This article appeared in TLS #59

by Tim Beatley – Virginia, USA
Reprinted with permission from Residential Architect magazine, November 2005.

We live in disconnected times. We occupy space but know little about it. Instead of joining communities or neighborhoods, we buy houses and make real estate investments.

Sustainable design offers us the chance to rekindle these lost connections, to rebuild knowledge of place. New residential development is commonly thought to bring more cars and traffic, higher taxes, overcrowded schools, diminished views, and open spaces. But there is a way to turn this around – if we can imagine new growth connecting with and strengthening our sense of place. This kind of green design might take many forms, but just a few possibilities are mentioned here.

Acting locally

One idea is to locally source building materials. In our globalized economy, such materials can originate hundreds or thousands of miles away from where they are eventually installed or assembled. They contain a high embodied energy, and their extraction often entails substantial ecological impact. Paradoxically, much of the practice of green building has emphasized materials, such as bamboo flooring, that are transported great distances.

We need to look much closer to home, to materials that nurture local livelihoods and reconnect us to place and land. An innovative sustainable wood initiative here in Virginia holds some clues and offers some inspiration. Operated by Appalachian Sustainable Development (ASD), it supports the local economy by working with small wood-lot owners who are willing to manage and harvest sustainably. The wood produced is beautiful, durable, and distinctive (more of the tree is used, with knotty “character” wood a key result), and it is certified under ASD’s Sustainable Wood label. It is then dried in a solar- and wood-waste-powered kiln and cut into flooring at ASD’s mill.

My family and I recently installed ASDcertified white-ash flooring in our home. As a result, I know where the wood was grown, and I have some assurance that the result for the landscape is not destructive but rather restorative. In this case, a sustainable material close to home was actually less expensive than its standard commercial alternative. It is a small expression of commitment to
sustainability but an important step on the way to a deeper connection and duty to place.

Using local materials is a growing practice in sustainable design communities. Innovative green projects like BedZED, the Beddington Zero Energy Development in the London borough of Sutton, have explicit targets for local materials. At BedZED, more than half of the building materials arrive from sources within a 35-mile radius of the site. Wood siding comes from local municipal forests, bricks from a local brick company.

In Western Australia, there has been a creative effort to nurture furniture building and wood artistry. Rather than exporting logs (or allowing them to be converted to low-value wood chips and then exported), there is a growing sentiment that these resources can be the foundation of a highvalue-added, labor-intensive economy, of which sustainably managed forests can serve as a linchpin. Among other steps, a forest heritage center and school of fine furniture making has been established there, and the number of outlets for locally made wood products and crafts is growing.

Much of our food comes from very far away. It typically travels some 1,500 miles from where it is grown to where it is eaten, according to the 2001 report “Food, Fuel, and Freeways,” and we are usually oblivious to these origins. New developments could begin to think more carefully about the food needs of their future residents, perhaps developing long-term relationships with local growers. This is essentially the concept of Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) residents buy a share in a local farm that provides (often delivered) a basket or box full of produce each week during the growing season. CSA farms are growing in popularity – there are now more than 1,500 of them nationally – and they could be offered as part of the package that goes along with a new home (or at least as an option).

Designing in opportunities to grow food directly is another way of promoting sustainability (and healthier living), strengthening place, and re-earthing us. This is a trend in Europe, where ecological, mixed-use projects such as Viikki in Helsinki, Finland, have left green fingers between major buildings for garden plots. Single-family homes might be designed to facilitate this as well. A model sustainable home in the Perth, Australia, suburb of Subiaco, for instance, includes extensive edible landscaping and a built-in raised-bed vegetable garden in its backyard. The garden is large enough to produce all the vegetables a typical family needs.

Energy use is another way to reconnect with local places. Every place has opportunities to generate its own power, whether through wind, sunlight, or biomass. Strong European examples exist of communities that have been able to redirect community resources to local energy production. In Aeroe Island, Denmark, which aspires to be 100 percent energy independent, small power plants generate energy from the sun and from locally grown straw and hay. Expenditures for energy stay local and help to strengthen, not diminish, the region’s economy.

A more urban example is the redeveloped district of Vastra Hamnen in Malmo, Sweden, where a variety of renewable energy technologies and design ideas have been incorporated into dense housing and the ambitious goal of 100 percent renewable energy from local sources has been met.  Energy production is a visible element of the community, with vertical solar hot-water-heating panels feeding into a district heating grid.

BedZED again offers inspiration with an on-site combined-heat-and power plant fueled by wood waste from tree trimmings. In Freiburg, Germany, the Solar-Fabrik solar-technology factory burns oil from locally grown rapeseed in a carbon-neutral cycle, further demonstrating the power of combining green and local.

The energy consumed by residents and the embodied energy associated with new building materials might also be compensated for in ways that creatively restore and renew bioregions. In the U.K., the Carbon Neutral Company works with banks and building societies to offer a carbon neutral mortgage, which provides for the planting of enough trees to cover the carbon footprint of the home and lifestyle of its occupants. In Australia, similarly, several banks are now offering carbon-neutral car loans. Habitat and place restoration can happen in many ways, of course, but local tree planting holds potential for productively harnessing the green sensibilities of people on behalf of place.

In an increasingly turbulent and globalized world, rebuilding lost place and human connections in a host of creative ways provides solace, strength, and reassurance. Sustainable design must strive not only to reduce its overall ecological impact, but to do so in ways that enable us to be truly native to place.

Resources
Residential Architect magazine www.residentialarchitect.com

Appalachian Sustainable Development
www.asdevelop.org/sustainable_woods.html

www.bedzed.org.uk
Beddington Zero Energy Development, an environmentallyfriendly,
energy-efficient mix of housing and work space in
Beddington, Sutton, United Kingdom.

Viikki Eco Neighbourhood Blocks – Finland
www.cardiff.ac.uk/archi/programmes/cost8/case/holistic/viikki.html

Malmo, Sweden
naturalspace.com_broadband/swedentext.htm
The CarbonNeutral Company, United Kingdom
www.carbonneutral.com/pages/reducingCO2.asp

Sustainable Communities

Toward Sustainable Communities: Resources for Citizens and
Their Governments by Mark Roseland, Sean Connelly, David Hendrickson and Chris Lindberg.

Developing Sustainable Planned Communities by Richard
Franko, Jo Allen Gause, Jim Heid, and Steven Kellenberg.

Sustainable Communities: The Potential for Eco-neighbourhoods
by Hugh Barton.

Designing Sustainable Communities: Learning from Village
Homes by Michael Corbett, Judy Corbett, and Robert L. Thayer.

Fostering Sustainable Behavior: An Introduction to Communitybased
Social Marketing by Doug McKenzie-Mohr and William Smith.

Ecovillages: A Practical Guide to Sustainable Communities
by Jan Martin Bang.

Sustainable Communities: Learning from the Cohousing
Model by Grahm Meltzer.

Green Cities: A Guide for Sustainable Community Development
by Michael Bloomfield and Michael Lithgow.

Sustainable Communities Network www.sustainable.org
Links citizens to the resources they need to implement innovative processes/programs.

Intentional Communities www.ic.org
Information on ecovillages, cohousing, intentional communities, urban housing cooperatives and other related projects.

School of Living www.schoolofliving.org
Nurturing healthy, Community Land Trust Communities.

New Urbanism www.newurbanism.org
Many choices for living in more sustainable, convenient and comfortable places.

Tim Beatley is the Teresa Heinz Professor of Sustainable Communities at the University of Virginia. This article is based, in part, on ideas discussed in his book Native to Nowhere: Sustaining Home and Community in a Global Age (Island Press, 2004).
www.residentialarchitect.com

This article appeared in TLS #59.

Turko Semmes is a licensed general contractor from San Luis Obispo County, California, and one of the foremost experts in straw-bale building techniques.

A graduate from the Architecture Department of Cal Poly State University in 1978 with a degree in Construction Engineering, he has been self-employed since that time, running a custom home building business specializing in energy efficiency and sustainable building techniques. Turko is a co-founder of the California Straw Building Association. He has built several custom homes, agricultural buildings, and wineries throughout central California. He has taught classes and workshops on sustainable building systems to community groups and to students at the elementary, secondary, and university level. He is recognized as an expert on passive solar design concepts and other energy efficient techniques, as well as nontoxic and sustainable building materials.

The Semmes southwest-style straw-bale home (pictured here) is nestled in the Los Padres National Forest in a setting that joins nature with natural building. The courtyard/pool area is an inviting setting filled with flowers and hand-painted artwork at the main entry door leading to Turko’s office and the family den. The lower terrace provides space for relaxing poolside with an outdoor shower nearby. The upper terrace is a covered outdoor cooking and dining area. The formal living and dining rooms and the master bedroom face onto the meadow with views toward the mountains of the Santa Lucia Range. The cool and calming color palette of the master bedroom contrasts with the bright and lively colors of the other living spaces.

Turko Semmes, Semmes & Co. Builders, Inc., Atascadero CA
<turko@semmesco.com> www.semmesco.com
Photo credits: Semmes & Co. Builders, Inc.

by Ken Haggard and Polly Cooper – California, USA

Adopted from an article that appeared in Home Power Magazine.

Straw-bale cottage during construction.

Like many other architectural firms in California, San Luis Obispo Sustainability Group architects had been designing building that utilized passive solar for many years. Like many other architectural firms around the country, and around the world, in recent years we found ourselves shifting our design work to “sustainability,” an extension of passive solar design concepts.

The definition of sustainability we use in our work is to use resources that meet our needs but do not compromise the ability of future generations to meet their needs. As our firm and the work we do evolved, our practice has evolved to encompass broader issues including life cycle impacts of materials, miniaturization of infrastructure, health issues in buildings, permaculture and landscape regeneration.

By 1994, we had developed a comfortable working environment, consisting of a mix-used passive solar complex that included an office, shops and a residence on an old trout farm adjacent to the Los Padres National Forest, 12 minutes north of the city of San Luis Obispo. Little did we imagine that we would endure the trauma of losing nearly everything we owned or that this tragedy would afford an opportunity to redevelop our complex based on our new knowledge of sustainability. In August 1994, the 41 Wild Fire that burned 40,000 acres/16,200 hectares in our area destroyed our entire complex, and forced us into applying these broader principles of sustainable design for ourselves. Once we got over the initial shock of losing an extensive library, slide collection, office and home, it became more and more obvious what an opportunity our natural fire-oriented local ecology offered us – we could start from scratch and build sustainably, without the problem associated with retrofitting existing structures.

One of the first things we realized was that the fire had left us with a large inventory of building material. (We had several strawbale benches on the site before the fire. They turned out to be more fire resistant than most of the stucco-, tile- and metal-clad buildings in the canyon.) It had killed most of the mature trees (except for 2/4 of the fire-adapted oaks), and these trees were now available to use as lumber. We would never have dared touch them while they were alive. In addition, the massive opening-up of the landscape afforded by the fire allowed us to examine our aging infrastructure. We realized it could be redone in a much more sustainable way. Landscape regeneration became an everyday reality, not some theoretical subject. We suddenly could do things that we had only talked about, but never had the time to do – like getting off the electrical grid.

Completed straw-bale cottage.

Right after the fire, it was necessary to develop a base of operations – a place to store tools, plan from and live in. We attempted to combine this need with several others, such as providing future retreat for guests and visitors, as well as a demonstration workshop for our senior sustainable design architecture class at Cal Poly State University. The result was a 500 sf/46m2 cottage that we uilt on a slab that was left from a shed we had removed long ago. his was one of the few slabs in the canyon not destroyed by the re, because it supported no flammable building at the time. For the structure of this building, we used fire-damaged telephone polls with a truss joist frame. We built the walls from rice straw bales laid on edge, which provide good insulation. In addition, the stucco finish provides interior distributed thermal mass. For the ceiling, we used wheat straw bales laid flat between TJI rafters, which also provide good insulation. The roof is corrugated steel sheet, and includes a 4-ft.x 8-ft/1.2mx3.4m skylight with skylid (movable insulation) unit. Our electrical power came from a Pelton wheel (a microhydro system) on the creek connected to storage batteries.

The construction of this building used healthier building materials that produced less waste. The unused straw was used for erosion control on the site. The building also gets much of its heat from the sun, and uses waste as a resource. In addition, the structure served as a prototype to test details that we planned to use in the larger buildings.

Sustainable Materials

In sustainable design circles, there is a lot of talk about the advantages of using regional materials. As practitioners, we always had nagging doubts about how much of this is truth and how much is idealized theory. Once construction of the guest cottage was underway, we turned our attention to testing this theory. There were several stands of mature trees on the site, especially in the creek areas. The oaks, Sargent cypress and several pine species were native. The Douglas fir and redwoods were not, although their natural range on the coast extends to just 10 miles/48 km north of the site. They were planted 33 years ago when the trout pods were developed. After the fire, all the redwoods put our new growth immediately, and three-quarters of the oaks sprouted from at least part of the remaining trunks. The other trees were killed. We now had an opportunity to do what passive solar applications do – use resources directly on the site rather than importing them from far away and exporting the impact elsewhere.

We felt obligated to mill the dead trees into lumber for reconstruction. We hired sawyers to do this during the fall of 1994, suing a wood Miser portable mill. Both we and the sawyers were amazed at the quantity and quality of wood produced in this relatively small area. We harvested 22,000 board feet of lumber, enough for construction of the other buildings with enough left over to be a storage, rain and sun protection chore. The economics of this also created the unusual condition of using straw-bale construction in conjunction with heavy timber construction, as it was more economical to mill big pieces rather than small ones.

The result of this experience was very interesting. The wood we obtained cost about the same as it would have from a lumberyard, but the quality was much higher. In addition, all phases of the life cycle of this material – source, transport, processing, use and source regeneration – happened on the site. Waste could not be exported elsewhere. It became a resource used for erosion control and organic matter for the regenerative process.

It became obvious to us that although the first costs of both milling our own lumber and buying it from a lumber yard were about the same, the long-range environmental costs of milling our own was much less. These costs are not often accounted for in our present economic system.

The Studio/Office

The next step was construction of the studio and office, completed at the end of March 1995. Because of the function of this building, we placed great emphasis on natural lighting in addition to the passive solar design. The studio/office is also off-grid, poweredby photovoltaic (PV) panels over the library/research area, with a Pelton wheel on the adjacent creek for use as backup in the winter when the water is high. (Two streams fed by the nearby mountain range flow through the property.) The studio/office is heavy timber-frame construction with straw-bale infill.

The south side of the office is configured to allow maximum sun
penetration in the winter and begins to shade itself in early April. During the summer months, it is totally in shade, picking up sun again in late September. Parts of this facade are view windows, part unvented 12-in./30cm Trombe walls that also act as shear walls, and part 9-inch-thick/23cm water tanks below the south-facing window on each end that act as indirect gain passive heaters. The Trombe walls and water tanks are painted with a selective surface paint on the sun-facing side.
The wiggly light shelf on this south facade serves two purposes: providing summer shading of the windows and low water tanks and throwing light deeper into the building in winter. This office is also designed for maximum night ventilation. Summer breezes generally flow from southwest to northeast, so the air moves through the long dimension of the office. These breezes, coupled with the large amount of distributed thermal mass in the building, keeps the interior temperatures below 79oF/26oC, even when daytime summer temperatures are quite hot, occasionally reaching 110oF/43oC.

The Residence

The two-story residence of the complex was completed in October 1997. We used construction techniques similar to those in the office, except that the heavy timber structure is placed 6 in./15cm inside the straw-bale walls. This configuration allowed us to expose the beautiful timber frame and create a continuous two-story straw-bale wall without interruption of the north side. The curves of this wall were very easy to achieve with straw bales without any added expense. This is the best arrangement of the timber structure and bale walls we’ve found to date. There are remarkably few cracks in this wall. The contrast to the stuccoed wood shear walls on the east side is very telling.

The residence uses interior 8-in./20cm concrete block walls as shear walls, thermal mass and decorate “gates.” Besides south-facing glass, skylights provide direct gain, with skylids as thermal control. We’ve found that this system offers more flexibility in the fall and spring than fixed overhangs.  The El Nino weather pattern sometimes produces a very unusual cool late spring, which we cannot respond to in the studio with its fixed overhangs. The skylight/skylid arrangement in the residence did allow us to respond to these unusual climatic conditions. The residence is also off-grid, powered by the PV system and Pelton wheel backup that provides electricity to the rest of the complex.

Landscape Regeneration

One of the unexpected joys of this whole ordeal has been to experience the rapid regeneration of the landscape following the fire. Fire is such an integral part of the native California landscape that everything is set up for it. The first spring was dominated by delicate fire poppies, which only appear in newly burned areas. In this case the seeds had been waiting 60 years for their chance – it had been that long since this area last burned. The next year was dominated by morning glories, which spread all over the armature of the burned branches of earlier plants. The third year was the year of low herbal plants – sages, bush poppies, soap roots and others. In the fourth year, we found the Ceonothus (wild lilac) dominating. The regeneration of oak and cypress trees then began to be much more noticeable.

The best wood for reconstruction turned out to be the Sargent cypress, used for the structure and trim. Alder was the best for cabinets. The cypress trees regenerated naturally because they were a fire species whose seeds are stimulated when they are burned. When the office was done, to commemorate the wonderful alder cabinet it contains, we planted several times the number of alders in the creek than were there before the fire.

Better Quality, Ecological Correctness

We’ve found that the application of our design theories to our own situation has helped convince clients and others that sustainability is more than just another theory. It is a way of achieving better value while simultaneously having far less impact on our planet. In fact, once we get beyond the fears of scarcity that haunt our industrial culture, we will see that these two values – better quality and ecological correctness – are interrelated.

Ken Haggard and Polly Cooper are principals with the San Luis Obispo Sustainability Group, 16550 Oracle Oak, Santa Margarita, California 93453; 805.438.4452, fax 805.428.4680 <slosg@slonet.org> www.slosustainability.com

Ed.Note – An article about the curved wall straw-bale workshop building (not pictured in this issue) at Ken and Polly’s complex will be included in TLS#60/Details, Details, Details. It’s amazing in its design and structure.