aMortonDesign is excited to have been part of the team that created Nix's Mate in Boston. Working with Michael Nedeau of Party By Design and Brian McAlpine of Eternal Furniture & Design was a great experience. 

The official Grand Opening last night came on the heels of a glowing review in the Metro. Not a bad way to close out the week!

 

Exhibiting at GreenFest 2012 with a variety of companies concerned with mitigating our environmental impact. http://www.greenpeabody.org/

Talking to Window Woman of New England about restoring old windows for improved energy efficiency. Several firms are offering Energy Audits - the first step toward charting a course for energy saving retrofits. The Worthmore Group is showing National Fiber cellulose insulation and Solar Hot Water and Heat systems. Independent Power Systems has solar electric systems and is explaining the complex options from utility third-party purchase, leasing, and independent installations that allow owners to sell back to the utility company. And Greenscaping Earth Care is offering earth friendly landscaping and maintenance.
All this on a Saturday when we could be outside soaking up some passive solar radiation (after applying sunscreen, of course).

Join USGBC MA Chapter's Emerging Professionals group on Saturday, March 31, at 1pm, for a screening of the film The Greening of Southieat the South Boston Branch of the Boston Public Library (down the street from the star of the film, the Macallen Apartment Building.) http://www.macallenbuildingcondominiums.com/ 

This is a FREE event, open to the public; all are welcome to attend. Please, RSVP through the EPMA-USGBC.org website, at http://epma-usgbc.org/events/film-screening-of-the-greening-of-southie

THE GREENING OF SOUTHIE is a documentary about building Boston's first LEED certified residential building. Check out the film summary and information here:http://www.greeningofsouthie.com/

What: Film screening of The Greening of Southie
When: Saturday, March 31, 2012, from 1pm-3pm
Location: South Boston Branch of the Boston Public Library, located at 646 East Broadway, South Boston, MA 02127
Cost: FREE

The path to sustainable design got a new branch recently. Or perhaps it is more accurately characterized as an heirloom scion grafted onto the growing family tree of the green movement. The Architecture Foundation of British Columbia announced a competition to design a new house using only "materials and systems made/ manufactured / recycled within 100 miles of the City of Vancouver." Additional parameters include a maximum area of 1,200 square feet and 4 occupants. Affordability is not the focus of this competition but certainly an important consideration for any real-life project.

While the 100 Mile House idea might seem revolutionary, in some ways it is a return to fundamental ways of designing and building. Materials found close to a site are uniquely adapted to the enviromental conditions of a given region. Vernacular architecture grew out of low-tech (although not unsophisticated) responses to site conditions and building methods and varies considerably from region to region throughout time.

The experience of realizing the design and construction of a 100-mile house near Vancouver provides examples of the challenges and rewards of this approach. Writer and naturalist Briony Penn describes the experience as "fun" in a Good Design article by Mark Boyer. While Vancouver is a major city it is also rich in natural resources and production of wood and other building materials. The 100-mile restriction may be more onerous in a region focused on a different industry or geographically more dispersed. But if this movement gains a foothold it could lead to a revival of smaller and decentralized manufacturing and resource management initiatives to revitalize regional economies and job creation.

Early human settlements were scaled to the distance a person could cover on foot then on horseback/donkey then wooden carriage and bicycle and motorized vehicle. Now we zip from one continent to another in a matter of hours. It is understandable that the footprint of our buildings and their provenance has expanded with our highway systems and passports. Now that we have discovered the whole wide world (superficially or otherwise) the 100-mile House Challenge asks us to reconsider our own backyards and Main Streets. The satisfaction of building a home by supporting businesses that build community is akin to exploring a new country by revisiting our old ways.

 

Night Shift Brewing's official launch at Tommy Doyle's Pub in Harvard Square was packed tonight! Congratulations to the guys for this huge milestone.

If you live in an older home in New England, chances are your exterior walls looks like the example on the left: no insulation, questionable vapor barrier, plenty of gaps to allow transfer of air between interior and exterior. Even if you don't have X-ray vision, your heating and cooling bills will give you some clues as to the state of your building envelope. An energy analysis will show specific problem areas but if your home is already on an old lot which won't accommodate new construction, a Deep Energy Retrofit (DER) may be your best option.
This approach essentially wraps the existing building in a blanket of insulation. The image on the right shows fiber insulation packed into the existing wall framing as well as a new interior wall which houses electrical boxes and other penetrations which reduce the insulation depth at their locations. Foil backed rigid foam insulation has been added to the exterior out to the depth of the roof overhang for the dual benefit of increasing insulation value and providing a continuous air barrier. All joints between materials are carefully sealed and gaps are filled with expanding foam.
This cutaway model is on view at booth 1010 at the NESEA Building Energy 12 conference in Boston through March 8. Exhibitors are Passive House New England and member representatives from Zero Energy Design and Boston Green Building.

Several Boston-area brewers have worked out a sweet deal with a local dairy farm. Maple Valley Creamery trades their delious ice cream for spent grain from aMortonDesign clients Night Shift Brewing and Idle Hands Craft Ales among others. The cows eat the grain, the brewers eat the ice cream, and the public gets great beer. Everybody wins.

Night Shift Brewing's Mike Oxton taking an ice cream break.

The reward for months of hard work and planning is the kind of hard work that these guys live for. Night Shift Brewing has cleared all the hurdles of licensing, code review, and recipe approval and has started their first professional batches in their new space in Everett. Congratulations guys!

This great 360 shot of the brewery shows the three founders hard at work in a session that ended at 4:36am, proving that they take their name seriously.

It has been a big week for the brewers at Night Shift Brewing. First their Massachusetts Farmer-Brewery license was approved.

If you have been following any of the upheaval around this issue you know there were big changes and lots of lively discussion when it seemed that the state licensing agency might change the entire landscape which had allowed Massachusetts to flourish as a center of great beer-making. So this latest license approval is especially wonderful news for Night Shift Brewing and the nano- and micro- and craftbrew loving citizens of our region.

And if all that wasn't enough, their commercial brewery space is nearing completion. Night Shift Blogging has a great new post about their journey with some nice artistic shots of the aMortonDesign Permit Set on the construction site (thanks for the shout-out guys!).

Our contact during this process was Mike O'Mara, a one-time architecture student who has turned his creative talents to being part of a team that figures out how to combine familiar ingredients in unexpected ways. Consider the Tripel Tangerine Turkey centerpiece of last Thanksgiving to get a sense of their culinary range. And, of course, there is a Taza Stout in the mix since their roots are in Somerville. Looking forward to trying all the Night Shift Brews soon and guessing which unique local ingredients are in the mix.

This renovation was undertaken to provide more work, play, and storage space for a growing family. With both parents working from home and caring for an active toddler, every inch of space is valuable and multi-purpose. The existing Living / Dining / Playroom were open to the Kitchen but felt disconnected due to a high peninsula capped with granite. Within the Kitchen storage space was limited and the dark green paint color and cherry cabinets absorbed the ample natural light making the space feel dark and heavy.

We reconfiguring the peninsula to provide a usable work surface of bamboo counter at a lower height. The box shelf above is open to provide display space and allow light to move through. An existing built-in hutch was flipped into the back hallway to serve as linen and towel storage with bookshelves above. This enabled us to extend the peninsula to the wall, providing cut-outs in the baseboard for heat, and gain a full-depth storage cabinet. A custom hinged tabletop will be added to the back of the peninsula to provide additional space for work, crafts, or overflow seating for large gatherings. The next step is installation of puck lights below the box shelf and baseboard for the peninsula. Additional scope includes a bench seat with storage below for the Dining Room bay window; installation of a locally designed and manufactured pendant light by Tesselight; and new paint to pull everything together and provide a backdrop for the owners' eclectic and bold collection of art and found objects.