Zenergy Efficient
Photo: Erik Johnson
There's nothing more environmentally friendly than recycling an existing building. That's what family-minded Washington, D.C., architect Lavinia Fici Pasquina did when she expanded the 1,100- square-foot ranch she shared with her husband, Paul (a.k.a. Colonel Paul F. Pasquina, M.D., chief of the Integrated Department of Orthopedics and Rehabilitation at Walter Reed). Many of the neighbors had demolished modest single-story bungalows that gave the wooded suburban street a cohesive feeling. In their place rose bland two-story houses as large as zoning allowed.
"It's easy to demolish and build new, but where is the challenge in that? How does it respect the history of the place?" asks Pasquina, who was born and raised in Palermo, Sicily (where they've been recycling buildings for millennia). Pasquina, now the mother of an infant daughter, was determined not to lose sight—literally—of the original house or encroach on the wooded quarter-acre lot, even as she increased her home's size to roughly 4,000 square feet. She removed the roof and demolished the attached garage, preserving its foundations as the addition's footprint.
The original 1949 house, its brick exterior patched and repainted a crisp white and its pitched, asphalt-shingled roof removed, became like a museum artifact preserved within the larger, decidedly contemporary addition, which is structurally independent of the bungalow, its steel columns dancing around the original brick walls. (The wing containing bedrooms and a new ground-floor living area sits atop the foundations of the demolished garage.) "The two influence each other," says Pasquina. "The vintage part and the modern part underscore the beauty of one another."
The walls of the addition are almost entirely translucent: a combination of energy-efficient windows and doors and fiberglass Kalwall panels filled with Nanogel, a high-tech aerogel insulation. The lightas- air, nearly invisible filling transforms the delicate, shoji-screen-like panels into a tough thermal and acoustic barrier. Light is softly and evenly diffused, eliminating the need for shades or curtains. "The walls let in so much natural light that we don't have to turn on the lights until much later in the evening," notes Pasquina, thrilled at the prospect of reduced energy use and smaller electric bills.
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