I’ve spent a lot of time recently thinking about what works and what doesn’t work. Some of this thinking has been spurred by a host of mechanical maladies experienced on our recent Habitat for Humanity project. Essentially every mechanical device in the house (except the fridge) has malfunctioned during the [...]]]> October 18, 2010

Figuring Out What Works

I’ve spent a lot of time recently thinking about what works and what doesn’t work. Some of this thinking has been spurred by a host of mechanical maladies experienced on our recent Habitat for Humanity project. Essentially every mechanical device in the house (except the fridge) has malfunctioned during the commissioning of this home, providing plenty of frustration for everybody involved. The HRV, boiler and oven have all experienced problems.

This would be frustrating on any build, but I find it particularly frustrating when the building is intended to showcase green technology. It seems that when things go wrong with conventional systems, we tend to put the blame on particular circumstances (improper installation, faulty devices, etc.), but when things go wrong with “new” technologies we’re much faster to blame the technology itself. I can see that happening with this project, as those involved are quick to see these problems as indicative of adopting green strategies rather than as problems with a specific installation/equipment.

It’s not just something that is happening on this project. We constantly accept flaws that occur with (and are even inherent with) technologies we are familiar with. Nobody would say that automobiles “don’t work” even though they break down constantly and require lots of maintenance to keep them running. Nobody would say that flush toilets “don’t work” even though we’ve all had them back up on us. We don’t despair over grid power when it inevitably goes down from time to time. Etc. The examples are nearly as many as the technologies we use daily. But if something new should have a hiccup on that scale, it’s almost certain that we’ll wring our hands and say “it just doesn’t work.”

We have to remember that we are choosing these new technologies for a vitally important reason: lessening our devastating impact on the environment. If we see this as the goal of our chosen technology, the occasional disruptions or problems seem small in comparison. Sticking with our existing wasteful technologies hurts the planet, our children and our collective future. Any technology we employ will present us with problems. I’d rather choose those that make a serious difference to the environment while having the same or similar quantity of “micro-flaws” as the existing technology.

The most frustrating part of the problems we’ve been experiencing with the mechanical systems at the Habitat house is that they are with the most “mainstream” of the technologies we’ve chosen to use in that building. The more “radical” choices (prefab bale walls, straw/clay walls, earthen plasters, etc.) have actually been working out very well. The mechanical systems are not that radical at all; they are choices made from the green edge of the mainstream, coming from major manufacturers with reliable histories.

But chances are good that the whole project will be tarnished by these initial problems, painted with the brush that says “See, none of that sustainable stuff really works.”

What to do about this? Well, all I can say is that I hope we all do our homework when making building choices. Don’t let a comment like “I’ve heard that [insert technology here] doesn’t work” deter you from doing proper research. Find out what does and doesn’t work based on more than just hearsay or a single example. And find out what the wider implications of your choices will be. Is it risky to adopt new technologies? Often, it’s no riskier than using existing ones, it’s just that we know the risks of the existing ones and we need to find out the risks of the new ones. One thing for certain is that every technology comes with risks. And if a greener technology helps avoid the larger, environmental risks, I’d encourage you to make that a guiding principle in your choice.

March 27, 2010

Who Are Our Builders?

When I went to high school in 1979, I had excitedly signed up for wood shop, auto shop and metal shop classes, in addition to the required english, math and science. I got my timetable on the first day of classes, and there they all were, my shop classes. I couldn’t wait.

But stapled to my timetable was an appointment slip to see the guidance councillor. The appointment fell during my first shop class. Damn. Oddly, nobody else in my homeroom had such an appointment slip.

When I showed up at the guidance office, the councillor asked me “what I wanted to be” (what kind of question is that? I have always been!). I told him I wasn’t sure yet. After a few moments of hemming and hawing about preparing for the future, he came right out and told me his concern: Students with high academic marks, like me, did not focus on technical courses in high school. By loading my schedule with shop classes, I’d be “limiting my options in the future.” It was much more appropriate that I take a full load of academic courses, the kind that would send me on my way to university.

The not-so-subtle message was this: Smart kids don’t go into the trades.

Being too young to adequately defend my own interests, I allowed him to change my schedule. I took the academic courses, and then went to university, like a good little “smart” kid.

After university I did a variety of the types of jobs for which my university degree prepared me. I did some journalism, some freelance writing, some graphic design, some public relations work. The pay wasn’t great, and the work none too engaging.

Then, my partner and I decided to build a house for ourselves and our young daughter. The plan was to make a low-cost, energy-efficient home that would allow us to work less just to cover our living expenses. What ended up happening was that my passion for hands-on, creative and constructive work was re-ignited. I’ve done no other kind of work in the 15 years since.

I’m lucky to have rediscovered meaningful, engaging hands-on work. But the fact that I was actively steered away from that kind of work when I was young is indicative of a kind of “class-ism” that has robbed this country of a group of workers who could have been addressing some of the major concerns of our time in an active way for decades. And we’re still not getting the message: To use one’s hands to make a living is no insult to one’s intelligence, nor is it a life sentence to impoverishment.

Among the tradespeople with whom I now make my living I have met all of my role models: Smart, engaged, creative, socially-aware, kind and generous individuals whose technical and manual skills are remarkable. These people should be role models to more than just me. They are, collectively, contributing to the pool of knowledge that will see our culture through the rough environmental times ahead. They have figured out and continue to refine (and invent) ways for us to generate and conserve energy, build sustainable homes and lead low-impact lives. This is the best work to which any of us can aspire!

Imagine if more of those people were actively engaged in an appropriate kind of learning from a much earlier age.

I have a very clear memory of being an assistant in my daughter’s primary school classroom and being assigned to help a boy who was “having a hard time” in class. We worked on his math for a little while, but then we both decided that moving to the blocks and mechano set would be more fun. At the math table, he was hopeless. Defeated, frustrated and already losing his self-esteem at such a young age. Once we started building though, he was a different kid. His hands moved quickly and assuredly, and he could make things that were quite remarkable. As we built, we talked. He could already drive a tractor at home, and he lit up to talk about it. It was painfully clear that this boy, who is only one among many, needed an education that would value his considerable skills. Instead, he continued to be told, directly and indirectly, that he was dumb and that his prospects were limited.

Had he been properly guided, he could have entered the trades as a highly skilled, thoughtful and inventive tradesman. I don’t know where he is now, but even if he made it through a high school trades program its likely that he was told, directly and indirectly, that he was there because he was dumb. He would be trained to be a robot, a low-level assembler or fixer of other people’s creations. The social problems caused by 12 years of frustration and blows to his self-esteem may well have undermined even this low-level education.

What we need, now more than ever, are tradespeople whose talents are spotted at a young age, valued and encouraged. Yes, we need “book learning.” But equally (at least) we need practical learning. We need people who understand the way things work, who can make things and fix things and invent things. And we need these people to know that the role they play in our society is far from marginal; it is, in fact, completely central.

Even the “book learners” need exposure to this kind of practical learning. I’ve worked with a lot of very well trained architects and engineers whose designs (and therefore their careers) would be significantly improved by at least some exposure to the actual shaping, attaching and building of things.

As a person with a liberal arts undergraduate degree, I ended up taking an awful lot of menial, low-paid white collar work. As a tradesperson, I have been successful, in demand and well paid for what I do.

My own 20 year detour away from hands-on work certainly had its value. But I can’t help but imagine where I’d be in my career now if my interest in making things had been taken seriously and fostered. And I want to do more than imagine what would happen if young students right now (especially girls) were given the respect and honour of being educated in this way. I want to bring those students into my Sustainable Building program, I want to hire those people. Most of all, I want to live in a world that is formulated, shaped and built by those people.

February 15, 2010

Doing New Things, Legally

Every year, as I undergo the planning process for a new building project, I think carefully about materials and methods I’ve used on past projects and consider how I’d like to do things differently this time around.

I do this because I always believe that I can make a better building than I did last time. There are places where small improvements in technique can be made, and there are places where a whole new material or methodology seems to make sense.

This is the essence of building, or of making anything at all. If you’re a poet, painter, automobile designer, gardener… no matter the task at hand, the joy (and value) in any kind of work comes from improving on the last outing, growing your knowledge and, hopefully, satisfying yourself and your client with the effort.

In most fields, this kind of improvement is widely encouraged and promoted. Stasis is not a desirable state in any field of human endeavour. However, in a field as rife with regulation as building, stasis is exactly what is being encouraged and promoted.

So, here I am in the midst of a new design and instead of eagerly embracing changes and improvements, I’m worrying about what kinds of hassles and barriers I’m going to run into this time. How many regulations am I going to be contravening, and whose permission am I going to have to obtain to move forward?

I fully understand the need to have regulations in the building industry. I’m not naive enough (not anymore!) to argue against building codes. But I’m certainly in the mood to argue for much, much more effective means of encouraging innovation within the building code regime.

Imagine, as an example, the pharmaceutical industry writing a code book that has the formula for every drug made to date and telling the industry that that’s pretty much it. Follow the recipes in the book and that will be the pharmaceutical industry from now on. It’s unimaginable. Pharmaceuticals – along with every other industry on the planet – thrives and prospers on innovation and change. It’s such an important part of the industry that the rules are almost entirely focused on how to handle innovation and not so much on how to continuously implement the innovation once it’s been made and come to market.

For most of human history, the building industry has operated on the same principle. We did not move from cave dwellings to skyscrapers based on a to-the-letter interpretation of a building code. Building codes have always been reactive documents, history texts that record the way in which things have been done with the fewest number of recorded problems. And it’s very difficult to make things happen outside that historical record now.

Like the pharmaceutical industry, preventing harm to people is the reason for strict building codes. Unlike the pharmaceutical industry, direct harm (of the kind with which the building code is obsessed) is fairly rare. In fact, a web hunt for statistics on injuries and deaths caused by building failures in Canada takes a long time to come up with any results. Most of what I could find were failures that occurred in buildings that complied with a code when constructed but failed due to either extreme wear (sometimes caused by incorrect assumptions in the codes), extreme weather or, most commonly, poor workmanship.

When a builder wishes to innovate, it is not difficult to provide a reasonable assurance against extreme building failure, the kind likely to cause bodily harm. Especially at the residential level, keeping a roof overhead and floors and walls that stay in place is not hard to do, even with new kinds of materials and methods. Most building innovations are not radical; a truly “new” material is rare, and commonly understood manners of assembling and fastening work the same way in new contexts. The first principles of building science are not difficult to apply to new assemblies to determine their suitability for an application.

The existing manner of innovating in the building industry is to create the new product or system and then perform a prescribed set of laboratory tests to the satisfaction of a code authority. But building materials do not truly get tested in the laboratory. They get tested in the much harsher laboratory of daily existence and use, and these tests can have very different results than lab tests. Even products tested under the current regime need improvements and changes made to them once they start existing in the real world. The truth is, buildings need to be built before we can determine their true properties, both for the better and for the worse.

The need to improve our buildings has never been more dramatic. And yet the ability to make improvements is more difficult than ever, as code officials worry more and more about lawsuits and code conformity.

The point has been made before: if wood were being introduced as a new building material today, it would be nearly impossible to pass it through the code regime. There are currently many materials being developed that are much more inherently sound than wood but which are facing high hurdles being put into use.

Our new “objective based” building codes here in Ontario promised to make this situation less daunting for new materials. In practice, however, it has not done so. The “proofs” being required by building departments to accept submissions under the objective codes are basically the same as the lab testing required under the previous code.

At the same time, building codes have been very slow to recognize forms of harm other than structural and fire failure that buildings cause to occupants. From high levels of energy consumption, resource depletion and, most directly, poor indoor air quality, current code practices can cause a great deal of harm.

Since the “objective based code” has done little to make life easier for innovators, a new legal structure is obviously required. Building owners should be able to be willing participants in the “experiment” of using new materials and techniques. A structurally sound building made with a material demonstrating properties with positive impacts on resource use, energy use and occupant health and no demonstrably negative properties should be able to be built by an owner who can legally recognize the risks being taken and absolve the municipal authorities of responsibility for unforeseen problems. This does not seem out of the question legally (people can choose to participate in experimental drug and surgery programs with much higher risks) and would free up the marketplace to innovative owners and builders to find, develop and refine the solutions that will help the entire building industry face the challenges of dramatically reducing building impacts on the environment.

The objective based codes could simply include the language for a waiver for owners and builders to complete. What would then follow would be a discussion between code authorities and owners and builders about the potential risks of the new assembly, perhaps the creation and implementation of in-situ testing to answer points of uncertainty, and most helpfully, the creation of documentation for the new assembly that include comments from the builder and the building inspector regarding the construction and suggestions for improvements. This would bring code officials into the realm of assisting with innovation, a team approach that could only have positive ramifications for the improvement of our buildings.

January 24, 2010

Will People Really Change?

It’s pretty easy to despair about the amount of inaction on environmental matters at the government level. The collapsed talks in Copenhagen are only the latest example, and it’s tempting to assume that the people electing those governments are equally averse to change.

But I don’t think that’s true. I think that people change and adapt rather quickly and usually with a minimum of grumbling when change is either foisted on them or, better yet, when they feel pressured to change by their peers.

On my last post, I talked about composting toilets. Of course, the big hurdle with composting toilets is getting people to actually turn around and deal with their own waste. Most of us would rather not do that.

But rather not and will not are very different. A case in point (which is quite relevant to the subject at hand) is the stoop-and-scoop etiquette that is completely widespread in this country. Just last week, I watched a very well dressed, older woman (fur coat, leather boots, makeup… none of the trappings I’d associate with a hard-core environmentalist) stop on the sidewalk, bend over and use a plastic bag over her hand to pick up her dog’s crap. She then carried that little baggie for as far as I could watch her walk, at least a few blocks and possibly more.

Now, if she can be trained to physically handle her dog’s fresh and warm feces, surely she can be trained to handle a well designed compost tray from a composting toilet once a month or so. So how did we do it? How did we train her (and millions of otherwise normal, non-feces handling citizens) to willingly wrap their mitts around a warm, stinking bag of dog doo?

Part of the training came from government edicts. Most towns and cities enacted stoop-and-scoop by-laws at some point in the last 20 years. Fines were created, public awareness campaigns run… the usual tools of public persuasion. More important, I think, was peer pressure. Nobody likes having somebody else’s dog do its business on the lawn, mainly because we don’t like stepping in it. Before the by-laws, we might have complained to a dog’s owner, or even attempted to compel them to pick up. Once we had the by-law behind us, it was even easier to vocalize our discontent. In fact, our discontent was assumed, and therein lay its power.

I doubt very much that it’s a fear of arrest and fine that makes most dog owners pick up after their pets. It’s the discomfort of knowing that they are being watched, and if they are not living up to their civic responsibility, they will be silently or overtly judged (it doesn’t matter much which one).

Many of us know that we are directly polluting our own waters when we flush our feces down the toilet. It might not be quite a visceral as stepping in dog doo, but as somebody living next to a river in a city, some days it’s not that far off. But what we haven’t started to do is compel our leaders to legislate against it and, more importantly, to apply social pressure on others to recognize the mess they are making. In the same contemptuous way we now treat those whose dogs are not followed with plastic baggies, we need to let our culture-mates know that shitting in our drinking water is yucky. We need to be willing to say to others, “Really, you still do that?”

I’ve watched people start using reusable shopping bags in the space of a year. Peer pressure did that. Nobody wanted to stand at the check out line and do the equivalent of saying, “I don’t give a darn, give me the disposable plastic.” I think we can affect plenty of change on that level. We have to let people know what the problem is, and then let them know that their participation in the problem is no longer okay with everybody else.

“Curb your pet” was on posters, television commercial, even t-shirts when the campaign started. It became part of the public discourse, and it became socially unacceptable to stop paying attention to the issue. Nobody wanted to pick up dog shit, but we all felt obliged. Now, it’s normal.

“Don’t foul my water” could be equally ubiquitous, and equally successful. And so could many other environmental changes.

January 17, 2010

That Stuff Doesn’t Really Work…

Proponents of sustainable building are constantly asked, Does that really work? Or, as is often the case, are told bluntly, That [insert name of technology] doesn’t really work. At which point, the earnest proponent launches into a diatribe that indisputably proves that the technology or material in question certainly does work.

But all of us, earnest proponents and skeptics alike, need to think carefully about what we mean when we say something does or does not work. And first of all, we all need to acknowledge that nothing works perfectly. There is not a material or system we use (not just in building, but in every aspect of our lives) that does not present us with at least one, and usually several, inherent flaws.

My favourite illustration of this has to do with composting toilets. I’ve been told countless times that composting toilets just don’t work. So, our mainstream and accepted manner of dealing with human waste is the flush toilet and the septic/municipal waste treatment system. If you were to take a poll and ask people if they’ve had at least one episode in their lives in which a flush toilet has backed up and caused an obscene mess they must deal with, my guess is that an awfully high percentage (should I be as bold as to claim it might even be 100%?) would say yes.

So does the flush toilet work? Of course it works. All of us use one on a daily basis. Do they fail on occasion. Yup, sure do. Are there cheap models that don’t work as well as expensive ones? Yup again. And some are more efficient than others.

Hey, you could say the same thing about composting toilets! Lots of people use them, and they work well most of the time for most people. For others, they fail (or are used improperly and then fail). And there are brands that work better than others. Just like with flush toilets.

So, let’s accept the fact that we willingly accept flaws in every system we use. We recognize that the system serves a function that we’d like to have served, and we adapt to the requirements and quirks of that system. From time to time, we’ll even give up a system entirely if something markedly better comes along. But we surround ourselves with flawed systems, so pointing out that a new technology or system has a flaw or two is no basis on which to dismiss it.

If we are comparing two systems (say flush toilets and composting toilets), we can compare their flaws. In this case, both of them require knowledgeable use, proper cleaning and maintenance and an understanding that from time to time we’ll have to deal with some unpleasant surprises.

Now, what sustainable building asks us to do is to consider two (or more) options that have relatively similar flaws that accompany their relative strengths and advantages and then to go beyond those direct comparisons in a more broad-based analysis. So we are not going to choose flush toilets over composting toilets (or vise versa) because they have some operational differences. We are going to look at the overall impacts the two carry with them as systems.

In this case, the flush toilet accepts human waste and uses a significant volume of clean water to move that waste down a very elaborate and expensive sewer network and deliver it to a waste treatment system of some sort. Most of these waste treatment systems are costly and not terribly effective at then removing the environmentally dangerous components of that waste. So, we spend a lot of personal and public money and contaminate a lot of fresh water to do a fairly lousy job of dealing with our own human waste.

The composting toilet keeps our waste on-site. Usually, no water is used (though some systems use tiny amounts of water). Waste is mixed with organic matter (sawdust, wood shavings, straw, peat) and encouraged to break down and compost. At some point, the waste in the toilet unit (from simple buckets to elaborate, heated, stirred chambers) needs to be moved to another compost pile to complete its breakdown into usable compost. At this level of comparison, the composting toilet offers us vastly superior characteristics and performance compared to the flush toilet.

I can hear the naysayers already… What are we going to do if every household starts composting? We can’t just dump all that STUFF into the backyard! Don’t worry, I agree with you naysayers! But in the same way that humans figured out what to do with flushed toilet waste (don’t kid yourself into believing that municipal sewage systems were built before people started using flush toilets! All public works are reactive.) we will similarly figure out what to do with the contents of composting toilets when we all start using them. The material is no more difficult to handle than household compost, and can be collected on a micro and/or macro level and turned into useful compost with much less contamination of ground water and ecosystems than the current system.

The toilet/composting toilet scenario is only one example. You can take the same perspective on every human system (I just happen to like thinking about buildings). Rather than compare relatively minor pluses and minuses, compare the overall, system-wide advantages and disadvantages and choose the ones that are healthiest for ourselves and the planet. And don’t worry, we’ll get used to the little changes.

January 7, 2010

Priorities!

I’ve just come back from a meeting with some local municipal officials, regarding a building project I’m considering doing in the city.

The details of the project aren’t that important… suffice to say it involves the renovation of a large, abandoned building complex into a mix of residential uses and community access space.

In considering the project, my partners and I spent most of our time thinking about how best to use the existing spaces and how best to bring new uses into the space. For us, this involved thinking about efficiency, beauty, light, access… a whole host of considerations that had us excited at the prospect.

We went into the city to propose a project that had the health of the building occupants and the health of the wider community at its heart. We went to propose a project that would remain true to the architectural spirit of the original buildings while adding what we felt were beautiful additions. Our proposal included some details about how we’d make the complex energy efficient and light on the planet. All the stuff that I think of as important when thinking about buildings.

The first concern raised by the city was… parking. We could have been proposing a pit of leaching toxins made from unpainted concrete blocks with spikes protruding from the doorways, but if we included enough parking spaces we’d be over the first formal hurdle.

Why aren’t health and beauty and function and context the major concerns of those who govern our public spaces? Why does making places for cars have to come first? As a designer, I tend to put people first. But I’m obviously at odds with officialdom on that point. “Putting Cars First” will be the new slogan for my design work.

I don’t know how to address this! I understand that we have cars and need places to put them. But how can we convince public officials to put this requirement into context so that projects impacting the public landscape must first address the things that people need, and then later on figure out the car thing?

We’ll go on pursuing this project, and try to keep our priorities straight as we do so. Hopefully we’ll be able to lovingly knock the heads of the officials involved with the satin-padded bat of humane design along the way!