day. There are the gargantuan vacation homes gracelessly parroting the region’s most historic predecessors and, more sparingly dotting the region, works by the likes of ZeroEnergy Design (ZED). This Boston-based firm, founded by five recent Cornell grads, references past, present, and future: Two of its recently completed homes on Cape Cod, a 6,400-square-foot beach house for a large blended family in Truro and a 1,950-square-foot lakefront building nestled in the woods of Orleans, are tough like the peninsula’s oldest buildings, Modernist in form, and sustainable in their conception…
Photo © Eric Roth Photography
 Photo © Michael J. Lee Photography
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…Digital methods do not necessarily yield high-tech ends. Take the intuitive solutions. Responding to the fact that the Truro family’s seven children are all grown, ZED carefully orchestrated HVAC zoning, effectively allowing large swaths of the house to be closed off when not in use. The building form, two parallel wings jutting toward Cape Cod Bay and topped in sail-like roofs, expresses the internal segmentation…
…For the Modern Lake House, ZED deputized surrounding foliage to lessen solar gain, and designed cantilevered elements to act as additional shading devices. Both projects feature radiant heating…
…ZED also makes use of well-known sustainability tactics, though with the exactingness afforded by computerization. Icynene open-cell insulation was sprayed into both homes, and in Orleans, it is supplemented with both rigid and closed-cell materials. “An additional benefit of foam is that it firms up the structure,” Horowitz notes…
…The durability of Cape Cod’s centuries-old homes is now obligatory here: Local building codes incorporate the threat of hurricane-force winds, Horowitz explains, so the entire western elevation of the Truro home is steel-framed underneath its FSB-certified, vertical-grain cedar skin. And the large, west-facing picture windows that provide views to Orleans’s Pilgrim Lake can withstand the impact of a cannon-shot two-by-four.
…To ascend to that next level, the Truro and Orleans houses are fitted out with 2.3-kilowatt and 11.7-kilowatt rooftop photovoltaic arrays. The lake house is ready to take a solar-thermal system once the owners, one of whom is retired already, decide to occupy the house full-time. (A surplus of hot water currently would damage systems.)
Heat recovery ventilators are installed in both houses, too. “We’re not going to maximize south-facing glazing because we read it in a textbook,” Horowitz concludes of ZED’s method. “Rather, we run five different glazings and figure out what kind of dent that makes in our overall energy performance.”
Posted on September 21, 2010
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