Documenting a personal quest for non-toxic housing.
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.