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?

Seriously, will anyone ever figure out how to combine truly sustainable materials with commercially viable and modern construction techniques?   Yes.  Modcell has (and I am sure some others have too).  But price is always the kicker.  Earthen materials usually involve higher man hours and thus higher cost (as I have discussed in this blog before).  Straw bale gets around this better than say, cob.

Prefab, modular walls cut down on construction time onsite, which is usually another drawback to earthen homes.  But with Modcell, an average wall panel weighs well over a ton, requiring special equipment to assemble.  (No problem for Modcell, because they make more money putting everything together with their Flying Factory equipment on site.)  So how much does it all cost?

According to a Footprint blog, as quoted by Jetson Green’s write-up of Modcell’s BaleHaus at Bath, a 926 sq. ft. house would cost $214,000.  Once you add the expense of the land this creates a price tag that hardly seems affordable.  I can’t quite figure out why Modcell’s cost ends up this high, but apparently it does.  Ultimately, I still have to ask, “Why would anyone pay to build a Modcell house when it costs more than conventional building?”

If I am a granola I can build my own house with straw and hemp and mud, and spend much less.  If I am a yuppie I can hire a “green” contractor to get the job done for me without spending a whole lot more money, and the end product will be more personalized and unique.  While I still hold out hope that the Granola Ethic can be commercialized for general consumption, we haven’t arrived yet.  I commend Modcell for the grand experiment they are embracing.  Maybe they will pave the path toward eventual success in creating a new species of home, one everybody on earth can embrace without dooming future generations.

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.

Forrest Fulton designed Big Box Agriculture: A Productive Suburb. In his design he advocates for transforming abandoned big box stores into suburban farms and markets, and I think it is a tremendous idea. Within three miles of my house right now (and I live close to downtown Salt Lake City) there stands an empty big box store that used to be a CompUSA. Yeah. Remember buying that flash drive there last Black Friday as they were going out of business? Well the building is still there. Currently there is a Halloween business pumping plastic jack-o-lanterns and pregnant Brittany Spears costumes into the soon to be saturated October holiday madness. But they will be gone again in another month. The location is perfect. Less than a mile to the East is a long stretch of solid neighborhood. A little further to the West and you will find the same. Right next to the Costco and Sam’s Club there could be a blacktop farm and market.

Fulton’s idea would use the old CompUSA building as a greenhouse and restaurant by replacing most of the roof with glass and the rest with more crops. One could easily imagine a small market to find fresh produce or where one could wash and wrap the harvest one’s self. By keeping the blacktop parking lot and using containers for the farming the urban/suburban farm could maintain flexibility and easy customer access. In a place like salt lake the greenhouse space would prove invaluable as well. Winter roles around and all the plants that need to come inside have a place to stay.

The two problems that I just can’t shake are crime and parking. Ironic that you can’t just plow up all the parking lots in the world to plant crops even though most of these parking lots were farmland not so long ago. I don’t know about the location of most big box stores, but the old CompUSA isn’t in what you would call a walkable neighborhood. And I don’t think Costco is going to like people using their parking lot/derby arena for parking their John Deere. Could an operation like this maintain a shuttle with off-site parking? Is it ridiculous to consider an underground parking garage? Yeah, probably.

The second problem would appear to be crime. I guess you could always put up a ten foot cyclone fence around the whole farm, but that tends to take some of the community feeling out of the friendly local market. I don’t know, maybe there aren’t that many thugs who need to make a tomato-plant-peace-offering to their old lady for shooting out the television. Then again, my church had its freshly planted perennials yanked out just a few months ago.

One last thought to ponder would be the profitability of an operation like this. Urban and suburban property is still pretty pricy in most cities. Can dense, container farming pay the bills? I know I would like to see someone in SLC give it a try in the old building where CompUSA gave up the ghost.

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.

The idea is pretty much how it sounds.  To qualify a house needs to be almost completely passive in its heating/cooling.  The basic philosophy is to capture all possible energy from external sources like sunshine and geo-thermal as well as retaining energy from humans, electronics,etc. and use all that energy as efficiently as possible.  When this is done well, very little other energy is needed.  Dividing your energy needs into the four categories:  household stuff, ventilation, heating/cooling and hot water,  the chart shows how much of each of these you can use and still be considered passive.  The other very cool and very practical element of Passive is that it requires you to be smart, and for the most part low-tech, rather than rely on very expensive gizmos to be efficient.

The passive building philosophy has been around for ever and often requires nothing more than a brain and basic building materials that include dirt, stone, and cellulose.  When building a passive House chances are your most expensive device will be the heat exchanger (which does its best to transfer all heat energy in escaping air back into fresh air entering the home – usually accomplishing somewhere around 70-80% exchange).  After that the next most expensive gizmo might be your hot water heater.  Passive means you absorb solar energy directly from the sun rather than spending $30,000 for solar panels to do it for you.  This means you can’t build a stupid design and slap some expensive gear on it and call it good.  Instead the home has to actually be a smarter and healthier way to exist with and within nature — in other words, sustainable.  Yahoo!  No more LEED debacles.

Passive House may not catch on that fast for just that reason.  There is very little room for commercial greed and muggery.  Building passive also requires a level head for design and a certain kind of Dutch pragmatism.  There, I said it.  Americans just aren’t passive.  We hate the very idea, especially when we find out it used to be spelled, PassivHaus.  I mean,  what is that?  Dammit man.  Tear me out a house from the raw nature around me and beat back any damn thing that tries to encroach on my private castle.  There ain’t nothing passive about it, and if I want a nature retreat, I will buy a Hummer to get there (or a helicopter).  But ding dang, if more of us level-headed ones can start spreading the passive house philosophy sustainability in home building gets much more realistic.

For more practical info. on Passive House Certification and passive building philosophy you can check out Treehugger and the Passive House Institute US.

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.

Pre-fab was born to be cheap and easy.  It was meant for rednecks and common schlebs.  Along comes the “green” revolution, and the discovery is made that pre-fab is a kissing cousin to efficiency as well.  Hallaluia.  Twixt the two together, and it’s a match made in heaven.  This newest reboot of pre-fab should have become a doubly (production and energy costs) cheap-ass home for cost-conscious redneck and granola alike.

Instead the Frankenstein fabbers, ablaze with style and form, created factory pre-fabbed studios and villas.  With fancy, green materials and high-tech jobbers, glamourous pre-fabs were built in pods, cores, units and cells.  Some can be put up and taken down in a few days (before you spend the next few months “finishing” them).  I simply can’t understand the point behind a $300 a sq. ft. pre-fabbed house, and I’ve tried, honest. (Other than possible eliminating those nasty construction jobs that only immigrants want, at a time when it is most convenient to blame all the stinking immigrants for our woes.  Oh damn, I said it!)

I realize that we have grown fond of comfortable predictability in things like Star Bucks coffee and McDonald’s hamburgers.  But, ultimately, people want originality and individuality in a home.  Pre-fab and original, while not mutually exclusive, will never be playmates.  They have gotten over their differences in the past with the help of one thing, cheap-ass Americans that want to live on their own land and call their own shots.  Pre-fab futurists should look to these people to find their way.  What do penny pinching individualists want in tomorrow’s home?  What are they willing to give up to keep the life they want to live?

Make it efficient.  Make it smart.  Make it fly the finger in the face of the establishment.  But for God’s sake, most importantly, make it cheap.

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.

Renting is fine, except for the fact that it will continue to leave millions of people vulnerable to whatever tide of the economy comes next.  With steady rental payments and unsteady income and little equity or savings people will drown.  Somewhere in the storm we have forgotten that the people who are best set to survive are the ones that own a home outright.  They bought it 30 years ago for $50,000, paid $5000 down and no longer have a mortgage.  This was the idea back when we devised mortgages.  If your housing cost is only maintenance and utilities it becomes much easier to stay in your home.

How the hell does anyone do this today?  If you pay $300,000 for your home with only a few thousand down, then make payments for a few years with almost nothing going towards your principle, just to have the economy tank, where do you end up?  In the crapper with millions of other Americans right now.  In Utah the median family income in 2006 was $58,000.  Thirty percent of this is $17,400.  Monthly this is $1450.  So if you are average and live in Utah you need to spend less than $1450 a month on your housing to be considered on safe footing, to be living “affordably.”  This means that you need to take out a loan for no more than $200,000.  There are two homes in my neighborhood for less than this right now, both in need of considerable improvement.  The kicker is that my neighborhood would not be considered fancy at all, but it is accessible.

It is too hard for people to find stability in the very basic need of housing in a situation like this.  The way we do it needs to change.  Housing needs to be less of an investment market and more of a building block for our communities and our society.  Property needs to be less of speculative venture and more of a grounding and connection to our roles as steward and neighbor.  I am not sure what sort of policy, discovery or technology will get us there, but I hope we can figure it out soon.

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.

Hemp can provide an excellent start when it comes to building with more natural and less processed/refined materials.  Hemp is a natural and obvious contender for products such as siding, fiberboard, carpet, shingles, paint, curtains and as a component in cemeotious materials.  Think about theses products.  This is huge in the building world.  These are the sacred cows.  If we could use hemp to make concrete, roofing, walls, and flooring…

Well, the truth is that we can.  Hempcrete is already being used in multiple applications by mixing hemp, lime, sand, plaster, and cement.  I realize you still must use a certain amount of portland cement, but in much less quantities.  All of the above listed building materials are being made from hemp as we speak.  If only we could freakin’ grow the stuff on location or at least somewhere other than the occasional Native Reservation or Canada.

An acre of hemp can produce up to four times the amount of cellulose fiber pulp than an equal amount of trees.  That cellulose is the building block of modern construction.  If we could only start taking it from a more sustainable resource like hemp.

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.

I don’t normally consider myself a pessimist, certainly not a realist.  Normally I fully and heartily endorse optimistic dreamland.  It is a great place to walk the dog or grab a doughnut.  But when it comes to sustaining human life on earth we got some serious shiz to tend to.  And I am starting to fret that we just can’t make the changes soon enough.

So I was watching the ABC special together with a friend.  He felt that radical change was already occurring in the U.S. and certainly he is correct.  Obama is nothing if not a frothing madman of radical and visionary change.  But…  I don’t know.  Obama doesn’t run the nation alone, and I am not even convinced a bulk of his efforts at change are going to turn out to be sound ones.  I mean, is anyone else worried here?  How much money does the world have left to throw at this problem?  And is it going to be enough? And soon enough?

For example, Architecture 2030 states that 76% of U.S. electricity consumption is for building operation.  76%.  It would seem obvious that something would have to be done about such significant energy consumption for us to make any progress toward licking global warming by 2050.  So that means we have 40 years to do what?  Completely retool how we construct modern buildings, tear down and replace our entire infrastructure, and do so while economically in the crapper?  How many homes and factories and office buildings and commercial outlets can we tear down and replace in forty years?  What materials are we going to use to do so?  What energy will we use for the work?  And yet, we will have to get down and dirty now.  I am just not sure that we are up for it.  Even with the recession, life might just be too comfortable to give up all the unsustainable, electricity draining bloggers out there.

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.Yes, temperatures and sea levels are rising here on planet earth (taking into account that temperatures have leveled off some over the last couple decades, but you know, follow the overall trend).  Yes, most of us have come to agreement that humans and our affinity for burning petroleum has contributed to these trends.  Over the last few years most people seem to be admitting that we should even do something about it.

But here is where level heads must prevail.  Most of us are not in agreement as to what the human impact is and will be.  Most of us are not in agreement as to how much and how quickly our planet will heat and what effects that temperature increase will have.  And get this, most of us are continuing to move forward under the assumption that everyone else either sees it our way or is a nonconsequential moron.  This sort of flippant name calling is the backbone of our national conversation these days and the biggest reason I randomly crap myself while wondering around the park considering life.

I thought Earth 2100 was interesting and imaginative.  It should cause many regular Joes to stop and think a little.  On the other hand I did think that their method was a bit heavy handed and overdramatic.  The last thing we need is for several of those regular Joes to take the whole thing seriously just to decide that when the dramatic predictions fall short that global warming was just a hoax after all.  Maybe Earth2100’s predictions are on the nose.  Maybe not.  Some people still need to be scared while others need to be encouraged, challenged or comforted.  A few people on either extreme will need to be ignored, it is true.

The main truth in all of this is that our petro-industrial revolution has run its course and we need to come up with another.  Intelligent people that disagree as to what this revolution should be and how we should come about it will need to work together (with one voice or another taking the lead).  This fact, above all, is what keeps me awake at night.

Third, hemp could easily replace our lust for cotton textiles.  Cotton uses 50% of the U.S.’s pesticides, damages the soil, uses over twice as much water to grow and produces less than half the crop that an equivalent acre of hemp will produce.  Fourth, by being burned or converted to ethanol, alcohol, etc. hemp could help significantly lower carbon emissions, as well as providing a carbon sink as a planted crop.  Widespread use of hemp could also save forests and other endangered carbon sinks.

Fifthly, hemp has great value as a source of nutrition for humans and an even greater potential as feed for animals.  Lastly, hemp could have a major impact in our growing construction industry by replacing or supplementing everything from fiberboard to concrete.  Each of these uses could easily be enough to make hemp a valuable crop.  Combined they make it impossible to ignore, yet ignore we do.  For the next several days I will highlight each of these glorious possibilities one at a time.

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.

Hemp has long been a product that was known to be useful for fuel, food, feed, textiles, croplands, oil, building materials and many other goods.  It has also been long known to contain such low levels of THC as to be completely inane and harmless when it comes to psychotropics.  But, it’s growth and manufacturing have been banned in the U.S. for over 70 years for several lousy reasons.  First, individuals wanted to continue to get wealthy from timber production and use.  Second, the use of petroleum for almost everything under the sun was just taking root (and people wanted to make money off of this).  Third, Mexicans and blacks were taking good jobs from white people (these minorities were the main users and purveyors of marijuana at the time).

Anyway, you get the picture.  Here we are current day still trying to get back our right to grow and use one of natures miracle products, and despite the huge roil surrounding “green” and sustainable innovation we are still flushing money down the corn ethanol toilet.  What the hell?  We’ve learned nothing.  Again the public is being ignorantly bullied about by powerful interest groups while we light an ecological match to our country’s farmland.  Meanwhile, places like China, Romania, Germany and Canada are greatly outstripping us to the finish for growing, refining and profiting from hemp.

It is not like hemp is some newfangled product or flaccid pipe dream.  It was a miracle crop hundreds of years ago and has remained one.  God bless America, but we just don’t care.