New York City is different. This, for many of us, is what we like about it, the "more" of it all, the fact that we have more of everything -- good, bad, indifferent -- than just about any other city in the United States. All the overage can be a bit much sometimes, but even on the worst of days -- subway delays and bummer street vibes, foul weather, kooky co-workers, unpaid bills, fill it in yourself -- many of us can barely stomach the prospect of leaving this honking, vertical, mess of a city. And yet... there's something about the idea of a house of one's own, neither above nor beneath someone else's, that unquestionably works. It's probably a stretch to say that it's that urban yearning for space that helped the New York-based Steven Learner Studio design the very cool Meadowlark House, which claimed first place in the Chain of Eco-Homes Competition. But it's no stretch to describe the home as one that could make even the most ardent New Yorker wonder what life would be like with both a front and back yard.
Meadowlark House won't be built in New York City, of course. It will actually be built, though -- in Greensburg, Kansas, a town that has remade itself as a haven of sustainable building (and star of a Discovery Channel TV show) after being essentially flattened by a devastating tornado back in 2007. Greensburg GreenTown, a non-profit based in Greensburg, co-sponsored the Chain of Eco-Homes Competition along with green house-plan experts Free Green. As has been the case with the green-design pre-fab revolution taking place in post-Katrina New Orleans -- Wayne Curtis has a great piece on this in The Atlantic -- Greensburg GreenTown reflects the national trend of communities reinventing themselves as more efficient and sustainable than they had been before devastation, in any of its many forms, precipitated a change. In the case of cities such as Greensburg and New Orleans (where the process has been, perhaps predictably, more anarchic), natural disaster triggered that reinvention; in some of the other cities we've written about here, the disasters have been slower and more demographic and economic in nature. In the wake of those multiple devastations, though, it has been heartening to see how innovative and impressive has been the filling up of what was so sadly emptied out. We've still got our issues as a nation -- health care, a couple of bad wars, bigoted ventriloquist Jeff Dunham -- but it's nice to see that we're still capable of creative responses to destruction.
And Meadowlark House is unquestionably an impressively creative response to the challenge of reinventing an entire town. Steven Learner Studio has a fine reputation for its interior design and architectural work, but much of that rep was built on aesthetics -- previous SLS projects have been more likely to show up in Elle Decor than, say, Inhabitat. But Meadowlark House, which was judged the best of 439 entries from 13 countries by a panel of eight green building experts and public voters, is both peerlessly green and up to the high aesthetic standards of previous Steven Learner Studio projects. (And it finally got SLS into Treehugger! Kudos, all around!) From the building's orientation -- east-west, the better to take advantage of sunlight through the south-facing windows -- to its compact floor plan and more familiar green-design elements, Meadowlark House offers an object lesson in full-spectrum, human-scale green building. Radiant floor heating and a ducted energy recovery ventilator highlight a long list of efficient mechanical systems; the roof set-up also allows for optional photovoltaic panel installation. Most notably, the exterior walls are constructed with the state-of-the-art, Lego-style HIB-System, a German-developed pre-fab building product that's surpassingly green and easy to install. While its modest scale and single-serving size make it unlikely that we'll ever see Meadowlark House in New York City -- at least outside of an installation like last year's MoMA pre-fab home show -- it's nice to see another step forward in green pre-fab homes (they're the future, at least outside of New York) and doubly nice, for those of us who insist on feeling some pride in this weird city of ours, to see that innovation coming out of NYC. The subways are still maddening and we as a nation still need to work out this Jeff Dunham thing, but on a Monday, it's just nice to see something that works.
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