Monday, January 18, 2010

Contest House - to show wind generators or not

Should the first image we show of the house have it topped with wind generators, or not?

Here we see the house with the wind generators - but the inside of the shroud has been painted white to reduce the contrast we were seeing in the previous image, or...

..do we dispense with showing wind generators for now and let the house forms stand on their own for the time being, solar collectors still in place.

I have to say that I think I like the interaction between the wind mills and the overlaying title letters, where as without them the house appears simpler and cleaner. But I tend to gravitate towards noise and complexity. We are still going to show the the wind mills in the image in Tile2 where we describe the characteristics of the house. Thanks for the great active feedback I've been getting all through this process.

5 comments:

  1. The idea of the wind tubines is great, but unless one of the specific criteria of this contest is to showcase that specific alternative energy source, I would go without. You've already got a uphill battle with the non-remoderned folks out there to accept modern design. Solar water heaters and pool heaters are fairly common and don't cause the average person's weirdness alarm to go off. Wind turbines are still a little far off the main stream.

    If on the other hand, if the idea is to demonstrate a full up alternative energy house then leave the turbines in the rendering.

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  2. In a way the purpose of the contest is to showcase this kind of tech, but I don't believe it has to be in this image. Having it absent sort of reinforces the idea that there is a menu of energy strategies available to you when you build a house. You have to choose the ones that are right for you.

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  3. The turbines look cool. In a way it makes sense because a house will concentrate wind as it flows over. However in an actual installation they may cause a undesired vibration when attached directly to a wood frame house. The models you have pictured above look like the AeroVironment models attached to the Camden Aquarium which is a steel commercial installation. Also those are horizontal axis turbines in fixed position which would be high noise and not steer into the wind. In a fixed position installation near a residential area vertical axis may make sense. Something like this:
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6SyW0eBDVnA
    or this:
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uGr2EFcBlts
    As the other person noted it entirely depends on the parameters of the project and how it will be judged.

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  4. I vote turbines as long as it doesn't conflict with the budget portion of the contest.

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  5. The contest brief does not dictate a budget, so I can't see anything wrong with presenting them as a possibility. Here I betray my mindset of approaching the design of the house as a "Product" with options, as opposed to a custom design. We actually have not answered directly to some specific points of the brief, but rather trying to propose a product that could satisfy the hypothetical couple as well as a range of others.

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