Rainwater Harvesting

Green Architecture (green building) is an outcome of a design which focuses on increasing the efficiency of resource use - energy, electricity, water and building materials - while reducing building impacts on human health and the environment during the building's lifecycle, through better design, construction, operation and maintenance.

Green architecture are design to reduce the overall impact of the built environmente on human health and the natural environment by:

• Efficiently using energy, electricity and other resources
• Protecting occupant health
• Reducing waste, pollution and environmental degradation
• The use of natural materials that are available locally

I am interested in a house designed by Eimar Boesjes, an architectural software developer and internet entrepreneur with his wife, landscape designer, Anita Van Asperdt. Check out these links:

http://www.architectureweek.com/2001/0110/design_1-1.html

http://www.uoregon.edu/~hof/S01havestingrain/intro.html

The house called Rainwater is a complex composition of four simple volumes - residence, guest house, office, garace - each capped with a planar steel roof rakishly tilted to channel rainwater down to a single cantilevered corner.

The divergent roof planes almost intersect, and the volumes converge into a single coherent element. But the singularity is elusive. No matter where you stand - above, on either side, or below - you never see the same combination of house, or, for that matter, the entire house. At least one of the volumes, one of the rooftops, is always hidden, just around a corner.

Front View

Back View

Rooftop View

Anita Van Asperdt and Eimar Boesjes treat rainwater as valuable resources rather than a problem. The metal roofs of their house are designed to collect and direct rainwater into an 8,000 gallon underground cistern where it is stored for later use. According to them, the wet season in their area will provide them with enough water to irrigate their landscape and perhaps reduce their dependence upon municipal water utilities for indoor use.

Rainwater Collection System and Filter Placement Detail

The rain water catchment system consists of painted steel roof structure. The water is artfully channeled from the rooftop to truncated downspouts that spill onto granite boulders at ground level. These boulders sit atop concrete footings that house pipes leading to the cistern inlets.

Boulder covers filter slots