"Every new $900,000 summer house in the north woods of Michigan or on the shore of Long Island has so many pipe railings, ramps, hob-tread metal spiral stairways, sheets of industrial plate glass, banks of tungsten- halogen lamps, and white cylindrical shapes, it looks like an insecticide refinery. I once saw the owners of such a place driven to the edge of sensory deprivation by the whiteness & lightness & leanness & cleanness & bareness & spareness of it all. They became desperate for an antidote, such as coziness & color. They tried to bury the obligatory white sofas under Thai-silk throw pillows of every rebellious, iridescent shade of magenta, pink, and tropical green imaginable. But the architect returned, as he always does, like the conscience of a Calvinist, and he lectured them and hectored them and chucked the shimmering little sweet things out."
-Tom Wolfe,
From Bauhaus to Our House. Farrar Straus Giroux, New York,1981, pp 3-5."
-Tom Wolfe,
From Bauhaus to Our House. Farrar Straus Giroux, New York,1981, pp 3-5."
A Few Sustainable Architecture Practitioners
In The Ten Books of Architecture, written in the First Century BC, the Roman master builder Vitruvius enumerated some fundamentals of his trade. Along with order, symmetry and stylistic perfection, he suggested, under the heading "economy", some sustainable building practices:
Berkebile's curiosity about materials grew from a deadly structural collapse in one of his firm's buildings. Although the disaster was caused by a construction mistake, Berkebile remembers wondering after a grisly night with the rescue teams pulling victims from the wreckage, "Did I kill these people?" The trauma triggered a more global question: "What is the real impact of what we design?" His search for answers continues in a transformed architectural practice.
Architects like Berkebile have begun "resource mapping" to avoid false economies and inefficiencies. Examining the future site of a building in Bozeman, Montana, Berkebile's firm has identified waste products from mining, timber and agricultural production which can be used in the building. As many as 15 local resources, including mine tailings and fly ash, may end up incorporated in building materials used in the structure.
"Getting to know the materials of your region is a tremendous adventure," says Pliny Fisk III, of Austin, Texas. He began his Center for Maximum Building Potential (MaxPot) twenty years ago in a professional endeavor which defies labeling. Though he has degrees from the University of Pennsylvania in Architecture and Landscape Architecture, he says "I wouldn't get a(n architect's) license for anything. You get pigeonholed... If I had to practice conventional architecture I would have a total fit. I have to get outside and see if this stuff works."
"Outside" is MaxPot's own materials research and development laboratory where, for example, kalichi (a high calcium soil covering twelve to 14% of the Earth's surface) is being considered as an alternative to portland cement in building products like concrete. Fisk says 10% of the CO2 pollution in the atmosphere is from portland cement production.
MaxPot is currently under contract with the Environmental Protection Agency to define sustainable building. MaxPot also created Austin's Green Builder Program, which helps consumers evaluate new homes according to five environmental criteria - water use, energy use, solid waste, liquid waste, materials. Fisk joined Robert Berkebile and others to develop the massive Environmental Resource Guide produced by the Berkebile's American Institute of Architects' Committee on the Environment.
Consistent with his faith in a metabolic model for the physical environment, Fisk's language is alive with biological and behavioral allusions. He says housing is "at a peak of immaturity." Noting that half of the housing stock in this country has been rebuilt since 1950, he suggests the need to make houses more adaptable, more enduring, less of a resource drain. He talks about "dysfunctional" landscape. "The idea of a landscape that absorbs your waste is weird. A home should be able to metabolize its waste."
Sim Van der Ryn wrote extensively on this topic. In the frontpiece of his ironically titled 1978 book The Toilet Papers, which invokes Lao Tze, The Bible and Catch 22 in questioning modern plumbing codes and practices and suggesting alternatives (composting and irrigation) he says this: "The idea of waste, of something unusable, reveals an incomplete understanding of how things work... Perhaps other cultures know better than we, for they have no concept or, no word for, waste."
As California's State Architect under Governor Jerry Brown, Van der Ryn pioneered energy efficient design in state buildings. He founded the Farrallones Institute as a hands on appropriate technology laboratory. Practicing architecture today in Northern California, his office recently designed a building for sustainable products purveyor Real Goods. The project employs non toxic and recycled materials. It is to be powered by photovoltaic panels and illuminated naturally with the aid of a contoured, reflective roof supported partially by walls of straw.
Of all earth-friendly building materials, the most ubiquitous is dirt, to be found almost everywhere. For that matter, it covers the Moon, which is why Iranian-born architect Nader Khalili proposed Moon soil to NASA as the basic material for a planned lunar station. The method consists of ordinary sandbags filled with local dirt, and stabilized using barbed wire.
In the 1970's Khalili was a successful architect of concrete and steel high rises and parking structures. He works and lives now in the California desert town of Hesperia, pursuing what he calls his "quest." But he is not tilting at windmills. His earth building method is currently undergoing testing for approval by the International Conference of Building Officials. According to Khalili, 70% of the homes in the world are made of dirt, often the only material in substantial supply. Codification of his method will bring to such homes a measure of security against earthquake and flood.
Individual builders, landscape architects and architectural firms, feng shui experts and baubiologists collaborate worldwide on the creation of sustainable buildings. Major corporations sponsor environmental research and development. Business now eagerly brings products to market labeled "environmental" - compressed straw panel systems, wood conserving engineered lumber and metal studs, "fuzzy photon" daylight collectors and photovoltaic cells.
Among the professional practitioners there is an unmistakable enthusiasm and optimism. There is also, mingled with their shared sense of purpose, mission, "quest," the feeling of a patient search. Robert Berkebile says of his sustainable practice: "Here we are a decade later with more questions than answers." Pliny Fisk III sees himself as "just trying to respond, in a world of chaos, to make sense of things."
"The more you go with it," says Nader Khalili of his own work, " the more you see how much you don't know. The earth, especially, is very humbling."
... it is not everywhere that there is plenty of pitsand, rubble, fir, clear fir, since they are produced in different places and to assemble them is difficult and costly. Where there is no pitsand, we must use the kinds washed up by rivers or by the sea; the lack of fir and clear fir may be evaded by using cypress, poplar elm, or pine...About ten years ago Kansas City architect Robert Berkebile, operating on the sensible principles laid down by his Roman predecessor, specified marble to cover the outside of a large building. "Durable, beautiful, low maintenance, local," he thought - except that after being quarried in neighboring Minnesota, Berkebile learned, the marble blocks were then transported by truck and train to the Gulf of Mexico, where they were loaded onto a boat bound for Italy, to be cut and polished and only then returned via the same circuitous route to the job site.
Berkebile's curiosity about materials grew from a deadly structural collapse in one of his firm's buildings. Although the disaster was caused by a construction mistake, Berkebile remembers wondering after a grisly night with the rescue teams pulling victims from the wreckage, "Did I kill these people?" The trauma triggered a more global question: "What is the real impact of what we design?" His search for answers continues in a transformed architectural practice.
Architects like Berkebile have begun "resource mapping" to avoid false economies and inefficiencies. Examining the future site of a building in Bozeman, Montana, Berkebile's firm has identified waste products from mining, timber and agricultural production which can be used in the building. As many as 15 local resources, including mine tailings and fly ash, may end up incorporated in building materials used in the structure.
"Getting to know the materials of your region is a tremendous adventure," says Pliny Fisk III, of Austin, Texas. He began his Center for Maximum Building Potential (MaxPot) twenty years ago in a professional endeavor which defies labeling. Though he has degrees from the University of Pennsylvania in Architecture and Landscape Architecture, he says "I wouldn't get a(n architect's) license for anything. You get pigeonholed... If I had to practice conventional architecture I would have a total fit. I have to get outside and see if this stuff works."
"Outside" is MaxPot's own materials research and development laboratory where, for example, kalichi (a high calcium soil covering twelve to 14% of the Earth's surface) is being considered as an alternative to portland cement in building products like concrete. Fisk says 10% of the CO2 pollution in the atmosphere is from portland cement production.
MaxPot is currently under contract with the Environmental Protection Agency to define sustainable building. MaxPot also created Austin's Green Builder Program, which helps consumers evaluate new homes according to five environmental criteria - water use, energy use, solid waste, liquid waste, materials. Fisk joined Robert Berkebile and others to develop the massive Environmental Resource Guide produced by the Berkebile's American Institute of Architects' Committee on the Environment.
Consistent with his faith in a metabolic model for the physical environment, Fisk's language is alive with biological and behavioral allusions. He says housing is "at a peak of immaturity." Noting that half of the housing stock in this country has been rebuilt since 1950, he suggests the need to make houses more adaptable, more enduring, less of a resource drain. He talks about "dysfunctional" landscape. "The idea of a landscape that absorbs your waste is weird. A home should be able to metabolize its waste."
Sim Van der Ryn wrote extensively on this topic. In the frontpiece of his ironically titled 1978 book The Toilet Papers, which invokes Lao Tze, The Bible and Catch 22 in questioning modern plumbing codes and practices and suggesting alternatives (composting and irrigation) he says this: "The idea of waste, of something unusable, reveals an incomplete understanding of how things work... Perhaps other cultures know better than we, for they have no concept or, no word for, waste."
As California's State Architect under Governor Jerry Brown, Van der Ryn pioneered energy efficient design in state buildings. He founded the Farrallones Institute as a hands on appropriate technology laboratory. Practicing architecture today in Northern California, his office recently designed a building for sustainable products purveyor Real Goods. The project employs non toxic and recycled materials. It is to be powered by photovoltaic panels and illuminated naturally with the aid of a contoured, reflective roof supported partially by walls of straw.
Of all earth-friendly building materials, the most ubiquitous is dirt, to be found almost everywhere. For that matter, it covers the Moon, which is why Iranian-born architect Nader Khalili proposed Moon soil to NASA as the basic material for a planned lunar station. The method consists of ordinary sandbags filled with local dirt, and stabilized using barbed wire.
In the 1970's Khalili was a successful architect of concrete and steel high rises and parking structures. He works and lives now in the California desert town of Hesperia, pursuing what he calls his "quest." But he is not tilting at windmills. His earth building method is currently undergoing testing for approval by the International Conference of Building Officials. According to Khalili, 70% of the homes in the world are made of dirt, often the only material in substantial supply. Codification of his method will bring to such homes a measure of security against earthquake and flood.
Individual builders, landscape architects and architectural firms, feng shui experts and baubiologists collaborate worldwide on the creation of sustainable buildings. Major corporations sponsor environmental research and development. Business now eagerly brings products to market labeled "environmental" - compressed straw panel systems, wood conserving engineered lumber and metal studs, "fuzzy photon" daylight collectors and photovoltaic cells.
Among the professional practitioners there is an unmistakable enthusiasm and optimism. There is also, mingled with their shared sense of purpose, mission, "quest," the feeling of a patient search. Robert Berkebile says of his sustainable practice: "Here we are a decade later with more questions than answers." Pliny Fisk III sees himself as "just trying to respond, in a world of chaos, to make sense of things."
"The more you go with it," says Nader Khalili of his own work, " the more you see how much you don't know. The earth, especially, is very humbling."