Posted by Dave on December 5, 2009
Credit: Modcell
Avert the eyes. Yes, they are at it again. Brits hold no modicum of decency when it comes to their efforts at mating sustainable products with modern building methods. Hemp and straw are so pure and modest, while industry is so brutish and base. Will it ever work?
Modcell is attempting, in their Flying Factory, to create the illusive commercially viable, modular, super-insulated, high-performance, low energy ‘passive’ buildings built using renewable, locally sourced, carbon sequestering materials. I know, I know. Crazy. When will these money hungry, earth-lovers give up? WAIT! There is more to read… read on »
Posted by Dave on September 29, 2009
America’s farmland has long been under siege by suburban development. This is nothing new. What is new is that a cease-fire has been called in most parts of the nation. And a conversation is developing about how to move into this new window of opportunity in a manner that not only restores the balance between urban demand and farm supply, but also helps to reenergize our failing economy heavily dependent on the construction industry.
This summer, Reburbia, a suburban design competition, was held by Inhabitat and Dwell Magazine. The competition set out to gather creative and imaginative ideas on how to go about re-visioning the American suburban sprawl that will almost certainly become our suburban wasteland without intervention. Several of the ideas were great, but one in particular caught my eye. WAIT! There is more to read… read on »
Posted by Dave on July 24, 2009
Salt Lake City is going passive. Joe and Rebecca are teaming up with Brach Design and Fisher Custom Building to build Utah’s first certified passive house. That is the plan anyway. Brach Design is Utah’s only certified Passive House architect and this will be his first passive house if everything turns out right.
You may be thinking, “Who gives a diddly ding dang do.” But let me tell all you Flanders swearing neigh-sayers, this is pretty ding dang diddly cool. Let’s not forget that 76% of all electricity produced by U.S. power plants goes to the building sector. Passive House started up as PassivHaus in the UK, but that was too stinking European sounding for God-Bless-’Em-Americans, so we changed it to Passive House Institute US, but it is the same thing. Passive House is a certification that literally beats the insulation off of rating systems like LEED. The graphic shows it pretty well (although LEED is not pictured because it is a bit like comparing apples to oranges). But the point is that Passive House is the stiffest energy efficiency standard the world has seen by far. WAIT! There is more to read… read on »
Posted by Dave on July 4, 2009
I just can’t feel bad about it. Post modern luxury and hippie just shouldn’t go together, and that is what so many of the most recently reencarnated pre-fab housing gurus have been trying to do. It has been doomed to failure since the start. Now the economic “downturn” is finishing the job, and I am hopeful that it may be one more good result that comes from it.
I think Buildblog puts it best in their recent post, “Pre-fab houses don’t work.” They go on to list 10 reasons why pre-fabbers have gotten it wrong at a time when I believe that most things were in their advantage to get it right. Like so many other huge changes that are taking place across the U.S. in the way that we think and live, this time of economic malaise could have been an opportunity for radical visionaries to rebuild American housing. Instead we came up with a stupider and more convoluted way to build the same old, stupid and convoluted environs. God bless America. WAIT! There is more to read… read on »
Posted by Dave on June 27, 2009
So the typical definition of affordable housing is less than 30% of your income. And yet, the 2007 Census revealed that over 40% of American home owners are spending at least one-third of their income on housing, and the percentage is rising. Low to moderately low income people are the fastest growing category within this stat as well.
Housing prices are falling. For people in lots of debt at the moment, this is bad. For people that own their home it is a slight bummer, but no big deal. For people that would like to be home owners this is actually good. The problem is that property prices are not falling in most areas. Most property has maintained a strong and constant value for a while. The exceptions are areas where their is little to no practical use for the land, and therefor unimportant for our discussion. So, even after the economy bottom’s out and starts to rebound (assuming that it will), there will be little help for people wanting to own a home in proximity to a place they can actually live. WAIT! There is more to read… read on »
Posted by Dave on June 11, 2009
Sustainable building is an albatross for a world stranded in the sea of global warming. So many of our resources are tied up in the construction, maintenance and operation of dwellings. And all too often these dwellings have been seen as our combative ways to keep the outside world at bay. Nature, a pox on thee!
The good news is that there are more and more people out there bringing the inside world into closer harmony with the outside world. Ooam. Ooam. No, I don’t mean by focusing your chi or by feng shui or anything hocus pocus. I simply mean it is time to start making homes out of our surroundings instead of trying to separate our homes from our surroundings. It is so much more considerate and less huffy. WAIT! There is more to read… read on »
Posted by Dave on June 5, 2009
Can we get there? Within the last 15 minutes of ABC’s show, Earth 2100, a positive picture of our potential future was painted. (How is that for alliteration?) The interviewed experts posed that it would be possible to perform the heavy lifting of global clean-up by 2050, with only the peripheries to remain after that. Really?
Now, many bloggers and commentators have spoken out that the first 100 minutes of the show were simply too devastatingly depressing. I don’t know. I thought the bulk of the show was pretty entertaining. Instead, it was the end that brought me crashing down into middle of the afternoon, bathrobe shuffling, bacon eating depression. If the bright, hopeful version of our future requires us to bond together globally in loving harmony in order to completely revolutionize our cultures, values and worldviews… I think I just peed a little.
WAIT! There is more to read… read on »
Posted by Dave on June 4, 2009
I by chance stumbled upon the last half of ABC’s show Earth 2100 a couple nights ago. Now understand, I just returned from a trip to Texas, the land of my birth. And Texas, with the exception of Austin, is not the land of environmental sensitivity. And so my frame of mind was stemming from what some other bloggers on the topic of Earth 2100 have been referring to as “the lowest common denominator.” Imagine my reverse culture shock when I found myself watching an acid trip induced, enviro-documentary/graphic novel about the end of humanity on prime time television.
Break out the shisha and tea. I need to relax. Now for the last couple of days most of the reviews on the show have been critical, but personally I think everyone needs to take a few puffs from the hookah. After you feel a little light headed you should keep reading. WAIT! There is more to read… read on »
Posted by Dave on May 19, 2009
So what makes hemp just so wonderful on the one hand and feared on the other? The magic number for hemp is its percentage of cellulose, which is as high as 77%. This makes it the number one producer of biomass on earth. Wood from most trees registers around 60% cellulose and obviously takes much longer to mature. Hemp can grow from germination to maturity in 3 to 4 months and produces around 5 tons of dry fiber stalk and 10 tons of biomass per acre. The last smoking gun is that hemp can be grown over vast portions of the earth’s land surfaces. It can grow anywhere from China’s temperate forested mountains to Mexico’s arid deserts to Canada’s cool farmland. (It grows best in warm, humid areas with over 25 inches of rain but only requires a bare minimum of 10 inches and a temperate climate.) WAIT! There is more to read… read on »
Posted by Dave on May 18, 2009
Damn you Reefer Madness, William Randolph Hearst, Dupont and racist American government of the 1930’s! Over 70 years later and we in the U.S. are still suffering the ill effects of banning marijuana and all its associates during a period of economic rebound that encouraged greed, paranoia, racism and lax political oversight. (Sound familiar?)
Industrial hemp was going strong throughout the 1920’s. It found uses in everything from paint to cosmetics to food. It is even rumored that the first pair of Levi jeans were made from Hemp in the mid-1800’s. (The evidence was destroyed in the great San Francisco fire.) People have long derided prohibition as one of the stupider achievements of American history, blaming it for (among other things) giving rise to organized crime. Well, if prohibition was stupid you have to lump reefer madness into the same category of dumb. WAIT! There is more to read… read on »