Documenting a personal quest for non-toxic housing.
Wednesday, May 30, 2007Personal Update
This site has suffered much neglect owing to work since my move to Santa Fe. The textbook business I began on arrival carries on but, as grateful as I am for any form of work after decades of being disabled and jobless, I tire of the constant stress of its roller-coaster fortunes, the endless parade of flakes, the constant paranoia, and the threat of total collapse at the whim of a corporate monopoly. If American college students knew half of what I do now about this industry and how its market works they'd be rioting on every campus and torching their school bookstores...
I've grown quite frustrated with the lack of progress in my pursuit of sustainable/non-toxic real estate development in this area. Day by day, as I see the news of the increasingly dramatic impact as a consequence of todays accelerating global environmental change, I feel an ever greater imperative for new architecture. Millions around the world will soon be in forced migration. The face of civilization is about to change forever and there's a chance my long-term goals with this could ease the pain of that change in at least some small way. And yet here I sit struggling to get a single project off the ground. Maybe I should be more concerned for myself but I can't help feeling like a hand-cuffed lifeguard forced to watch people drown.
I've sought out the help of more experienced real estate investors, but found them elusive -with the exception, of course, of the countless purveyors of foolish real estate scams and get-rich-quick 'programs' that have contributed so much to the housing market tribulations of late. Much of the problem relates to the difficulties my disability imposes on travel. I've been able to explore little of the region since moving to New Mexico. But it may also be that the essential situation of this region, with runaway gentrification in the cities, a half million dollar median home price, construction costs outrageously inflated, minimum parcel sizes overly large due to water management issues, simply has no practical solution, making it impossible for all but the very wealthy to get a start in this here. I don't want to have to resort to building the typical toxic suburban crap just to get a start at this. I'd rather not do anything at all than contribute to that insanity. Sustainable building really has some critical problems at the low end of things a lot of people in the field seem to be ignoring and which contribute to its tortuously slow pace of progress.
But I have found some encouragement from the building techniques I've learned about from my landlord. A long time sustainable builder, he's curiously had little call to analyze his building costs because most of his past clients -owing to the reluctance of banks to support sustainable building- paid for projects out of pocket and simply gave him a general target budget to work within. But recently he's gotten project offers that compelled him to very carefully itemize his costs, and the results have been quite interesting. Conventional stick frame construction starts at $200 per square foot in the Santa Fe area. Sustainable construction -despite this being a world center of sustainable building- starts at $300. My landlord has perfected techniques of soil-cement construction he learned from the legendary Ken Kern (whose book I mentioned below) and now projects a construction cost in the area of $125-$150 per square foot while producing structures completely indistinguishable from hand built adobe -and in some ways superior in performance. This is also a very flexible technique, offering potential for the use of textured formwork to eliminate the expense of adobe rendering (since the material is so stable, it needs no covering like adobe brick), textile block systems, and stacked stone inclusion facing. Combined with simple design, the potential exists for the construction of sustainable and non-toxic homes at drastically below-market costs. But, again, I run into trouble for lack of any architects in the region who will give me the time of day and the problem of traveling around to track down prospect properties.
Similarly, I've been frustrated by an inability to find anyone who will collaborate with me -or even casually discuss- my concepts of pavilion and skybreak architecture, as I've been planning to employ for my own permanent home. This seems like such an incredibly rich area for novel design ideally matched to the emerging 21st Century trends while having long precedent in Modernism and yet you'd think I was proposing making homes out of jell-o given the response I've seen. Generally, this site has seen remarkably positive feedback for which I'm quite grateful. But for some reason these ideas elude most readers. Maybe it's just my crude writing, or maybe it's just very hard for people to visualize, though I've had little luck interesting area architects in the concepts either. It often seems as though I frighten these people in some way. It looks like I'll simply have to shelve these promising ideas until I can somehow build the necessary wealth to demonstrate them entirely on my own.
On a more positive note, things have been looking up for prospects of giving the remarkable TomaTech building system a try. Since the real estate situation in the Santa Fe area has proven so difficult, I've had to broaden my range of prospects, though this makes me even more dependent upon the aid of others. Recently a colleague of mine expressed an interest in moving to Hawaii and aiding my search there. Hawaii is well known to have a real estate situation largely identical to what I found here in Santa Fe -if not much worse in many respects. But it's climate and cultural aesthetics are perfectly suited to the Tomahouse designs that can't be used here in this high-desert climate. We've learned there is a peculiar situation on the islands that seems to offer a great opportunity for the use of TomaTech,
Most of the rental housing market of the islands is dominated by vacation rentals. But I've learned there is a steadily growing dissatisfaction among tourists to the islands because of the nature of this housing. It seems that tourists from around the globe are beginning to notice that they can travel from Florida, to the Caribbean, to Latin America, and to Hawaii and all the vacation rental homes look virtually identical. It's all the same old suburban American crap. Nothing looks appropriate to the locations. It's really difficult to take a vacation in Hawaii and find any place to stay that communicates an impression of an island aesthetic -at least outside of resort venues that look like a set from Gilligan's Island. Lenders and builders, with their perennial obsession for quick and easy sales through lowest-common-denominator design, have systematically homogenized the community aesthetics all over the world. But this works against those hoping to invest in vacation rentals. No one wants to go to Hawaii and be left feeling like they might as well still be in New Jersey.
Similarly, resident Hawaiians are becoming increasingly frustrated by the declining quality of housing the market is dumping on them at increasingly high prices. They don't like this suburban homogenization either but are even more troubled by the truly terrible quality of construction they are being forced to spend outrageous sums for. I've been hearing story after story of people paying half a million dollars or more for veritable shacks -not counting the cost of land!
It would seem that TomaTech could offer an excellent solution to both of these issues. With such low labor and great speed for their construction they can come in far below market in square foot costs despite their relatively high materials cost. Yet their quality couldn't be matched by local builders for less than thousands per square foot. These are whole buildings crafted with the finish of fine furniture and some of the most sophisticated in European technology. They are like luxury yachts you can build yourself. At the same time their designs, blending Asian, Indonesian, and Modernist aesthetics, are ideally matched to the island environment without resorting to looking like some cartoon cliche. These really do epitomize a kind of contemporary island aesthetic. So it's possible I've clued into something very powerful here. Everyone I have ever shown the Tomahouses sites to have responded with jaw-dropped amazement. But it will be some time still before my colleague can make his move to the islands and his experience in this area is not that great. We'll just have to see what happens.
I really wish I could find more experienced people to collaborate with. I've practically lived the life of a hermit because of my disability for decades. I need mentors -especially when it comes to a field like real estate development where so very little of the available literature is even legitimate. Yet everyone in this nation is so self-absorbed or afraid of each other -and the Internet's current reputation as a virtual jungle devoid of any practical mechanisms for trust-building certainly isn't helping matters.
Tuesday, May 29, 2007The Owner-Built Home
This now somewhat rare 1972 book by grandfather of the sustainable building movement Ken Kern offers an incredible wealth of practical information in an astoundingly small package, even accounting for the aging of some of its product details. A must for anyone with an interest in sustainable or low-toxic architecture. Here one can find in condensed form an overview of every major building technique in the contemporary repertoire of sustainable construction and design. The book is also an exceptional example of high quality self-published literature -still a radical notion when its was first published. It's amazing how little has actually changed in the general technology and theory of sustainable building since the 1970s -aside from the very high-tech concepts and products of the predominately European Eco-Tech movement. Though I'm reluctant to recommend a book this rare -I chanced on my own copy in a Santa Fe thrift store- it appears some copies are readily found on-line.
Z-Box - Rooms As Furniture
This recent article from the Gizmodo gadget blog as well as this article from the Apartment Therapy blog detail and interesting example of design by Dan Hizel that is especially relevant to this site's on-going commentary on the subject of 'pavilion' and 'skybreak architecture.
Dubbed the Z-Box, this item is a 12'x12'x10' free-standing box structure designed for use in loft apartments which houses an elegant wood paneled bedroom space surrounded by an internally illuminated collection of cabinets, closets and shelves and equipped with its own power outlets. This clever structure appears to be composed of a simple angle-iron frame -perhaps after the example of work by designer Andrea Zittel- which is externally covered in a stainless steel optical screening panel that creates the impression of translucence. Purported to soon be the basis of a modular kit of parts intended for owner-assembly and ease of apartment loft installation, the supposed current price tag of some $18,000 will probably keep this out of Ikea's catalog. Another example of the miraculous alchemical powers of contemporary architects...
Readers of this site, and fans of contemporary architecture, will immediately see the analogy here to the mobile Japanese-style room boxes of Shigeru Ban's much-publicised Naked House, though the modular component system and volumetric use of tight apartment space hails back to the Living Structures work of Ken Isaacs.
Z-Box presents a very good demonstration of the kind of light modular habitat structures I've frequently described in my commentary on skybreak housing (a concept based on the use of large span wind/rain shelter structures like pillow-panel domes and permanent tents as shelters for light quick-built habitable structures that can be easily built and modified by their occupants) and pavilion housing. (homes based on free-standing roof structures enclosed in glass or other material panels used as free-standing equivalents of loft space adapted into rooms with modular partition structures and free-standing furniture) However, it seems likely that the average person may do equally as well or better in terms of look and cost using light modular post-and-beam structures of wood or the ubiquitous aluminum T-slot framing. There is great untapped potential in this notion of merging room and furniture, both in terms of novel design and the prospects for easy end-user construction and the spontaneous adaptability that 21st century lifestyles demand. And as the choice of materials in the Z-Box suggests, the prospects are also quite good for meeting the needs of chemically sensitive users. Lets hope this design venue sees much more exploration.
Wednesday, November 22, 2006The Green House
Sustainable archiecture has long been stereotyped by its typical choice of low-tech materials, energy-efficiency utilitarianism, and predominate organic design themes, driving some designers away from the field because of what they percieve as far too limited a potential design repertoire. But for some time a different branch of sustainable design, sometimes referred to as Eco-Tech, has been emerging among the community of New Modernists, picking up a trail first blazed by the likes of Buckminster Fuller. This alternative approach to sustainability is based on a very different paradigm where the way a building performs as a system and a consumer or producer of energy and other resources is far more important to its ultimate sustainability than the materials it's made out of. This is an approach which embraces new technology rather than turning away from it, seeing its smarter, more responsible, use as a path to a greener future.
Eco-Tech is a movement that has developed mostly among designers in Europe, Asia, and Australia, where Modernism in general has seen less cultural resistance than in America. In the US the theory of Eco-Tech has been the province primarily of a few futurist writers and alternative energy tinkerers. But there are some designers here -still mostly Modernists- now cluing in to this movement as a means to expanding the sustainable design repertoire.
With The Green House we get a nice introduction to this very different take on sustainability through a large selection of sample buildings from around the world. Predominately Modernist and European, these examples offers an intriguing look at how new technology is affording some very radical design a level of sustainability that even earth and straw bale would be hard pressed to match. Perhaps one of the most dramatic examples in this book is the R128 house designed by Werner Sobek in Stuttgart Germany. Here we see the ultimate sustainability non-sequitur; the Modernist metal framed glass box which -in the dead cold of a German winter- produces more energy than it consumes!
There is also a nod to the issue of housing toxicity among the examples in this book. While few of these homes might qualify as truly non-toxic housing, and few could qualify as 'affordable' by any fancifully creative accountant's interpretation of the word, there are some interesting elements in some of these homes that could well apply to any non-toxic home design, though often due to the basic nature of Modernist Minimalism to employ materials in their natural state rather than adultrate them with the usual finishings. One excellent example of this is the Tuscon Mountain House by designer Rick Joy. Here is a home design which, though probably never actively attempting low toxicity, has nontheless probably come as clost being low toxic as any home specifically designed for it, simply as a consequence of its design aesthetic and Modernst preference for simple spaces and unadulterated materials.
Altogether, this book is an excellent look at sustainability from a very different point of vie and should open some eyes to possibilities never imagined before.
Monday, June 12, 2006EcoNest - Creating Sustainable Sancuaries of Clay, Straw, and Timber
This recent book by Paula Baker-Laporte and Robert Laporte details these architects' current focus of work, the 'EcoNest' sustainable and non-toxic cottage based on their revival and improvement of the clay, straw, and post & beam 'wattle and daub' construction techniques common to traditional archiecture of Europe and Japan. Paula Baker-Laporte is one of US's few non-toxic housing specialist archiects and has been known largely for her work in the US Southwest using pumicecrete construction. She is also author of the book Prescriptions for a Healthy House, one of the important textbooks and sourcebooks for non-toxic housing. (mentioned previously on this site)
With EcoNest the Laportes present a detailed and lavishly photographed introduction to a method of construction and style of design that are not only sustainable and non-toxic but also exceptionally graceful and comforting in its organic aesthetic. More strongly inspired by the Japanese tradition of this construction method than by the European tradition, the homes showcased in this book seamlessly blend the sensibilities of traditional Japanese homes with those of contemporary sustainable design as well as the traditions of Southwestern design. Quite often I have observed that there is an interesting complimentary aspect to both Asian styles of design and indigenous Pueblo design which seems rooted in their mutual minimalism and veneration for organic materials. The few but growing number of designers devoted to what I call the 'organic by composition' aesthetic seem to have noticed this as well and in the more contemporary of sustainable home designs we often see hints of an Asian influence. But in these showcase EcoNest homes the Laportes' offer the most sophisticated expression of this to date. There is no mere mimicry and transplanting of the stylistic artifacts of Asian design -no sense of the 'Mikado stage set' that many attempts to employ Asian influence in contemporary design are reduced to- but rather a true integration of essential aesthetic in combination with the integration of fabrication technique, the result being a comfortable new pragmatic design sensibility well adapted to the particular mix of environments these homes have been placed in. Indeed, 'comfort' rather than 'luxury' seems to be the essence of these homes.
Unfortunately, those looking to this book for a detailed system of instructions for this clay and straw building technique and the design of homes based on it will be disappointed. This book is quite the light read and ultimately comes across as a very elaborate sales brochure for the Laportes' EcoNest-specific design practice. But then, these homes -as much as the Laportes give lip-service to their economy- are dependent on very skill and labor intensive techniques. These are homes crafted like art objects and it is highly unlikely that they could be produced by mainstream contract labor, be affordable to the mainstream homeowner, or be possible for the owner-builder without exceptional talent. Even as modest in size as they are, I doubt they could be produced within half a million dollars in the US at current rates for this sort of skill and labor. Thus, as beautiful as they are, they fail to offer any realistic solution to the needs of the vast majority of people with a practical need for non-toxic housing -a complaint I have had with other work by the Laportes' and the rest of the very small community of non-toxic housing designers.
Still, there is no question that these homes offer something very profound to the emerging culture of sustainable home design. There are few better demonstrations of the essence of the organic aesthetic.
Who Killed The Electric Car?
A new movie has appeared recently which may be of particular interest to those concerned about a healthier habitat. Who Killed The Electric Car? is a documentary concerning the curious appearance and disappearance of the GM EV1, one of the most advanced and eminently practical of all electric cars produced by American auto makers. Having long been in need of lower-toxic transportation as well as being keen on the technology for environmental and aesthetic reasons, I have long wondered about what happened to this extremely promising high-tech vehicle which supposedly cost a billion to develop and performed outstandingly but was given only a half-assed marketing effort by its manufacturer, offered only by lease through a few Saturn dealers, and quickly obsolesced without explanation, countless new units being sent for destruction.
GM is not the only US company to have pulled this same peculiar stunt. Around the year 2000 Ford Corp. briefly hyped their own electric car program called Think based on a compact car developed by a Norwegian company with a form-factor similar to today's popular 'Smart' cars. The storied development of the car was even featured in a science and technology documentary. Reports at the time were that the company had imported some large quantity of the vehicles but their marketing consisted almost entirely of a single web site which targeted a youth market with a style of graphics that parroted the ad design style of Apple Computer. Test marketed in a couple of dealerships given no education about it, it was quickly deemed a 'failure' and this massive number of vehicles were sent to the shredders just like the EV1. I actually wrote to Ford Corp. when I learned of this impending atrocity and begged to be donated two of the vehicles for my own use as non-toxic transportation. (one to drive, one to store for replacement parts) Of course, this request was denied with the usual executive excuse of 'corporate policy'. I could just imagine the soul-less middle-management drones giggling over my naivety. I wonder if this film will feature this car's story as well, though I suppose I'll have to wait until it's available on DVD to find out. (movie theaters being intolerable due to their chronically toxic interiors and perfumed patrons)
Today the only immediate hope of low-toxic transportation is the MDI Air Car developed in France. It functions identically to an electric car, only it uses compressed air to store energy resulting in a much lighter vehicle and much lower cost. It's engine, developed by a Formula 1 racing legend- is even lubricated with vegetable oils. But the company's plans to establish a manufacturing plant for it in New York state apparently fizzled-out after political tensions arose between Europe and the US and right-wing politicians started their childish 'Freedom Fries' campaign. Yet another opportunity squandered by hubris...
Strawjet
An interesting new use for straw as a building material has emerged recently in the form of a system called Strawjet, now being developed at Ashland School of Environmental Technology. The use of straw bale for non-toxic housing has tended to be tricky due to the problem of residual pesticides on on all non-organic agricultural products and the need for great care in preventing any possibility of mold or pest intrusion in the rendering encapsulating the straw bales. This new technology offers a new form of straw construction that may reduce these problems, though at present much more field experience is needed to determine its non-toxic housing potential.
Strawjet is based on the use of a special winding and binding mechanism which allows a harvester to produce a continuous thick cable of dense compressed straw fiber which is woven into composite panels and pultruded into beams with a cementous encapsulant. Individual cable cores can be replaced with pipe to serve as in-wall or in-beam utility conduits. Some very interesting architecture has been proposed for this technology, though not yet demonstrated. All in all, a promising technology but still in its very early stages of development.
Personal Update
Some readers have been enquiring about me lately due to the much lower pace of updates to the sate this past year so I thought it would be good to post and update.
Since moving to New Mexico last year, I have been struggling to get by in a textbook business a friend here introduced me to. It's a precaious line of work exploiting the very peculiar -and largely little understood- monopolistic situation the college textbook publishers have been allowed to create in the US. Initially looking very stable, it quickly turned into a struggle due to the persistent incompetence and capriciousness of wholesalers and the various book suppliers. I was hoping to finally get free of the albatross of SSI but find myself still stuff with it to survive. It always amazes me how, in a country so constantly giving lip service to the supposed virtues of capitalism, so many people in business -especially in executive positions- have utterly no business acumen! I guess if there is any definitive virtue of capitalism it's the ability to keep so many mean-spirited knuckleheads off the street... I would very much like to try another line of work. The instability of this line of work is terribly stressful and has been eliminating any of the gains in health I hoped for from this new cleaner environment.
As for my new home, I got as lucky as one is ever likely to get in finding low toxic housing on short notice in this country. Here is a picture of my cottage on a mesa south of Santa Fe.
My landlord -a sustainable building advocate- built this house himself. It was a sort of proving ground for his building techniques, it's design something of an ad hoc experiment and its interior illustrating its stages of construction and his developing skills. It's a quirky design where the fellow honed his skills through trial-and-error and generally succeeded. It's not ideal for my health needs, since it was never really designed to be non-toxic, and has its problems. But my landlord's appreciation for natural materials and native vernacular building methods for their aesthetic virtues meant that, incidentally, he arrived at a very low toxic dwelling. His own home nearby is based on a native-inspired 'compound' design featuring an open courtyard linking a ring of independent rooms all set into a terrace on the edge of a small canyon. It's good to have people who can appreciate and work with the kind of architecture I study so nearby, but then this whole region is one of America's few centers for sustainable architecture. Good prospects for collaboration sometime in the future.
Unfortunately, my exploration into starting my own career as a sustainable and non-toxic real estate developer has not gotten very far. While this is a haven for sustainable building, it is not a place where one can do it economically. Median housing prices are as bad as anywhere on the East Coast. Property values are rising steadily -which would be a good thing were it not for the fact that -due to a combination of very high construction costs and large minimum parcel sizes- everything has already moved so far out of my meager reach that it is now impossible for one to build a cottage the size of the one I'm renting for less than a half a million dollars! One would think this situation would dampen the real estate market -especially with the problems of a drought situation thrown in- but the opposite is the case. Building is booming with multi-million-dollar pueblo-style mansions popping up like adobe-colored mushrooms all over the place! I feel quite left-out of the party. I have great aspirations for development -hoping to one day be able to found the first proto-arcologies and marine colonies- but it looks like, as good a place for alternative architecture as this region is, it may be impossible for me to get started in alone.
In recent news, I have been in correspondence lately with Frank Toma; the developer of the powerful TomaTech building system based on the newly introduced larger scale aluminum T-slot framing. Readers may recall previous mention of this technology on this site. Mr. Toma, now working out of both Bali and Germany, asked my advice on a non-toxic vacation cottage project for Fiji he has been working on. Hopefully this will develop into an article here as the project gets to the building stage. In exchange for my help, Mr. Toma offered to send me some components from the building system for me to examine and I will be writing more on this should they arrive.
TomaTech is a very promising building system. It's the closest our civilization has come to date to a true plug-in architecture, providing housing with all the design virtues of contemporary computers. And it helps that it is also extremely easy to accommodate the needs of non-toxic housing with.I have recently featured the technology in an article I'm planning for my future Office of Post-Industrial Technology web site. Though perhaps not relevant to this site, this article concerns the development of a post-industrial demonstration community called The Ever-Changing Palace -a community founded on the principle of communal living in support of industrial independence and built around the core of a Fab Lab. The use of TomaTech makes perfect sense in this context, the community being a deliberately 'unplanned' community where the use of a perpetually demountable building system is chosen to allow for spontaneous and perpetual evolution of the community structure and its architecture as well as the option to make the whole community nomadic -moving about the world as part of its mission to spread the virtues of post-industrial technology and add to that skill base with the indigenous ingenuity of other cultures.
I have also been doing a lot of writing lately (basically to fight depression) on my pet subject The Millennial Project; the marine and space development scheme envisioned by futurist Marshal Savage. TMP has grown rather out-of-date over the years and I have been toying with its update to contemporary technology and a contemporary understanding of architecture and technology trends. Though not particularly relevant to the topic of this site, anyone who has ever wondered what living at sea or in space is really like can get a glimpse of my own thoughts on this in the archives of the Yahoo Groups forum LUF-Team. Or I'd be happy to share material in email with anyone who is interested.
Sunday, February 26, 2006Site for Quanitco Lustron Images
Relating to my past article "Lustron Mania" on the unique porcelain coated steel Lustron homes of the Post War period, this site was recently mentioned on the Lustron Homes Yahoo Groups forum and offers a collection of good color photos of the collection of Lustron homes built at the Quantico Marine base in Virginia -now focus of a relocation project by MCS advocates. The homes have been declared obsolete by the military and were slated for demolition but have attracted attention by Lustron enthusiasts, architectural historians, and MCS patients, leading to attempts at a program to have the donated and relocated. Looking at these pictures from 2003, I was surprised at the apparent good condition of these homes considering the US military's reputation with handling their obsolete buildings and structures. Unfortunately, with typical relocation and rennovation costs for these homes currently floating around $160,000, the prospect of availing oneself of one of these 'free' Lustrons is not necessarily a bargain.
Monday, November 14, 2005The Envirnmental Illness Resource
I've recently learned of an excellent gateway web site offering information on and recources for the spectrum of Environment Illness. Offers news, discussion forums, and sections on illness classification, treatment, and chemical and allegen avoidance. Looks to be a very valuable resource for EIs and others concerned with allergies and unwanted chemical exposure.
Tuesday, August 30, 2005Auroville Earth Unit
The Aurovile Earth Unit is a research and education facility established by the Auroville religious communty in Southern India. This facility performs some of the most sophisticted earth constuction engineering and archiectural design in the world and is responsible for Auroville's oustanding array of earthen archiecture. Thier web site is an excellent source of information on the subject and features numerous photographs of their research projects and the many remarkable buildings of Auroville.
Wonderful Wombs - Healthy Heating
Wonderful Wombs is a blog site on the subject of radiant floor heating and the related but newer technoogy of radiant tube air conditioning. It's parent site is Healthy Heating which showcases information on the radiant HVAC subject.
Radiant floor heating is actually an ancient technology whose roots lay in the 'hypocaust' heating invented by the ancient Romans. It first came into use in its modern fluid tube form (often called 'hydronic heating') early in the 20th century and was frequently featured in homes designed by Frank Lloyd Wright and the many Modernist designers. It remains one of the preferred heating technologies among architects today. But despite this heritage, radiant heating has seen limited acceptance among builders in the US due to a basic lack of knowledge. It is perpetually percieved as 'new', 'futuristic', or 'high-tech' despite a nearly 100 year history of use in this country. But in recent years it has seen a steadily growing acceptance, especially in the parts of the country better suited to slab foundations.
Radiant floor heating is one of the preferred heating technologies for non-toxic housing because it reduces the need for ductwork which has a tendancy to accumulate dusts and fungus. It dosen't, of course, eliminate the need for proper ventilation in a home but ductwork for that can be greatly reduced or sometimes completely eliminated when it need not be routed through a furnace. Radiant heating also uses electric water heating systems and can easily integrate with solar water heaters, which eliminates the need for oil and gas combustion systems that are a source of indoor pollution. Highly efficient compared to other heating technologies, radiant floor heating may make electric heating much more practical in areas where electric power may exceed the cost of gas or oil power. And in terms of basic comfort, most users consider it superior to everything else. Drafts and uneven heating are virtually eliminated, operation is totally silent, and the human sense of comfortable warmth quite good at much lower average heating temperatures, thus further saving energy.
Radiant air conditioning (also called 'chilled beam' systems) is a much more recent technology which basically reverses the operation of the radiant heating system using cooling tubes in a ceiling to absorb heat discharged by a heat pump similar to that of a central air conditioning unit or 'ductless' AC system. First appearing in systems designed for the suspended ceiling frames of commercial and office buildings, it suffered from complications in collecting and elliminating condensation on the overhead tubing. But more recent systems have gone far in reducing or eliminating that problem. Home use of this technology seems to still be limited, possibly because of the need for thick suspended ceiling spaces to accommodate equipment not yet adapted in scale to residential use.
Auram 3000
Developed by the Auroville religious community in Southern India and marketed by the Aureka Corp., the Auram 3000 represent the current state of the art in earthen block construction technology. The Auram is a variation of the 'cinva ram' developed in the mid 20th century for making Compressed Earth Blocks for use as a higher strength lower labor alternative to traditional earth blocks such as adobe and a more sustainable lower energy alternative to fired brick. But unlike all other cinva ram devices, the Auram uses a system of interchangeable steel molds which produce a large family of specialized precision block shapes. This allows for a versatility of earthen construction impossible with other techniques or devices. The Auram produces various forms of interlocking hollow blocks which reduce production labor, provide insulation, and which can be used in combination with poured concrete for hybrid construction that allows the earth block to be used for much more than simple walls. It's 'hourdis block' shape allows for the construction of CEB floor decks and roofs without the need for arches, vaults, and domes. Its 'U' channel block makes hybrid beams and lintels. Round column blocks can be used to make columns and posts, or in combination with pre-fab concrete step plates, to make spiral staircases. The high precision and uniformity of strength of the blocks as well as the ability to use hybrid concrete and earth composition allows for structures much larger and higher than typical with other earthen construction. Auroville has built earthquake resistant CEB buildings over 4 storeys high and domes and vaults over 10 meters wide. CEB has many advantages over other kinds of earthen construction. Small modular unit sizes make block construction easier for the DIY builder and the high precision and interlocking block shapes of the Auram CEBs minimize block laying labor by reducing the need for mortar and eliminating the need for special brick-laying skill. Using about 5-10% cement as stabilizer, CEB is more sustainable than other stabilized earth materials while still being resilient enough to be used without a plaster or adobe finish render. Traditional adobe MUST be protected by a finish render while cement and asphalt stabilized adobe doesn't always need a render but is so rough in appearance that it compels it just for aesthetics. Auram blocks fit together with only the slightest of visible seams and so have a very finished appearance without any other finishing needed -even in an indoor setting.
Used extensively throughout the Auroville community itself, the Auram is responsible for some of the most sophisticated and large scale earthen construction built to date. The Auroville Earth Unit web site contains numerous examples of their earth construction work and well showcases the Auram's versatility. And with CEB now under consideration as a key technology for the construction of settlements in space using at-hand indigenous materials, this technology may see a long future indeed.
In areas with relatively uncontaminated earth (sadly, a scarcity in some parts of the US) the Auram could be an excellent tool for the construction of economical non-toxic housing. It's potential for low-cost housing is well demonstrated in India and the Auram has been adopted by UNESCO for disaster relief housing construction. Because so much of the structure can be made out of the same simple material, cost is reduced by eliminating multiple trades and relying more on this single low-cost material while the reliance on a single material makes the whole task of ensuring low-toxicity much easier. The only downsides to the Auram are its reliance entirely on human labor -a virtue in energy-starved India but a liability in the US where labor costs are still much higher than fuel costs. Of course, for the extremely sensitive, the less one's building tools rely on fuel the less likely the chances of the building materials getting contaminated by exhaust or spilled fuels and oil. Purchasing a complete Auram package with all its molds would be a big investment for the DIY enthusiast, costing over $10,000, though the basic machine itself costs a couple thousand. Also, there is currently no place in the US where one can purchase these machines. They must be imported from India with at least a two-week delivery. Still, there is great potential in this product and the building system based on it. This author is currently considering becoming a US import dealer for this machine and would be interested in hearing from people who might want to use this building method in a demonstration.
Cohousing
Cohousing - Cohousing - A Contemporary Approach to Housing Ourselves
- Kathryn McCamant and Charles DurrettHaving read much of late on the subject of cohousing, this book appears to be one of the most definitive as an introduction to the concept and an overview of cohousing history. It begins with a look at cohousing in Denmark where the movement for this style of living seems to have originated and we are offered a collection of community examples detailing both the general architecture and the development history with emphasis on the personal experiences of the people setting up and living in these communities. Later, the book moves on to American examples which illustrate some interesting differences. Americans seem to have a much greater difficulty in comprehending and adapting to the cohousing paradigm and with working together as a group, apparently because of our culture's focus on the autonomy of the nuclear family -even though such autonomy is a very recent cultural invention. There is also more reluctance in America to explore novel architecture. So while in Denmark we see cohousing communities based on glass covered streets and large adapted factory buildings, here most -with the one exception of an urban based 'loft' style conversion- cohousing projects use a style of architecture virtually indistinguishable from conventional suburbs except for the spacing of homes and the lack of cars. Of course, this perspective may be due to the age of the text as this author is aware of a number of American cohousing projects which have employed much more sophisticated architecture and community layouts closer to the Danish model.
This book is an important read for anyone thinking seriously and rationally about the future and the prospects of family life in it. As we now depart the age of cheap fuel, suburbs as they have existed to date are becoming increasingly unsustainable. And that's not in an environmental sense but rather in terms of simple domestic practicality. The suburbs of today, because of their ad-hoc dispersed organization and disconnection from venues of work and commerce, are only livable in an economy of cheap transportation. Take that away and they are no more practical for the average middle-class family than a cabin in the wilderness. Meanwhile, cities face a similar crisis as their similarly ad-hoc organization is similarly dependent upon cheap energy to compensate for their inefficiency. They will likewise become unlivable as their antiquated infrastructures fail under the strain of rising costs. The obvious solution -as many futurists have been predicting since the 1960s- is a reinvention of the village, the creation of more self-contained micro-urban environments where reliance on the automobile is minimized or eliminated and transportation among key subsistence resources is confined to a few efficient routes. Those in the cohousing communities are already ahead of the curve in adapting to the practical realities of this new age. They are living the lifestyle we may all soon be compelled to share, and from the looks of it, we may be quite pleasantly surprised.
This author has often considered the possibility of cohousing as a means to meet the steadily growing need for non-toxic MCS patient housing, allowing the possibility of MCS patients on fixed disability incomes to pool resources to reduce housing costs. This has been tried in the past but with mixed results -HUD's own attempts at this in California becoming something of a fiasco. There are complications with this notion which have been difficult to overcome. First, in the experience of most cohousing communities, savings on the usual cost of housing has only been realized with government subsidy or by the even more difficult prospect of large volumes of sweat equity from prospective residents. Cohousing projects typically have a hard time keeping budgets low because participating families often customize their individual home designs too much and they must work with architects whose 'custom' designs are an excuse for contractors to charge more than usual. Consequently, most current people adopting cohousing do so for the lifestyle, not for economy. MCS patients, of course, are familiar with a similar situation, having to spend much more on homes to meet their needs because contractors normally overcharge for anything which is new, different, or 'custom'. This has compelled some people to go one step beyond cohousing into cohabitation; multiple people sharing a common house. This is very tricky to do if MCS patient tolerances are not complimentary.
Which brings us to the second key complication with this idea; MCS patients all have different tolerances and sensitivities and these sensitivities relate to quality of life. The average person's quality of life is often related to the use of a lot of products which often rely on chemicals in some form and may have latent toxicity or simply a latent odor people normally aren't aware of. When someone succumbs to MCS they are compelled to give up a lot of things they used to casually use everyday because they've become intolerable; soaps and cleaners, perfumes, cosmetics, hair sprays, synthetic fiber clothing or bedding, types of food, types of appliances, books, magazines, newspapers, the list goes on forever. This sacrifice incurs a lot of change in lifestyle and often means a great loss in quality of life. This has broken up families or forced MCS suffers to live in leper-like seclusion from their families as it becomes very difficult for healthy family members to give up these things for the sake of another -especially in the contemporary American culture where marriage and the nuclear family are held together by increasingly tenuous bonds.
Since every MCS patient tends to have different tolerances, this translates to a different spectrum of industrial goods they can or can't use or have near them and thus a different level of quality of life. None will sacrifice any more than their tolerance limits dictate. The cost in quality of life is too high. This also means different kinds of architecture as one type of 'healthy home' composition will not suit all MCS patients even if they are ostensibly fully non-toxic. For example, one can use all natural chemical free lumber to make a non-toxic home but some of that lumber may be aromatic wood species which some MCS patients cannot stand the slightest odor of.
Put two MCS patients together in the same house and they must negotiate with each other over most every detail of the goods and products they use everyday in order to work out a mutually acceptable level of quality of life relative to their individual tolerances. This makes it very difficult to put large groups of MCS patients together in a closely-spaced community. Indeed, some planned MCS communities have specified minimum parcels of over 10 acres per home just to minimize the potential drift from pollution from one home to the next.
All this would seem to suggest that MCS cohousing is fundamentally infeasible or impossible. But it may be that, in the emerging economic reality of the 21st century, none but the very rich will even have the option of living outside of a cohousing situation. So is there any way to actually make MCS cohousing work? Through my own research on this, I suspect that the answer lies in seeking the absolute maximum in non-toxicity of habitat with the least compromise in quality of life by seeking out and cultivating the maximum number of chemical-free alternatives to the goods quality of life depends on. In other words, you eliminate the sacrifice in quality of life by eliminating the need to sacrifice those goods when those goods can be made -pretty much the same or better- in a chemical free form. As I've learned in my research of non-toxic housing, it is simply society's ignorance of and indifference to the alternatives which tends to drive the MCS patient to homelessness. Even MCS specialist physicians know virtually nothing about non-toxic housing or non-toxic alternative goods and do little research into that because they -foolishly in my opinion- don't think that's part of their job. They just tell their patents to stay away from stuff that makes them sick and if those patients can't find the alternatives on their own they can -in our better living through chemistry culture- quickly be left with nothing they can live with! But there are a lot of alternatives and their number is growing steadily and so, with careful and comprehensive planning and the cultivation of a community not just as housing but as a marketplace and source for these alternative products, it may be possible to make MCS cohousing work. Even this, though, will not be a complete solution. At best it can only be a 'one size fits most' option. And because of the first complication, without government support it probably would not be cheap. But it would still be better than what the housing market has to offer today.
Wednesday, July 13, 2005How To Survive Without A Salary
The unfortunately named How To Survive Without A Salary
by Charles Long is a book that should be required reading in every school on the planet Earth, and at the very least required reading for every disabled person who must cope with the limitations of a fixed income. I say 'unfortunately named' because this title implies to many people that it is just another of the innumerable get-rich-quick scam books flooding the market today. Nothing could be further from the truth, however, as this book is really about how to avoid the negative effects of the biggest scam there is; the contemporary consumer culture. How To Survive Without A Salary is a guide to a frugal and efficient way of living that seeks to make the most of every dollar and every minute and a reality check on the way consumerism exploits our ignorance, laziness, and compulsive nature. While the lifestyle it describes is definitely not practical for all, the insight, tips, and advice it offers is of very practical use to just about everyone. This author has lost copies of this book lending them to acquaintances. People who borrow it often find it too useful to return...
The New Natural House Book and The Natural House Catalog
Both of these books are by David Pearson and I include them together as they deserve to be treated as a set. The New Natural House Book
is essentially an overview of the issue of housing health and common means of abatement and non-toxic home design. It does not get into much technical detail, focusing instead on a discussion of healthy materials and extensively photographed examples of housing. The book goes far to create a visual impression suggesting the true squalor in the non-healthy homes common to American suburbs. Many of the homes featured here were also featured in the Sydney and Joan Baggs book The Healthy House.
The Natural House Catalog
The Healthy House
One of the first books this author found specific to the subject of non-toxic housing The Healthy House
remains an excellent introduction to the subject. Written by Australians Sydney and Joan Baggs, The Healthy House is a light overview of a broad selection of building techniques and materials mixing both a technical or clinical notion of house healthfulness or 'baubiologie' with a more aesthetic or 'spiritual' sensibility more typical of organic designers as well as the usual strong doze of eco-sensibility common to texts on sustainable architecture. The book is also interesting in that it features a number of eco-village projects -though alas some of these have already become defunct before being built. Altogether, a good introduction to the subject of low toxic architecture, though with few examples from the US.
Prescriptions for a Healthy House
Written by New Mexico architect Paula Baker-Laporte, Prescriptions for a Healthy House
is an in-depth guide to non-toxic home construction, materials, and products intended to meet the needs of both prospectic home buyers and the people involved in building them. The book is very useful as a sourcebook for techniques and products. There are a number of interesting products that I have not seen noted elsewhere, such as the enzyme based earth treatments used as a non-toxic alternative to asphalt for driveway construction. Baker-Laporte favors the use of pumicecrete construction for non-toxic housing as well as it's logical pueblo style of design. She has frequently used this material and it features in homes she's designed for The Commons cohousing community in Santa Fe. However, she also employs a contemporary version of wattle and daub construction for a line of homes she calls EcoNests which are not noted in this book.
Altogether a very useful sourcebook and guide to the issues and subject of healthy housing but without very specific information on building techique.
Healthy House Building for the New Millennium
One of the more recent healthy architecture books this author has read, Healthy House Building for the New Millennium
by John Bower details the full construction process for a model non-toxic home based on a unique approach. Bower Advocates the use of a method called ADA or Airtight Drywall Approach along with a super-insulated double-wall system which allows fairly conventional building materials to be employed for non-toxic housing including that specific to the needs of people with environmental sensitivity. The model Healthy House featured in the book is built using light gauge steel framing fiberglass batt insulation, and conventional drywall products. Using careful drywall finishing techniques, an airtight enclosure is created. This would normally present a number of potential problems for indoor air quality but these have been overcome by virtue of the ADA approach which locks out the latent contaminants in the wall materials and by careful choice of low-toxic interior finishing products and furnishings.The approach is similar to the abatement techniques some healthy home contractors have employed to make existing homes more tolerable for MCS patients. My only concern with it is that Bower presumes a much higher degree of skill and care than is probably typical of the average building contractor. While the model Healthy House is cost-effective, extremely energy efficient, and has apparently worked well for sensitive individuals, it seems unlikely that the majority of contractors would be able to duplicate the skill and diligence Bower himself has demonstrated. So duplication of this home design seems challenging.
Bower's other texts on the healthy housing subject, offered through the Healthy Housing Institute and via Amazon.com, look very promising and I hope to review them in the future.
Monday, July 4, 2005Update - Site Reorganization
After a harrowing Spring and a 2000 mile relocation, a reorganization of the Shelter web site and a change of focus for this project.
Readers of this site will recall that I was facing the loss of my home of 40 years after the sudden New Year's Eve death of my last supporting relative. Things looked quite bad. With no local prospect of work within the limits of my disability, not enough inheritance to afford any kind of housing but just enough to threaten my continued disability income, and no real help emerging from this web site, I was facing imminent homelessness or -even worse- permanent internment in some hellish state nursing home. But thanks to the help of a kind and generous colleague I was able to find a low toxic adobe cottage to rent in a quiet high desert location south of Santa Fe and have obtained help is establishing a simple home business to pay for it.
For someone who has been effectively home-bound for decades, the 2000 mile relocation was something of an ordeal. And I arrived in a period of freakish cold and stormy weather for the region. I own little aside from books and computers so had to scramble for basic furnishings. Thankfully, the region is quite well supplied with thrift, consignment, and pawn shops where some decent bargains in used furnishings could be found. (these having the advantage of being outgassed as well as cheap) Though I had to rent the cottage sight-unseen, it proved to be much as advertised and though not ideal for my needs, is sufficient for the time being. The mesa-top location is quiet, low in pollution, and offers nice views of the surrounding hills, mountains, and the lights of Santa Fe. Santa Fe is also one of the few centers in this country for sustainable architecture and interest in non-toxic housing. There are many contractors and architects here with the skills and sensibilities to construct the kind of housing I need. So future prospect for a non-toxic home of my own look good. Considering my situation, I could probably have not done much better.
Having gained a reprieve and largely settled-in, I have begun a reorganization of this web site and a change in its role. Shelter will now change from a personal project site to an on-going catalog of non-toxic housing technology and products. As can be seen from the navigation links in the adjacent side-bar, this site now features several new category sections cataloging entries in the matter of more conventional technology and architecture review blogs.
The Building Systems section will catalog the various building technologies I have found and studied.
The Designs section will collect examples of existing homes using alternative and non-toxic architecture and will also feature discussion on new and speculative home design concepts.
The Infrastructure section deals with the technologies of power and energy distribution, heating and cooling, plumbing, waste handling, and the like.
The Materials section catalogs alternative non-toxic materials and the companies supplying them.
The Tools section catalogs interesting tools for home building and design -both hardware tools and computer software.
The Products section collects all the other types of products relevant to the non-toxic home including furnishings, household care products, household health products, some complete kit homes, and anything else which seems relevant to the theme.
The Literature section will list books and other media on the subject of non-toxic housing and related themes of alternative architecture.
And, finally, the Links section will catalog links to other sites relevant to the non-toxic housing and alternative archiecture subjects.
Right now you can examine the Building Systems section where I have completed a large list of articles cataloging and discussing the non-toxic building methods I have found to date. Future articles will be seen both here on this home page and in their respective category sections. Readers may link the individual cateogry pages to filter out any articles they might have less interest in.
Most of the original content of this site can still be found in the Gallery section. I have removed a few things now less relevant, such as much controversial (for some reason...) autobiography.
In the near future this site may also spawn another web site on the subject of Post-Industrial technology and the cultivation of Post-Industrial culture. Keep an eye out for further announcements on this soon.
To close, a thank you to all readers who have been following this project and expecially to those who were kind enough to write with their feedback and enquiries. I trust this site will still be of interest to you all.
Saturday, January 22, 2005Update - Yet Another T-Slot House
Nw that it's too late to help me, even more T-slot houses appear. Looks like an emerging design trend. The iT House (Flash site) is, again, so similar to the things I've devised it's scary. In fact, this house is based on the same Bosch brand industrial automation T-slot framing products I note in my Gallery section article on the Urban Nomads and their modular building technology. But for some reason these architects were able to get access to a larger scale and cheaper set of T-slot components than the Bosch company is willing to offer to you or me. This is either custom fabricated -which seems unlikely- or they have been hiding this stuff for some specialized purposes. I guess it's another case of who you know, not what you know.
All in all, the iT House is an ideal non-toxic housing platform, but it's a costly one. It's probably come far too late to help me, but I think others EIs with an need for this kind of housing should take a look at this. It would be quite easy to integrate a great diversity of alternative non-toxic materials to this structure as well as to enhance it using the off-the-shelf T-slot framing components. They've even managed to integrate the kind of easy T-slot connection into a ceiling system making it easy to adapt this house on demand with snap-in partitions and appliances. It comes very close to the ideal of plug-in architecture. It's only downsides are a likely limitation to warmer climates and the architects' fascination with the use of vinyl based window transfers as a means to decorate the otherwise very minimalistic structures. One would have to order the home without this for a non-toxic home -and I'm rather doubtful of the long-term resilience of such transfers to UV even for the non-EI home.
In other news, I have learned that availability of the Tony's T-Houses Bali-T kit homes has been unaffected by the recent tsunami disaster. Good news as this is one of the cheapest prefab non-toxic housing options available -although it's still just out of my reach and only usable in Hawaii due to the unusual type of design.
Also, readers may find interesting an idea I have been trying to interest the executives of eBay in. I have found that virtually everything I would need for relocation and a home can potentially be found on eBay -if I could get the professional help to make it work. There are prefab steel buildings which could be adapted into a non-toxic home, land offerings in areas I have considered going to for low pollution, equipment for off-grid living, no end to the supply of used furnishings which -because it's old- is sufficiently outgassed to be safe for me, and even some kinds of food I could eat. In theory, my entire relocation and everything I need could be obtained on eBay and possibly at a cost I could afford. But it would only be possible with the help of a team of eBay experts able to stretch my resources to their maximum and a team of assistants to aid in the logistics of pulling this all together -since I could not myself perform due diligence on things like land by myself.
This idea seemed to me to be a great potential promotional gimmick for the eBay company. They have gotten a lot of negative publicity lately from people using the service to sell ridiculous things. It's created the impression that eBay is not usable for anything practical. My project would offer them the opportunity to demonstrate that one can, in fact, do very practical things with the service. Even provide adaptive housing to the disabled and relocate one's whole life. Unfortunately, I found it very difficult to reach the eBay executive offices. This icon of Internet business has no means to send an email letter to anyone other than customer support. Customer support actually told me they were completely incapable of communicating with anyone outside their department. I literally had to write the marketing department a letter and send it by snail mail. So much for the Information Age...
Alas, this is just another long-shot. I suspect I'm just grasping at straws with such notions. Cleverness just isn't enough to escape this kind of slow-death-spiral. Not in this country, not in this era, not in this society.
Sunday, January 2, 2005Update
My situation has quickly become more critical. My elderly relative's prognosis quickly went from months, to weeks, to days. Then yesterday, just hours after being moved from hospital to hospice, she passed. I'm very thankful that she suffered so little discomfort and indignity in the end. We should all be so lucky when the time comes. But for me the whirlwind has now arrived and I have no idea where it may leave me -though the likely destinations tend to look rather grim. I may have little time left where I am and little to no personal control over what is happening. It now seems that only the most immediate solutions may still be practical and my expectations for aid are low. Bad as my situation may be, what is my plight to that of the millions now in even more dire situations in coastal Asia? I'm lost in the noise of a whole world in crisis.
Still, a glimmer of light has appeared. Tonight I stumbled onto a link to a new modular component housing product that is virtually the exact thing I have been seeking for the past 20 years. Called the Tomahouse, this is an advanced aluminum T-slot profile and modular panel based building system using a simple modular pavilion structure scheme. It's similar in some ways to what Unique Structural Systems was offering but never managed to get to market and it so closely matches everything I have ever thought about modular component housing design that it's scary. It's like these people plucked this out of my own head -or perhaps I'm being taunted by some malicious deity, the perfect answer to my problems now being dangled just out of reach in front of me at the moment it's too late to matter... If only this company had existed years ago! I could have stockpiled these sorts of parts even in NJ and handled construction alone just as I has hoped! Now, whether or not this discovery comes in time to help me depends largely on how cooperative this company is -and by now most readers of this site should know how rare such cooperation is these days.
I do not know how much longer this site will be on-line or how much longer I will have Internet access. My articles have been helpful to some so I will try to keep this running as long as I can. Again, I thank all those who've sent me encouraging feedback and support.
Tuesday, December 28, 2004Season of Crisis
The impending crisis I've anticipated these many years is finally at hand. I have finally run out of time. This past holiday weekend my elderly supporting relative -who has been struggling with illness since November- was hospitalized and diagnosed with terminal cancer. She was given "from weeks to months" and will soon be put into hospice care. Thankfully for her, this ordeal should be as short and as comfortable as could be hoped. However, for me this means that I now have an equally short period of time to find a solution to my housing needs or I will be homeless. My options are few and difficult.
Frankly, my decades long research into alternative and non-toxic architecture has proven to be a failure. I have failed to discover any technological answer to the one fundamental problem that has barred me from the housing I need; the fact that there is no known form of non-toxic housing cheap enough for someone on SSI (Supplemental Security Income) to afford alone. There are no government agencies, programs, or non-profit organizations I can turn to for help because the issue of disabled housing has simply never been very important to US society. (and before anyone wastes their time suggesting it again; no, Habitat for Humanity does not do adaptive housing for the disabled. HfH is not the kind of organization most people seem to think it is. They don't build houses for the poor. They build cut-rate houses for banks to coerce them into mortgaging them to the 'financially challenged'. No bank provides mortgages to people on SSI, period) I'm on my own.
With so little time now left, my options have been drastically reduced. Since the government doesn't allow SSI recipients to have any kind of savings, I had hoped to ultimately find a building technology that would allow me to incrementally stockpile light easy to handle components for a home or somehow be able to invest sweat equity here into modular components I could transport to the low-pollution locations I need to relocate to. But this simply never panned out. The building industry is just not sophisticated enough to produce anything suitable for this. Now my choices are limited to those things that can be made/purchased more-or-less immediately and that means two options; either I immediately find about two dozen people -at least some skilled- who will donate a month or more of time to build a home for me by hand using one of the several earthen or related building techniques, or I find someone who can put up a lot of money to pay for one of the few quick-build forms of non-toxic housing based on ferro-cement, excavated structure, prefab steel structures, or shipping containers, or even more money to buy one of the few readily available 'healthy homes' now on the market. (one can see most of that tiny market here) Even the limited choices among the quick build homes is now reduced. The two cheapest of the few non-toxic kit home products are now probably unavailable due to the Indonesian quake that struck this past weekened.
My emergency housing options are limited to two things; a small adapted Airstream trailer I found for sale a while ago (seen here) and a product called the ChuckHouse which offers a bit more room, comes with solar power, but is more expensive, more difficult to transport, and whose claim to being made exclusively of non-toxic materials cannot be confirmed because they would not answer any detailed questions on finishing materials. Both these are limited to very mild climate locations, would cost a lot to transport, and are too small to allow me to pursue any kind of work. So while they would provide emergency shelter, they are ultimately a dead end. And though I could afford one of them on credit, I may not be able to afford them and the land to put them on -and even if I could, I would probably have to buy land through the Internet sight-unseen and just hope for the best. A VERY scary prospect.
The situation does not look good. If any readers to this site can offer real help or some concrete viable suggestions (not off-the-cuff notions that haven't been thought out) I need to hear from you NOW. This is it, folks. This is the endgame. If only this were not such a primitive country, but then if it weren't so primitive I probably wouldn't have contracted this illness in the first place.
For obvious reasons, this may be my last post to this site for some time, if not for good. I now must concentrate totally on coping with my relative's last days and finding a way to avoid the same fate. Should I be unable to continue this site in the future, I wish to thank all the many readers who have to date offered their encouraging feedback and generous support.
Wednesday, December 8, 2004Update
Still no progress, though I have made some promising contacts in the past couple of weeks. Hopefully there may be something significant to report soon. In the mean time, I thought readers might be interested in an article I completed recently on space settlement design and posted to a space architecture forum. Have long been interested in space advocacy, I've been puzzled by the obvious scarcity of any realistic portrayals of practical space settlements in any media. There are, of course, plenty of proposals and images for space outposts but these are not places where people would go to live in space permanently. They are temporary elements of exploration programs. A true permanently inhabitable space settlement has very different requirements and purpose. So I have, for a time, been pondering exactly what a realistic space settlement would be like given existing technology. You may find my conclusions, and my proposed design strategy, interesting.
Saturday, November 27, 2004Slow Progress
As Winter approaches, there is very little progress to report. I seem to have run into some kind of point of diminishing returns on my research and efforts. It has become like pulling teeth to communicate with any company today -especially those right here in the US. The rate of response to my inquiries has dropped to near-zero and the 'flake out' rate (the rate at which follow-up correspondence is just ignored for no apparent reason) has gotten to near 100%.
This has long been a problem due to the way different mediums of communication seem to become obsolete after a time in the business world. Business executives and professionals seem to cope with high communication volume by inventing a steadily increasing number of excuses for filtering-out more and more messages until a given medium of communication is ignored altogether as 'no longer professional'. (and then they puzzle over where all their clients/customers went...) This is often driven by nuisance marketing; the various forms of what in today's computer parlance we call spam but which has been a plague on all open mediums of communications throughout history. And the executive class has always had a certain compulsion for exclusive means of communication so they can minimize their potential exposure to the 'unwashed', often adopting new communications technologies simply because they are too expensive for the rabble to afford to use. Telex seemed rooted in that notion; a private electronic channel of communications for corporations and no one else...
I found that 'snail mail' and fax had become useless for me many years ago, and the telephone a short time thereafter thanks to the advent of automated phone systems which, of course, are engineered to increase company productivity by making communication with the outside world impossible. Now it seems email has become obsolete as well -or perhaps my occasional paranoid suspicions were right after all and I've somehow been blacklisted. I don't know what it is. All I do know is that it seems to have become virtually impossible to reach anyone in any company, and impossible to maintain communication with them for any length of time in the rare instance when you can reach them.
I'm beginning to suspect that I've reached the practical limits of my research. I've ferreted out virtually every alternative building technology in existence and every practical means of building non-toxic housing known. Most of the new things I find now seem to be simply minor variations of technologies I've found previously, with no significant savings in cost or convenience -or help from anyone working with or manufacturing them- on offer. It seems that there will be no near-term breakthroughs here in terms of cost or technology and this leaves me in the situation that there is no means of achieving my goal of acquiring non-toxic housing by my solitary labor and disability income. The housing approaches described in my Final Project section seem to be the absolutely most efficient ones current technology can offer. Non-toxic housing will probably never get any simpler or cheaper than the Pavilion Architecture I've described there. And yet that remains far out of my reach. I'm no closer than I was decades ago. It's troubling.
Still, I have some nominally promising news to report. As noted in the articles in my Gallery section, I've long had an interest in a material known as Tefzel; an elastomeric film which is one of the most low-toxic plastics known and which has the very useful properties of being very tough yet more transparent than glass. Tefzel first saw architectural application in the form of a system of membrane 'pillow panels' used as cladding for a geodesic 'pillow dome' built by Buckminster Fuller's New Alchemy Institute. It was not until the turn of the century that this feat was duplicated on a more ambitious scale for the famous Eden Project greenhouse complex in the UK. Commonly used as a lining material for bulk food packaging, the architectural applications of tefzel are many. It can be used for conventional but extremely light windows, as a material for tension or membrane roof systems, as inflatable panels, and for large pneumatic enclosures like the common inflatable domes used for tennis courts. It doesn't outgas, is unaffected by UV or extreme temperature, is strong enough to resist cutting by most knives, has the self-cleaning properties of teflon based tension roof materials, and has a virtually indefinite life span. It does not sustain flames and when it is forced to burn it burns completely leaving a residue which some references describe as nothing more than steam and vinegar. And yet despite all these virtues I could find no other examples of its use beyond the two pillow dome projects. No one in the US seemed to have any knowledge of how to use this material -even though it is made here by Dow Chemical.
Recently I finally discovered the company who had made the pillow panels for the Eden Project; a company in Germany called FoilTec. On their web site I discovered that -in Europe at least- all the many architectural applications of this material have been well explored with very impressive results. I'm a bit annoyed by having had to wait this long to find this company. If the people in the American division of the Mero Corporation (the space frame system maker that had built the dome space frame structure for the Eden Project) had not been so utterly clueless about what was obviously one of that company's highest profile projects I would have learned of this FoilTec company many years ago!
FoilTec's version of Tefzel is a product called Texlon and it is available as custom fabricated skins or structures with a variety of options. They offer it in fully transparent and translucent forms and can also apply a metalized pattern that tailors its transparency to any desired degree of transmission or can be applied for aesthetic effect. The material is apparently very easy to work with since the company offers replacement for damaged membrane parts within 48 hours world-wide regardless of structure size. The project examples on the web site show an impressive range of uses. It has proven especially effective for large area atrium enclosures and various forms of greenhouses or solarum roofs, its very low mass allowing for very light support structures providing very wide spans yet with no compromises in durability or weather resistance compared to glass. They even enclosed whole city streets with this! Used for a variety of large pneumatic enclosures for German laboratories studying solar effects on different types of atmosphere, the exceptional transparency and thinness of seams produces structures that virtually disappear. In some pictures it's as if some kind of force-field where being used for an enclosure rather than anything solid. The effect is quite impressive.
So, how would one make practical use of this material for non-toxic housing? I see three significant ways to use it. First, in the conventional roll of skylights and atrium roofing. Readers will recall one design I proposed for excavated housing based on radial forms that made optional use of a membrane skylight dome to enclose its central atrium courts, thus eliminating the need for glass windows to weather-proof the open room chambers, allowing Japanese style screens to be used instead. Atrium roofs are typically very expensive and complicated to build due to the heavy weight of glass and the limited maximum area of glass panels. Those problems are gone with Texlon. Only the largest of residential scale atriums would even need a truss or tensegrity truss structure and they could be handled by very few people because everything would be so light.
Similarly, Texlon allows one to make window wall systems with extremely large area panels that even a single individual could easily handle alone. Windows fashioned like Japanese screens would be as resilient as glass and optionally as well insulated, though their sound dampening properties would be poor.
Texlon could be the basis of a low-toxic membrane roof system for pavilion structures. Several of the project examples on the FoilTec site show clever engineered lumber framed pavilion structures where the entire roof has been used as a transparent or translucent skylight. Similar structures based on non-toxic lumber or alloy truss systems could provide a very light but strong roof system for a pavilion home with the compelling virtue of a bright sunlit environment.
But perhaps the most interesting potential use is Skybreak housing. first proposed by students of Buckminster Fuller as a means to the most practical use of the geodesic dome for housing, the Skybreak concept is based on the use of a large area clear span transparent dome enclosure as a basic environment enclosure for a home made of independent free-standing modular structures made of light comfortable materials set in an indoor garden landscape. Put simply, it's like living in a greenhouse using prefab Japanese tea house buildings for rooms, their roofing and walls optional and needed only for shade, privacy, and supplemental insulation. This ultimately became the definitive concept for geodesic dome housing -the dome houses common today having nothing to do with any of Fuller's own work. But the technology needed for transparent domes never materialized until the end of Fuller's life -that technology being the tefzel based pillow panel dome.
Unusual as this housing concept may be, other designers have been exploring it recently using different kinds of large clear-span structures. One of the most well known is Shigeru Ban's Naked House, a home in Japan based on a large wood framed clear span box with a translucent membrane skin inside which the funtional rooms of the home consist of very traditional Japanese style rooms built inside wooden boxes on casters, allowing them to be freely moved about the large space. I've long had an interest in this idea because prefab industrial membrane roof buildings tend to be quite inexpensive and quick to construct and because -like the open-plan pavilion homes I've concluded are my most likely housing option- Skybreak housing reduces interior finishing to nothing more than an arrangement of free-standing furniture and appliances. It's almost like making a home by erecting a really large tent and moving furniture into it. It just doesn't get much easier than that! The catch, though, is that no existing membrane roof or tension roof buildings offer more than a translucent skin, they don't accommodate conventional windows very easily, and most of them use very toxic architectural membranes or fabrics.
Using Texlon one can make Skybreak enclosure structures that are low-toxic and fully transparent. One can also make their surface selectively transparent using the metalized shading option. The perimeter edges can be left completely transparent for views while the upper parts are increasingly less transparent to reduce heat gain. And since it can be used for pneumatic structures, a Texlon roof could be a suitable enclosure all by itself, reducing on-site construction to just a perimeter foundation. This is a very compelling notion for an architectural experiment, whether or not one has any interest in non-toxic or rapid-deployment housing.
Alas, these applications are ones I will probably never have the opportunity of trying. While the German parent division of FoilTec is easily contacted, once again the American division that they insist I deal with proved to be impossible. It took a very long time -even with the German HQ's prodding- to get any information out of them and after I received a promising package of brochures, the company just ignored my subsequent enquires into pricing and available services. They just flaked out like so many other companies I've struggled to communicate with lately. So my exploration into this very promising material, once again, runs into a dead-end. Perhaps others may have better luck with this than I.
Sunday, September 19, 2004Systems
A new and promising building system has been brought to my attention recently. The German company Bambutec is now offering tools and components for a very novel bamboo and wood based space frame system. The system uses bamboo or milled wood struts with precision milled ends that plug into laminate lumber joints with precision milled sockets. The components are permanently fixed together with epoxy. Cladding attachment is performed at the joints. Simple as this seems, the system is capable of large scale structures and seems able to produce both truss based and geodesic based structures. Housing structures have been built using a bay frame truss structure with a triangulated sandwich wall framing. They also offer an arch truss system with a 10 meter span that looks quite suitable for housing.
I was concerned about this meeting non-toxic housing requirements when using epoxy but I've been told by the company that they have used milk-derived casien adhesive for both joints and the laminate lumber joints with equally good results allowing for a completely VOC-free building system. However, that still depends on using chemically unadulterated wood and bamboo -which may require importing all that material from Europe or using the few and expensive 'organic' lumber sources there are here in the US. Also, keeping the lumber VOC-free means using designs that well protect the wood structure from the elements without the need for chemical sealants, though I know of some VOC-free wood sealants from Palmer Industries (the makers of non-toxic Airkrete insulation) and others that might be suitable for exposed structure use. Altogether, this is an intriguing system that seems to offer some strong possibilities. My only complaint with it is the lack of demountability, which seems to have become an increasingly important capability within the logistics of my situation. But I'm definitely looking into it.
Also, a member of the ReadyMade Magazine readers forum informed me of an aluminum building system I had not heard of before. Called Aluma-Strut and offered by the Texas based Aluminum Engineered Systems company, this appears to be a medium scale beam and post with truss roof system using an unusual round profile shape with locking flanges for four attachment faces. It's rather like a scaffolding system evolved into a permanent structure building system. The system apparently relies on load bearing perimeter wall structures supporting truss floor and roof joists or pitched roof trusses with an interior clear span of up to 60 feet. The system is apparently designed to emulate the look of conventional housing, though is also used for commercial and induatrial buildings.
This looks to be another very promising building system but the company does not appear to sell any standardized components via a catalog. Instead, they are contracted to produce a housing 'package' on a made-to-order basis. This precludes the possibility of stockpiling components incrementally -the same problem faced with using the pre-fab park shelter products I previously explored. But it is engineered to accommodate sweat equity, rather than relying on exclusive assembler contractors with heavy equipment. That is a strong advantage. And it should be easy for a volunteer team to use this system as the parts are light and easy to assemble with simple tools. Not as quick and easy as theatrical truss structures but not too far from that.
Lastly, I have gotten the final word from the BLM and Park Service on those mining claim properties I was interested in. It turns out that the sites are under Park Service jurisdiction and this adds further restrictions on their use due to environmental regulations. It's simply not possible to build any kind of 'worker housing' if there is any readily available private land for sale within 'commuting distance' of the site. Of course, it's not their concern whether such land is affordable or not nor is 'commuting distance' clearly defined. So that pretty much puts the kibosh on that notion.
Monday, September 6, 2004Tools
Some readers have asked me about the modeling tools I've used for the pictures on my site so I thought I would pass along news on a new modeling package I learned about from a product note in Desktop Engineering magazine. Called SketchUp, this modeling package looks like a real successor to the easy-to-use Deneba CAD which I have used for many years but which has not been updated for a long time. Designed as a conceptual design-level tool for architects and industrial designers, this package features a very intuitive user interface, some very clever tools, a large assortment of rendering modes, and some good features for doing live presentations. It's available in Mac OSX and Windows versions and free demos are available for download. The nearly $500 price tag is not exactly cheap but it is very inexpensive compared to a lot of other professional modeling packages which are very difficult to use for casual interactive modeling. You might not be able to do CAD-CAM with this, but for getting a design started with the least hassle this looks very promising. I'm considering saving up for it when Deneba CAD has become too long-in-the-tooth to use.
Monday, August 30, 2004Request
I would like to hear from anyone near the Scott River area of Siskiyou County in northern California who would be willing to examine and photograph a couple of pieces of property I am interested in. Anyone who can help with this please contact me as soon as possible.
Thanks.
Thursday, August 19, 2004Project Update
Finally, a price list. I was at last able to get pricing on the H40V theatrical truss components from one of Prolyte's US distributors. However, there is still no practical solution to the mixing of ladder truss and box truss components for a box frame structure. Having custom welded connectors on these already pricey components is simple not on. But after some pondering I've come to realize that there is another structural approach to the use of these components; a 'bay frame' system.
Some large clear-span structures such as aircraft hangars use flat truss members for both wall and roof support. This is done by creating a series of parallel frames spanning the sides and top of the building, sort of like the spars in the hull of a boat or the wing of a plane, that surrounds a clear span space or 'bay'. Perpendicular cross-supports and sometimes diagonal tension cables are used to stabilize these frames but when metal roof and wall panels are installed the system collectively functions as a 'stressed skin' or 'monocoque' structure. This approach leaves the two ends of the 'bay' completely open so they can accommodate those large doors such structures are noted for.
Using just the H40V box frame and box corner components alone a similar kind of structure can be made, each bay frame consisting of one 5m truss, two 2-3m sides, and two box corners. To include a floor deck one would add box corners and another 5m truss at the bottom to form a complete rectangle. A series of these frames are then joined together at the corners by short 1m box truss units and thus the bay is extended for as 'deep' as one requires. If a floor deck is used one must add further 1m truss units to the bottom of several corners for foundation supports. On a concrete slab the frames just plug into sockets set in the concrete floor. Bays are added side-to-side by adding more bay frames to the sides of the existing ones at their corners, sharing the intervening vertical members. The 1m spacing is close enough to support the heavier grade of structural metal panel roofing or catwalk grating/aluminum deck for flooring while leaving plenty of room for portals/doorways between each bay. Adding bays side to side is actually more efficient then just extending the 'depth' of one bay since it uses fewer parts, sharing vertical members.
With this approach a simple home might be built as a series of side-by-side boxes, each with two wide openings at the bay ends for windows and doors and a skin of metal roofing panel. A 'microhouse' might be built with one 10m long bay.
But this strategy has a much larger number of these more expensive components -especially the box corners. According to the newly obtained price list the box corners will cost about $800 each, 5m trusses almost $1000 each, 2.5m trusses about $600, 1m trusses $400. A roughly 5m square (about 256sf) structure finished will probably be in the area of $20,000. That's just one modest room. At a cost-per-square-foot guestimate, this is probably about $100 per square foot on slab foundation, well over that using a floor deck with pier foundation.
Though cheaper than other currently available modular component products and suited to incremental stockpiling, this is expensive. My income might cover one part a month. At that rate I'd wait a good decade to save up enough parts for a small home -and I just hope the company is still making them by the time I've saved enough. And there's still the issue of experimentation to deal with, and its attendant waste due to trial-and-error testing. But I can't help thinking there's some possibility here. This is something I could build by myself, even if affording it would take more time than I have. A very small test structure could be realized with the income over about a year. But unless that could win further support, it would probably be an exercise in futility. Though I've seen a great deal of welcome feedback to this project site, I've seen no actual interest in supporting any of the building approaches I've described. Is a bet on lottery-ticket odds better than no bet at all? I feel like the street person struggling over the best way to spend his last dollar. Does it matter?
In other new