Landscape Architecture For The Prefab Modern House Kit: The Root Cellar, and More.

We will begin to have guest bloggers (weren't you tired of listening to me anyhow?), people who know a heck of a lot more than I on the next steps of the prefab SIPs house kit as it goes from a modern house kit shell to a sustainable modern homestead in the years to come.

Please welcome Heather Barber, founder of Topos, LLC, a landscape design studio dedicated to purposeful design through creating unique natural environments in Richmond, Virginia.

The sustainable landscape plan by Topos was earlier mentioned here; today, she talks about visiting the off grid prefab modern house for the first time, and how sustainability is connected in the kitchen.

The rest of the post is her own.

Sustainability and landscape go hand in hand, but to really understand sustainability from a livable principal you must put form in the background and set the focus on function. The two do not have to live entirely separately, but the thing that has driven landscape design for centuries must become secondary to to the primary purpose of function. A sustainable landscape does not have to leave beauty out of the picture, but it is there for many more reasons than just aesthetics.

Let’s take green modern kits casa ti as a prototype for understanding the adaptation of the built object to the site rather than the normal process of site adaptation to accommodate the built object. casa ti is a melding of modern living principles with a centuries old notion of living with the land, off the land, and of the land. casa ti is sited in the middle of rural farmland in Virginia.

At first sight, it seems as though there is a modern box sitting in the middle of this soft, rolling earth...still viable earth that is now a repository for a very static looking building. Understanding modern sustainability will turn this perception on it’s ear. casa ti, a prefabricated green modern kit home is actually a very dynamic part of the earth and a living, breathing entity that sustains the land it inhabits. The landscape that surrounds casa ti becomes a fulcrum that allows the exchange between the site, the building and the family that lives on the land.

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