One of the most important books I've ever read was one with the rather unfortunate title How To Survive Without A Salary. I say unfortunate because it's a title which instinctively raises red flags for most people, suggesting that it is one of that endless assortment of get-rich-quick 'programs' whose books litter the shelves of bookstores across the US. In truth, this book by Charles Long is about living efficiently and about the way our ignorance of the of the actual practical value of things, our laziness, and our tendency to simply buy and own more than we need gets exploited by the contemporary consumer culture, reducing us to serfs whose lives are controlled by creditors and corporate employers. I think this book should be required reading in every school in every industrial country in the world. People today seem to have a poor grasp of what standard of living and quality of life are really based on and waste enormous amounts of money, natural resources, and -most precious of all- time as a result.

Efficiency lies at the heart of the problem of inflated housing costs and it was clear to me from the start of my housing quest that if non-toxic housing were to be made affordable it would have to be efficient in the extreme and, as a result, far more sophisticated than is the norm for conventional housing. There is a common misconception that sophistication equates to elaborateness but in practice the opposite is true. The sophisticated artifact/technology is one which does the most with the least and the sophisticated lifestyle is one which achieves the highest quality of life with the least clutter of possessions by virtue of possessions chosen for maximum performance. Laziness is not an inherently bad thing -as long as you're lazy like an engineer.

Contemporary housing is unsophisticated in the sense that it is needlessly overcomplicated in design and structure for the current level of technology at-hand. Materials are not being used to the best of their practical performance and labor use is grossly inefficient -labor representing the largest part of construction costs in industrialized countries. A needlessly rich mix of different materials is typically employed in contemporary homes and that alone greatly increases cost, since materials cost more per unit amount the smaller the whole amount purchased while different materials require different handling processes calling for more different tools and skills. Many home building products now exploit the benefits of mass production but it does not go far enough, the basic structures of homes still left largely to non-modular on-site-fabricated components. There's nothing wrong with handcraft except when you are being made to pay more for something a machine can do with the same or better quality at far less cost. In my opinion this is a deliberate overcomplication that has evolved to suit the interests of home finance lenders who depend on homes being too expensive for people to afford out of pocket -thus necessitating credit- and then as expensive to own as the consumer will bear -to maximize lenders profits. To make matters worse, the design of homes seems to maximize the cost of their renovation and adaptation in defiance of the one thing which characterizes contemporary life more than anything else; change. And, of course, the lenders have another 'solution' to this problem in the form of home improvement loans. People seem to casually accept this situation as if it were some consequence of nature, like the weather, rather than their own creation. They likewise treat homelessness as if it were some act of god, forgetting that homelessness did not really exist, outside of the context of war and natural disaster, until the industrial revolution. Perhaps this is the result of people being completely ignorant of their alternatives, oblivious to the possibility of a better way.

My first hint of a better, more efficient, way of housing came with the discovery of the Lofting Movement. In the 1970s the wave of urban decay that spread across the industrialized countries resulted in an interesting phenomenon. Artists, always compelled to live efficiently by virtue of an alternately feast-or-famine self-employment income, began to explore abandoned urban industrial/commercial structures in search of low cost live/work space within the urban cultural centers they have always tended to congregate in. Pooling their resources, groups of artists purchased some of these obsolete buildings and turned them into mini-communities, partitioning them into private residence spaces and shared studios and galleries. The novel environments these creative people made for themselves from these spartan structures attracted the attention of architectural and interior designers who came to appreciate the freedom of creative expression afforded by large simple clear-span spaces. Once publicized in the media, this concept went mainstream and became the basis of a kind of ad-hoc urban renewal driven by the needs of a new generation of young urban professionals migrating to the cities in response to a resurgence in corporate growth and white collar work opportunity. Thus was born the Lofting Movement and today we see the seemingly peculiar phenomenon of new industrial style buildings created specifically to serve as residential loft housing.

The power of the loft apartment rests in the independence of the primary weather-sheltering structure from the elements which define the function of space inside it. It's this big generic clear-span space which accommodates an infinite variation of interior organization and use through free-standing or retro-fit sub-structures which themselves are freed from the burden of being weather-resistant or bearing structural loads and thus can be light, simple, cheap, made out of just about anything that appeals to the users' tastes, and removed as easily as its installed. Is it not curious that, in an age characterized by change, this clearly practical strategy has not been applied to the free-standing house? If you could drive down any American suburban street wearing X-ray glasses you would see right away that the banality of house exteriors is in stark contrast to the colorful diversity of design inside them. Clearly, the first thing home owners do with a house is customize the interior to their needs and tastes, perpetually tweaking that interior for as long as they reside there. Why then isn't the suburban home specifically engineered to accommodate this at the least cost and effort? Why is there no 'loft' housing on the ground?

This, of course, is not all that new an idea. Many of the classic Modernist designers had celebrated the virtues of simple clear span structures, something they had learned from the vernacular housing traditions of Japan and the South Pacific. They just were never very good at communicating this in a context the general public could relate to and comprehend. For example, the legendary design group Archigram anticipated the Lofting Movement by demonstrating a futuristic apartment which was reduced to a simple blank space inside which was placed a cluster of utility 'pods'; free-standing self-contained appliances which assumed the specialized functions normally associated with separate rooms. This was no different from 'lofting' except that the practical message here was lost to the distraction of the B-movie SciFi aesthetic applied to the design of these appliances. Most Modernist designers seem to have made similar mistakes with this concept, being too caught up in showcasing their personal style to communicate the simple practical virtues this strategy toward structure afforded. However, two of the most well known classic Modernist homes do communicate this idea very well and were quite a revelation to me when I discovered detailed images of them.

Glass House - Philip Johnson

Built on his estate in New Canaan Connecticut, Philip Johnson's Glass House has been alternately lauded and lambasted since it was first built in 1949. This is by no means a 'practical' home in the context of conventional suburban tract housing, though it has served quite well as a home for Johnson himself since it was built. (and would be perfectly suited to my own needs were it equipped with a little more bookshelf space) But like one of those transparent models of a human body or automobile engine, it very plainly communicates a key set of concepts and asks us two very critical questions even more relevant today than they were in 1949; what does a house really need to function and how much does a person need to live well? The Glass House represents the epitome of what I have come to call Pavilion Architecture and demonstrates a simple idea of tremendous practicality; the function of space can potentially be independent of structure and therefore that structure can be simplified so as to improve efficiency while accommodating an infinite diversity of use. In the Glass House the function of different zones of space is determined by the objects and fixtures placed there, not the shape of the structure around it. Thus that primary weather sheltering structure is allowed to evolve into a minimalistic form composed of a minimum number of high-performance elements offering (theoretically) great economy. The Glass House is no different from a loft apartment in a converted warehouse in some city except that it is at grade and glazed on all sides and, as a consequence, depends more on external elements for its aesthetics and sense of privacy. (The Glass House sits on 40 acres of private forested property so it is about as private as any house could be without being entirely underground)

Eames House - Charles and Ray Eames

We see the practical potential of the concepts so plainly illustrated by the Glass House demonstrated in less minimalist form by the Eames House. Built by Charles and Ray Eames in 1945 and strongly inspired by the modular design principles of traditional Japanese housing, the house was actually intended as the prototype for a turnkey DIY building system dubbed Kwikset which was intended to exploit the power of industrial mass production as a solution to the post-war housing crisis -a very popular idea at the time. Composed entirely of off-the-shelf industrial building components, the structure of the Eames House demonstrated a direct and practical reuse of industrial structure, anticipating the High Tech design movement that would appear some forty years later. With the essential functions of shelter handled by this simple high performance structure, an infinitely variable and spontaneously changeable interior design was possible using light modular interchangeable panel components and furnishings. These could be made by any number of manufacturers and accommodate any particular technologies, materials, or aesthetic desired. Theoretically, this technology could accommodate any possible design style, even if the Eameses themselves preferred the Modernist look.

Why the Kwikset concept never took off is beyond me. Considering the radically strange housing concepts that were speculatively financed at the same time with the same goal of solving the post-war housing crisis, it seems odd that such a practical and economical concept based on off-the-shelf technology would be overlooked -especially as the Eames House quickly became something of an icon for Modernist design and was routinely used as a backdrop for fashion magazine photography well into the 1970s. Part of the problem may have been the acknowledgement and celebration of Asian influence in the Eameses designs, which probably did not play well with the American public in the immediate post-war period. But most likely it was the simple inability of the mainstream culture to accept an untraditional appearance for the home that has plagued Modernism since its beginning.

While Pavilion Architecture has remained a mainstay of Modernist design and continues to be used to this day in countless variations, there have been few other attempts to realize a system of standardized mass produced components for it, architects generally giving up on the idea that there was any solution to the home finance addiction problem, if not being as oblivious to the fact that there even is such a problem as the middle-class is. It's a shame that the Kwikset concept, or something like it, was never commercially realized because if it had been there might not be a non-toxic housing crisis today, homelessness might be much reduced, and the average home owner might be enjoying a much higher quality of life. How could something like this have had such an impact? Because it would have done for mainstream housing what microcomputers did for computing.

The power of the contemporary computer rests in the ready adaptability of its hardware which is the result of an architecture based not on specific pieces of technology but rather the standardized interfaces between them. Thus instead of being the product of any single manufacturer, the computer has become the product of a community of competing companies spread all around the world. This concept appeared with the advent of the single chip microprocessor and the modular sub-systems it served as a generic processing engine for -a revolution for an industry previously limited by the static architectures of mainframe computers. The consequence was the transformation of a cumbersome unsophisticated technology that was then barely affordable to a few into an infinitely versatile technology now cheap and utterly ubiquitous.

When designers of the 40s, 50s, and 60s sought to 'modernize' housing through the application of industrial production most mistakenly chose the model of the automobile industry and the result was a strange menagerie of prefabricated house designs intended to be mass-produced, marketed, and financed like automobiles. They all failed and the reason they failed was that static designs simply weren't sophisticated enough to suit the vast and constantly evolving diversity of housing needs and tastes. If we regard housing through the analogy of computing and consider conventional housing architecture as akin to a mainframe computer then these primitive attempts at 'machine age housing' were akin to a hand-held video game machine with hard-wired software -a vertical application appliance doomed to quick obsolescence. But the pavilion home is something else; a simple modular framework into which interchangeable subcomponents can be randomly yet orderly combined to suit any specific application without regard for who makes them as long as they are engineered to the same modular component standards. A horizontal application platform which may never become obsolete by virtue of being able to accommodate unlimited future adaptation and expansion and the random individual replacement of any one of its elements without effecting the performance of the rest. As any experienced computer user knows, the actual computer is not a machine or any individual piece of hardware but rather a sort of domain of personal and public information which continually migrates across an evolving medium of hardware and software. So too is 'shelter' a process which is carried out across an evolving medium of structure, furnishings, and domestic technology. Le Corbusier had it sort-of right but lacked the proper technological context. The house is not a machine for living but rather a medium for living in the way that a computer is a medium for information.

This is nothing new or strange. Before the advent of home financing and tract housing developments the conventional 'vernacular' housing technology was quite versatile and dynamic. Lacking bank services, the home owner had to rely on his property as his 'bank'. A home was typically something one built-up incrementally as one could afford it, room by room if necessary. And vernacular building technology evolved to accommodate this type of use in as efficient a manner as pre-industrial technology could manage. Vernacular architecture became obsolete when corporate employers started moving people with increasing frequency among the centers of centralized industrialization and commerce, breaking up extended families and compelling a demand for instant housing with fungible equity. The mortgage became the new transitional 'bank' for personal wealth but one which benefited the lender more than the home owner and came with so many complications to assure the security of the lender's investment that housing quickly became an increasingly unattainable commodity to many.

Rediscovering the forgotten versatility of vernaculars and the potential liberation for the owner-builder they could offer, a community of architects in the late 1980s began advocating a revival of vernacular architecture as a solution to the increasingly dysfunctional architecture of contemporary suburbs. But many made the mistake of assuming that just because a technology was pre-industrial and based in some past 'tradition' it was automatically more appropriate. It doesn't work that way. Vernacular technologies were evolved to the particulars of the economic and cultural situations of their time and place. You can't transplant them into the present and expect them to work anymore than you can expect learning to lap flint to get you ahead on Wall Street. As a result, much of the Vernacular Movement devolved into nostalgia architecture based on superficial decoration applied to the same technology once declared dysfunctional. Only a few of the Vernacular Movement's advocates remained true to the original vision, acknowledging the limitations of the different past technologies and seeking to update them to the practical realities of the present. For vernacular architecture to work in the present it needs technologies evolved to the specific situation of the present.

I think that Pavilion Architecture represents the potential 21st Century vernacular, even though it is not yet in use enough to qualify as an actual vernacular. My reasoning is that it has the capability to best fit the context of the contemporary economic, cultural, and social situation. Pre-industrial vernacular technologies don't accommodate the contemporary pace of change or mobility. This is because, while they very successfully produce evolutionary structures, they don't take advantage of the economy offered by mass production and lack the capability for quick adaptability that the extreme dynamism of contemporary life demands. They evolved to suit a situation where the pace of life was relatively slow, migration limited, extended families offered a mechanism of gradual transition to independence for the young, and material was worth more than labor and land. That situation doesn't exist in industrialized countries anymore. Indeed, it's the complete reverse and as a result the use of these old technologies cost more than they did in the past, don't function as well, and leave the home owner still stuck with the crutch of home financing. If we are to overcome this we need a technology where the elements of shelter can be reduced to freely interchangeable components akin to furniture so that they not only offer evolutionary structures with perpetual demountability and portability, they depreciate in the manner of furniture and thus increase accessibility of shelter by reducing its value. We need to obsolesce the anachronistic idea of the house as a static repository of life-long wealth -are there not vastly more practical instruments for that?- and treat it as something like a personal computer; a collection of diverse prefabricated parts we assemble and change on demand to meet our evolving shelter needs. And, of course, this is precisely what Pavilion Architecture can offer -if we could establish the necessary component interface standards and an industry to support it. But even without that, it can come very close to the ideal using off the shelf materials and components, just as the Eameses so effectively demonstrated.

Which brings us at last to the key question of the role of Pavilion Architecture for my immediate non-toxic housing needs. Early on I realized that one of the key means to reducing the cost of non-toxic housing was the simplification of structure so as to minimize the diversity of materials needed to create an effective home. It is easier and cheaper to manage the issue of latant materials toxicity when you have the smallest mix of different materials to deal with and can use them in ways that preclude the need to paint or coat them. If we look at the example of the Johnson Glass House we see a structure which, by virtue of its minimalist design, is already probably completely non-toxic. Being a high performance structure made of industrial materials like metal, glass, and brick, the primary shelter system of the house is inherently non-toxic. So one need only insure that the furnishings put intside this space are likewise of non-toxic composition. Using an open plan -since a single person living alone has no need of numerous rooms to provide interior private space- we further minimize the amount of materials used. And even if we used materials like wood and accepted the higher cost of its unadulterated forms, we still come out far ahead of the game because those materials are never wasted on structure which is hidden or left exposed to the elements. So we are using the minimum material to its maximum practical benefit. With this idea in mind I attempted to devise my own ideal pavilion home design which I dubbed Simplicity.

Simplicity 1

The first incarnation of the simplicity design is its most minimalist form. It's seemingly improbably primary structure is reduced to two concrete slabs, one serving as roof, the other as floor and foundation. This primary structure appears to defy gravity but, in fact, is enabled through the use of a central double-T-frame of heavy steel members supporting a steel roof frame encased in a solid slab of lightweight foamed concrete topped by an elastomeric membrane. Fiber optic light cables and emitters are likewise encased in this roof monolith and provide a grid of area lighting.

The central support system is secluded by the home's dominant feature, a long multi-functional modular cabinet wall referred to as a Supercabinet which defines the purpose of different regions of space by its arrangement of intergrated storage and appliances and which serves as the sole partition element in the home. In this original design the Supercabinet enclosed a utility room which was intended to serve as a large volume media storage space and place for a network server farm in support of a home business. Enclosure is completed by a recessed perimeter window wall composed of glass panels with UV cured silicone panel joints which is penetrated in two or three points by free standing matrix shelving units doubling as doorway portals. Several transparent panels in this perimeter enclosure would be replaced by translucent or patterned glass providing privacy for the bathroom space flanked by pocket doors. A seamless shell bathroom unit with all fixtures formed in place which I dubbed a neo-dymaxion bathroom would be used, plugging into the utilities backplane secluded by the Supercabinet.

This structure would serve quite well as a non-toxic home and be readily expandable by creating companion pavilions joined to the same roof plane. I have also imagined other similar structures based on circular or polygonal pavilion forms. However, the unusual composition of the monolithic roof system -simple as it may be- was clearly beyond the skills of the DIY enthusiast or any conventional housing contractor and so I had to shelve it as impractical.

Simplicity Concrete

I've explored many other incarnations of this design with the current most practical form being dubbed Simplicity Concrete and based on a more conventional external column-supported pavilion made from modular foam-core ferro-cement panels which are covered in sprayed concrete. In this 'low tech' incarnation the Supercabinet is a construct of Box Beam or T-slot framing enclosed in wood panels and the perimeter enclosure is composed of a more conventional store-front aluminum framed glazing system. Commercial sliding doors replace the more advanced matrix shelving portals and a commercial suspended ceiling system replaces formed-in-place roof utilities. Though a little more complicated in appearance, this version of the design does offer more decorative possibilities in the form of exterior concrete texturing or the application of concrete textile blocks. This is perhaps the lowest cost, lowest labor, form possible for this design concept given current off-the-shelf technology. It is perhaps the lowest cost form of non-toxic housing possible anywhere. It could also be executed with a more typical truss supported metal roof system but I found that this is potentially more costly than the ferro-cement unless its components can be owner-fabricated or facilitated by the use of recycled/donated materials like theatrical truss components. While these metal roof systems are the most common for architect designed pavilion homes, they are typically made more expensive than necessary through hand-crafted welded joint construction rather than the use of modular bolt-together parts -largely because no suitable off-the-shelf building systems like that seem to be available, as it once was in the time of the Eames House.

One open issue with this form of architecture is the issue of thermal performance when using glass enclosures. This is obviously not an issue for the home design which uses primarily insulated perimeter enclosure panels but the designs I have worked on have maximized the use of window walls -perhaps because of my troubled memories of a childhood where natural sunlight has always been something of a luxury. I long pondered why so many Modernist architects have used these vast window walls when the convention is that this is a critical source of thermal loss. However, according to Pierre Koenig -who has designed more homes of this type than perhaps any other American architect and who is one of a handful out of dozens of architects I've written to who could actually write a coherent paragraph in reply- claims he has never had any problems with the thermal performance of his homes in the many decades he's been using such vast windows. And that includes early works developed at a time when multi-paned gas insulated glass and sophisticated thermal film products didn't exist. Part of this may be due to the predominantly mild climate locations of his works, though similar designs by other in colder climates (the Connecticut location of Johnson's Glass House is hardly known for mild winters) seem to work fine. Another possibility is that the combination of open plan single floor design with concrete slab foundations as well as the common use of hydronic heating tend to work together by allowing solar gains and higher general heating efficiency to compensate for side thermal losses. The use of very wide roof overhangs in many of these also seems significant, providing high solar gain in early and late hours while high shade for the rest of the day. Clearly, multi-storey pavilions have been notable for their poor thermal performance even when designed for the sake of passive solar gain, designs of this type by Frank Lloyd Wright being notorious in this respect. With no first-hand experience, and being aware that ego tends to color architects opinions on what 'works' and what doesn't, this remains a still unresolved issue. But the ready adaptability of the basic technology means that, whatever the actual situation with this, the structures can spontaneously adapt to compensate.