Documenting a personal quest for non-toxic housing.
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.
