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Xiao-Yen’s Solar: If You’ve Got it – Flaunt it!

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Here is a house with solar done right!
(So often, namby-pamby neighbors try to preserve an olde world tradition in neighborhoods, by enforcing rules that make it almost impossible to put solar power on your house. )

But Xiao-Yen’s House overlooking San Francisco from Craig Steely Architecture is a brave new solar home that goes to the other extreme!

Steely’s design absolutely celebrates the fact that it is solar electricity lighting up (and powering) the modern home beneath.

The solar system is gorgeously integrated into the roof as another real design element in its own right, not left to skulk around behind faux shingles and hide its head in shame.

Neighbors be damned. The great structural engineering design is from Val Rabichev and contractor Structura.

Of course, it is in trendy San Francisco, so maybe it wasn’t such a stretch. Steely works in Hawaii and California. In California, solar gets right of way. There are laws preventing neighbors or housing associations from forbidding solar.

I love the way that the green roof is working together with the solar here. There’s room for both good green eco-design choices: solar for clean fuel-free electricity and a green roof for replacing lost habitat in cities for native species like birds and butterflies and even bees.

Studies have shown that the combination of solar with a green roof improves the performance of both. Solar panels suspended above a green roof can provide needed shelter from a too harsh sun and wind. And transpiring plants on a green roof cool the air above them, which helps solar panels work their best.

And maybe studies haven’t been done to show that people enjoy great views out beneath their solar canopies, but they do.

And how nice to watch that clean sun power at work while getting some work done yourself, too.

Via Arch Daily