Good Wood

The Enertia building system is billed as "performance-based natural architecture" that draws from the science of biomimicry.

Enertia® is a new technology for building houses so that they heat and cool themselves. This is achieved from the design, the orientation, and the materials of the home, rather than a furnace, heat pump, or air-conditioner. Three basic, millions-of-year-old principles of nature, combined with state-of-the-art windows, radiant coatings, and prefab manufacture, make it possible, and practical. The principles are inertia, thermal currents, and the energy capacity of wood.

The goal is a comfortable living space - in an often hostile environment. Remarkably, our planet Earth achieves this, in the absolute-zero temperature of space, by weather patterns and thermal inertia. This "ecological balance" is possible because Earth has an atmosphere that traps and distributes the sun's energy by thermal currents. Enertia® Building Systems has applied this concept to Architecture.

 The cool factor here is substantial: this project won the History Channel's Modern Marvels Invent Now Challenge. Last year top honors went to Strawjet, a system for making load-bearing building components out of, you guessed it, straw from the Ashland School of Environmental Technology in Oregon.