GreenBean

Yannell Residence

Location
4895 N. Ravenswoood, Chicago Map

Owner
Michael Yannell

Architect
Farr Associates

The Yannell Residence is a new two-story plus basement, 2,675 sf home seeking LEED for Homes Platinum certification. We haven't seen many LEED for Homes projects in Chicago (the Mauceri Residence recently earned a Gold certification), mostly because the program has been in pilot phase for years, but the USGBC has finally sent it for final member approval. The home also seeks to be one of Chicago's first zero net energy homes - a challenging goal that can only be demonstrated by studying a year's worth of utility data after the home is completed.

1314 N. Moorman

Location
1314 N. Moorman, Chicago Map

Owner
House Plant, Inc.

Architect
Norsman Architects

1314 N. Moorman is a 2,600 sf (3,600 sf with basement) speculative single family home with many basic energy efficiency features and a bit of 'green bling'. Although it is certainly in the class of high-end spec homes, with 4 bedrooms and 3 1/2 baths it isn't nearly as large as some of the custom homes we see. This is another example of an owner new to development using green as a way to differentiate their product - I love that their company name works as a triple entendre.

Chicago Magazine Green Awards

Normally we stay away from event announcements, but this item isn't really an event and comes via special request. Chicago Magazine has opened nominations for their second annual green awards. Last year's winners, a diverse and worthy crew, include Ori Sivan and Joe Silver, owners of Greenmaker Supply listed in our sidebar. This year's nominations are due December 15, so start thinking now about who you'd like to see recognized in the green community.

ChiCobCo

Location
Varies - shown is 722 W. Grand Map

Artist
Miguel Elliott

For this post we're changing pace and not discussing a single building but a company and technique that can be seen in a variety of locations around town: cob. Miguel Elliott is owner of ChiCobCo, which has produced a variety of cob sculptures and structures, of which the most elaborate is the interior and exterior of the Butterfly Social Club shown here. Other projects include a community garden bench in Cabrini Green, a bench outside of True Nature Foods, and Elliott's own Yoga Now studio.

Welcome Greenbuild 2007!

This week 20,000 green building professionals are descending on Chicago for the U.S. Green Building Council's annual Greenbuild conference. The show is at the new McCormick Place West building, which is expected to earn a LEED certification. We won't focus on detailed conference coverage - Inhabitat has proved a good resource for this in the past - but here's a shout-out to all our out-of-town readers dropping in this week.

The mayor kicked off conference events Saturday with a ribbon-cutting for the new Green Building Resource Center at the Chicago Center for Green Technology. This is the legacy project for Greenbuild and is beautiful and dramatic expansion of the space formerly housed in a hallway (literally) at Green Tech. We'll provide a detailed review in the next few weeks, but for now, get out there and check out the space!

Chicago Green Homes and Remodeling Guides

We're a bit late on this, but last week the mayor announced two new resources: Chicago Green Homes and a series of Green Remodeling Guides. We've been anxiously awaiting a public announcement of these resources for several months.

Chicago Green Homes (CGH) is the city's green certification program for small residential projects. The program has been up and running for about 6 months, and the technical criteria were around for more than a year before that, but this announcement is expected to raise the profile of the program. Most of the concepts are similar to LEED, but whereas LEED is fairly performance-based, requiring a certain amount of research and calculation to demonstrate compliance with each

Cleveland Residence

Location
2013 N. Cleveland, Chicago Map

Owner
Private Residence

Architect
Elements Architectural Group
William Scholtens, Design Principal

The Cleveland Residence is a deconversion of an existing 5 dwelling unit building and coach house, both dating to 1876, into a single family home. Similar to the Orchard Residence, this is a luxury project that can afford some very sophisticated features, but is also fairly large (6,500 sf). Although we take some heat for covering these large projects, this one has two green elements working in its favor - it's an existing building, and it's on a double lot and is preserving a fair amount of open space. These projects also provide an opportunity for architects and engineers to experiment with new technologies that can't be applied on most market-rate homes.