New House Rules

I'm in Victoria, British Columbia, at the Canadian Home Builders' Association (CHBA) conference. I was the luncheon speaker yesterday, in a session sponsored by the Canadian Wood Council (CWC). My presentation and message were warmly received, but perhaps only because our country was properly humbled with the Olympic hockey loss. After I acknowledged their hockey superiority, everything else I had to say sounded a little wiser, or at least worth politely listening to. I can't imagine any words from an American would have been appreciated had the hockey gold not been won by Canada.

It's not just in hockey that we've been humbled, however. The average Canadian home is better than the average American home*. The CHBA has consistently sought to raise standards, lead the research into better materials and methods, champion good innovations, and support education and training. They take pride in the quality of Canadian housing, and are dedicated to continually improving it. In the discussions and meetings I've had with the builders here—and in all the CHBA reports I've been reading—there's a consistent theme about raising the bar, whether the subject is energy, durability, safety, or construction efficiency. It's what trade associations are supposed to do and they do it with diligence.

The U.S. homebuilders' association (NAHB), on the other hand, gives lip service to standards improvements, but spend much of their leadership effort in lobbying against code or regulatory changes that would help to enact what they say they are for. Instead, they fight hard to minimize standard upgrades with the might of their "experts" and attorneys, using funds from their membership dues. If we were scoring a game of homebuilders' associations in a competition of doing what is right for their consumers and their country, this one is not nearly as close as the hockey game.

But that's not all. The Canadian banks didn't get caught up in the sub-prime lending disaster. They have constraints built into their regulations that prevent that kind of wild, free-for-all gaming of homebuyers. Since Canada is so affected by what goes on south of their border, their economy and market was deeply influenced by the bubble mania, but the builders I've been talking to didn't let it steer their business plans into risky territory.

On the other hand, the U.S. economic collapse in late 2008 did pull the Canadian homebuilding industry down with it. They were, and are, innocent victims. Still, the Canadians have been buffered from deeper problems by their stronger banks, by the lack of foreclosures, and by the wisdom of the building community to stick to building homes rather than chasing baseless profits.

Yesterday, in one of the conference reports, an economist said that they are already in a "post recession growth phase.**" Though the recovery is somewhat fragile (again, mostly due to U.S. problems), the mood at the conference has been upbeat and optimistic. Several of the builders I talked to said they actually haven't suffered much. Because they didn't get greedy on the upside, they didn't get unduly punished on the downside. Overall, the Canadian housing start numbers are currently down about 30% from the pre-recession peak.

That sounds pretty bad, but the recent housing news from the U.S. is much, much worse. According to the following chart, we're now at the very lowest point in the last 45 years.

We're down to a seasonally adjusted annual housing start rate of 309,000, which is a full 80% off our peak in 2005, 2006. And with this news, there is absolutely no discussion in the U.S. homebuilding industry about post-recession anything. In fact, on our side of the border, we are clearly in the throes of a homebuilding depression the likes of which not many living builders have seen before. So score this one for Canada too, but pity them as well because this wasn't a game of their choosing or creation.

It is time for us to recognize that in many things we are not the best. Really. We don't have the best hockey team. Our economic policies are not guided by the best policies or the most common sense. Our citizens can't expect to have the best homes that can be built for the money they spend. Our trade associations don't always strive for better because they tend to get caught up in striving for more.

It's time to show a little humility. We would do well to go north of our border and listen to a little Canadian wisdom.

*This is a subjective statement and I'll stick to it, but my caveat is that U.S. homebuilding right now is very slow, but the quality standard is pretty high for those that are being built. The low-skilled labor is off doing different low-skilled jobs, or they're unemployed. The quick-buck builders aren't building because there are no quick-bucks slipping from anyone's fingers. The good and dedicated builders and tradespeople are hanging on and continuing to do good work. So the quality of the average American home may be equal right now.
**Here's a stark difference that helps to explain the quicker turnaround: In the U.S., only 10% of homeowners have fully paid for their homes and 1 in 5 of those still paying are "underwater" on their mortgage, with many of those heading for foreclosure; in Canada 42% of homeowners have fully paid for their homes and the underwater problems aren't significant because home values weren't as seriously affected.

There's nothing more important in homebuilding than finding the solution to making sustainable, affordable, high performance homes the norm. If we're ever going to get there, we need to recognize the inherent tensions and conflicts, and then overcome those obstacles by developing new strategies in design, building and financing. To put it simply, if we really want a better result, we need to do a whole lot of things differently.

These following two slides are intended to illustrate how some of those differences might be put in perspective in order to implement new approaches. In the first one, you will see the Open Building concept, with the separation of the shell (Green) from the Infill (Blue).

The shell has its own separated layers that also must be taken into account, but the important consideration is that its performance requirements must be matched by longevity. Better buildings consume more energy and resources in their construction and therefore need a longer period to account for the embodied energy and resource use. I see no reason why 250 years shouldn't be a normal goal and expectation for the average home. Right here in New England, we have tens of thousands of examples that prove such a time period is reasonable.

The shell has public aspects that are often controlled by public or community agencies for multiple reasons. Its energy consumption has public and environmental impacts, the structural qualities are a matter of public safety (need we be reminded by the recent earthquakes in Haiti and Chile?), and even exterior style and material selections are often controlled to maintain local character.

The infill elements should be much more controllable by the occupants during the multi-generational life span of the building. Because of this, the most important short and long term consideration becomes two-fold:

1. That the infill layers should be executed in such a way to give the occupants the flexibility to fit the interior out to suit their needs and desires, both initially and through the decades and centuries.
2. That the initial infill needs don't unduly compromise the quality of the shell.

That leads to the second slide.

Here you will see some of the Miyasaka-san's ideas as referenced in my earlier post. Again, green is the shell; blue is the infill. The entire length of the bar is the whole cost of the completed building with all its amenities and finishes--that is, fully "tricked out."

The shell should have very little variation in quality and therefore its relative requirements and budget can't easily be compromised. These needs ought to be supported by tax incentives and a completely different financing program.
Parts of Europe have long had these kinds of incentive programs. My friend Stephen Kendall, who is a leading scholar and advocate of Open Building strategies, pointed out to me that Japan now has a "long building life" program to develop residential buildings with a 200 year standard. The new law was passed in the Upper House of the Japanese Parliament in October 2008. According to Minami Kazunobu of the Shibaura Institute of Technology, the incentive works this way:

"The client can apply for tax reductions and can receive subsidies by designing and building a house which complies with the new law and technical guidelines. Specific incentive measures have been implemented. 1) When a person has purchased or constructed and occupied long life-span superior housing from 2009 to 2011, the person is exempt from income tax up to a maximum value of 6 million yen over a ten year period according to the balance of the person’s housing loan at the end of each year. 2) When a person has purchased or constructed and occupied long life-span superior housing, the person receives an income tax exemption equal to 10% of the construction cost which exceeds that of ordinary housing (limited to 10 million yen). 3) The fixed asset tax on long life-span superior housing is reduced by 1/2 for two years longer than in the case of ordinary housing."

It can be done!

Along with a new approach to achieve the "long life" shell, we need a new approach to develop the systems and approaches for the ever-changing infill elements in order to accommodate the lives of the generations of inhabitants. It's on this side of the bar where budget flexibility and inhabitant participation are critical. The blue side should not require expensive specialists. Instead DIY systems, para-professional designers and installers, and new infill system companies should control the fast-churn side of the bar. I also envision an active second-hand market for infill elements, including modular partitions and other demountable elements.

If we're going to achieve any of this, disentanglement must be one of the New House Rules. The shell (theater) must be disentangled from the infill (stage); the structure must be disentangled from the space plan; the space plan must be disentangled from the mechanical systems; the mechanical systems must be disentangled from each other; and each of newly disentangled layer must have access and demountability in relation to its expected life span or need for change.

--21st century homes should be durable to the tune of multiple centuries.
--21st century homes should not chew up energy; they should require little and make what they need.
--21st century homes should adapt to the lives of their occupants, continuously.

Such homes are possible right now.

Our own Open-Built systems, strategies and philosophy are intended to lead the way and prove that the future of homebuilding can be brought to the present.

I used the Theater and Stage analogy at last year's Greenbuild conference in Phoenix. It struck a chord with reporter and author, Katherine Salant, who was in attendance. Subsequently, she wrote an article for the Washington Post about the principle of separating the shell from the infill and how it plays out in our work. We used the following graphic to illustrate the point:

The tie-in to high performance building is the simple notion that better structural and thermal performance requires more resources and more labor, which in turn begs for more longevity to justify the materials and time invested. Two other considerations are derived from that understanding: 1. The internal short-term elements (stage) need to be less intertwined and hard-connected to the long-term shell components (theater) and 2. infill needs to be subservient to the shell requirements in the original construction.

I grew up in Colorado Springs, which is fairly close to Cripple Creek, a 1890's mining town that was empty and crumbled into ruin by 1950. My dad used to take us up to the old ghost town where we'd explore the mine and building remains. It was there that I first saw poor construction standards. The miners' shacks and the storefront buildings were little more than wooden tents, made with skinny framing members and board sheathing. These buildings were all temporary props, with no intention whatsoever to make permanent structure. At least they knew it, and planned it that way.

In my later youth, I found myself working in tract developments outside of Colorado Springs. First, I worked in the ground, laying sewer and water pipes, but eventually I joined a framing crew and helped to build the homes. I soon realized that the construction standard wasn't a whole lot different than the dilapidated miners' shacks of Cripple Creek. In some ways, these buildings were worse than the miners' shacks because the truth wasn't known to the owners and their homes often had very serious inherent deficiencies and workmanship flaws. With the siding on the outside and the drywall nicely painted on the inside, no one knew. Well, actually there were a few who knew--the oft-repeated job-site saying when something wasn't right was, "You can't see it from my house."

Here's an important architectural vocabulary distinction: Buildings should have good facades, but they shouldn't BE facades. Illusions can happen on the Stage, but they shouldn't happen on the Theater structure itself. Our commitment to building high quality, high performance buildings requires us to first of all insure the integrity of the shell. Then the play can go on, decade after decade and generation after generation, celebrating both beauty that is static and life that is forever dynamic.

I've been having an email conversation with my friend and colleague, Kimihiro Miyasaka. Mr. Miyasaka is an architect based in Toyko. I've known him for many years and have been enriched by our positive relationship in numerous ways including cross-cultural learning and collaboration. Additionally, we have various interests and priorities in common, such as the importance of good design, a fondness for wood and timber construction, the celebration of craftsmanship, and the pressing need for both more sustainable homes and homebuilding processes.

Lately, Miyasaka and I have been lamenting our difficulty in communicating the importance of Open Building ideas to the future of homebuilding. We think the name itself is inadequate and somehow undersells its significance. Open Building theory attempts to explain the rather subtle fact that buildings are fundamentally different than their contents and are only temporally defined by their interior amenities and finishes. Yet these short term elements have somehow become entangled in our consciousness and in the buildings themselves. A house is at least two things, not one. All the pieces, parts, layers and equipment add up to a long-term feature on the landscape in which the dynamic churn of daily lives plays out.

Two things. They both matter, but at different time scales and for different reasons:

One is the house; the other personalizes it and makes it your home.

One is the theater; the other is the stage where your play is set.

One should resist change; the other should invite it.

One should be designed for permanence and sustainability; the other should be designed for multiple possibilities and flexibility.

One is your actual shelter; the other allows the shelter to function for your needs and desires.

One has public implications; the other is purely private.

One ought to be worthy of long financing; elements of the other should be paid for immediately or shortly.

The purpose of the theater is what happens on the stage, but it wouldn't be smart to compromise the quality of the theater for the needs of a play. The theater is in service to the stage, but the stage is therefore subservient to the theater.

This sort of paradoxical relationship is the nut of Open Building. It isn't sexy. It's even kind of boring. But understanding it and applying its truth to the process of design and construction could transform the industry and the very idea of home. At the very least, accepting its reality, and applying principles and priorities that arise from that understanding could make houses and homes much better places for less cost.

My childhood home, which we affectionately call "2320," is a good example of a typical older home living out its long-term potential and its short-term continual change. It’s now about 120 years old and is in its 4th incarnation. It started out as a single family home, became a rooming house, and then was broken into three different apartments. My father saved it from the wrecking ball and had it moved a mile up the street. With that, it was occupied by 13 rowdy Bensons and it stayed in our family for about 40 years. When we sold it, the buyer bought it with a sub-prime mortgage and never even made the first payment. Instead the “owner” stripped out the millwork,, sold it on EBay, and otherwise did his/her best to destroy the place. But a new buyer, like my dad, recognized its beauty and value and has completely restored it for her family and her at-home business. It’s hard to imagine why 2320 won’t be useful and no doubt made over a few more times in next 120 years.

The theater lives on; the stage is constantly changing. Unfortunately, 2320 wasn't built for the inevitable churn and change that's happened over the years. Each of the incarnations has been difficult and expensive, or has caused the inhabitants to adapt to the building in uncomfortable ways.

The challenge Miyasaka and I have been noodling about is two-fold: How do we get the theater to support the requirements of the stage and, on the other hand, how do we ensure that the plays on the stage don't cause people to forget the needs of the theater. Being the diligent and thoughtful man that he is, Miyasaka came up with a plan to help put the priorities in the right place. Notice that the brown refers to the "Support" (Theater) considerations, while the blue refers to the "Infill" (Stage) considerations.

Miyasaka is showing that the budget for the Support/Theater is fixed, while the budget for the Infill/Stage is variable. By this chart, he is proposing to his clients different strategies for affecting the completeness or the level of finish for the Infill for the purpose of making the underlying house construction all that it should be. He offers no strategy to go the other way, which I think is brilliant.

A few weeks ago, I sat in on a training session with our Building Systems team about window installation in high performance buildings. It took over two hours to cover the theory, define the proper materials, explain the procedure, and do a demonstration. Watching and listening brought to mind some questions I was asking myself. Could I remember the first time I learned how to install, seal and flash windows? Who taught me? How long did it take? I couldn't come up with the answers. It was too long ago.

I do remember installing many windows and doors, but most of what comes back was the focus on getting the units plumb and square and ensuring that they were operating properly. There was plenty of concern about the best way to shape and install the head flashing and getting the felt paper "splines" attached in the right way, but that was essentially the extent of it in those early days. There was no discussion about air pressure differentials and moisture diffusion issues. The only drop of water we worried about was the one from outside, from the sky above. And we didn't want or expect an airtight seal. The house has to breathe, after all.

Over the ensuing years, energy costs and pollution effects have made it apparent that our buildings have needed to perform better. In pursuit of that, there's been a several decades ante-raising game going on. Improved insulation in the walls led to more insulation in the ceiling or roof, and that led to more awareness of insulation around the foundation and beneath the slabs. Thermal breaks then became big issues, and building systems details were tweaked to overcome those situations. Improved insulation required more attention to vapor drive and dew points, and we learned that sealing leaks well requires that all leaks are sealed well. We learned that small defects in an otherwise good envelope can cause big problems, which brought on the use of special cameras and depressurization fans to find the pesky problem areas. But then, all of these envelope enhancements meant that indoor air quality couldn't be taken for granted. The more we solved heat loss and moisture movement, the more we would need to control building respiration. It's all pretty complicated and eventually led to a field of research and study called Building Science.

Of course, there has always been lots of science applied to structural and mechanical engineering and construction technology in buildings, but this thermal and moisture control branch is relatively young. It is also now the most important area for innovation in building products and process. The future of sustainable, high performance buildings as a standard consumer expectation is coming very quickly.

I learned some things I didn't know during my attendance at our window installation training session. I suspect others did as well. Sealing against water and air requires more than common sense and it's not at all easy. To get it right, education, training and an agreed upon team procedure are all essential.

What's true of Building Science is also true of building crafts and trade skills. In our company, we don't expect people to come in knowing how to properly sharpen chisels or plane blades. We use water stones and a procedure we learned from a Japanese temple builder. In his words, there are only two possibilities: "Sharp or no sharp;" in other words, the right way or the wrong way. To be efficient and effective, it is necessary to understand water stones and their proper use and care. Then you must know and follow a specific procedure. And when you have the information and know what to do, it still takes diligence and practice to become competent.

In my opinion, a good builder education curriculum ought to encompass the extremes of these two examples. We need to have the knowledge and skills of the past and the emerging science and technology of our times. If our knowledge and skills can bridge between the values of the past and rising standards we expect for the future, there's some hope that the buildings we construct might do the same.

The truth is that being a builder today is more difficult and demanding than ever. We somehow need to invoke the wisdom of Vitruvius, revive the craft skills of our forefathers, while also performing a kind of physics sorcery as we turn normal looking buildings into weather-and-energy-defying havens of comfort. It's a tall order. It's also a good challenge and often fun. There's a whole lot to learn.

In the month of January, we also had seminars and training sessions on these subjects:
Sizing timbers
Deck Layout
Moisture management (mostly focused on walls)

Taken from the lists we've gathered from different parts of the company, here are some other courses and training sessions, just to give an idea of the range of topics:

Basic Frame and Panel Compound Layout
LEAN concepts
Nails, screws and bolts, oh my
Math 101 (Lots of Pythagoras)
Intro to wood technology
Understanding Shear Walls
Envelope performance criteria
Ventilation strategies
3D CAD model manipulation and reading
Framing Square basics
Crane signals and safety considerations
Passive solar strategies
Stair design
Open and closed stringer layout and cutting
Calculator Trigonometry
Door construction basics
Teamwork skills
Lighting basics
Insulating foundations and slabs
Clapboard and shingle siding
Tension joinery
Wood movement
Intro to HVAC

The list goes on. When we have revised curriculum completed, I'll post it here for comment.

Onward.

Working in Colorado tract home developments in my early years in homebuilding, it appeared the knowledge and skills to accomplish the tasks were coarse and optional. Cowboy brawn prevailed. Good framing carpenters wielded 32 ounce hammers and could drive a 16d nail in two blows. They'd run their circular saws without blade guards and sling them like machetes, dispensing with sawhorses, holding the "stick" with one hand and making the cut with the other. Cut lines and layout marks were approximate and indicated with fat pencil leads. Layout was +- 1/4 in. and the stuff we built easily lost another 1/4 in. It was all "close enough," or " you can't see it from my house." We'd use 3,4,5 triangulation on decks, but walls would just be squared up with the sheathing. We mostly used trusses for roof framing, but when actual rafters needed to be cut, nobody on the site could do it. A friend of the boss would show up and make a template for our crew. All other roof work was figured out with strings and levels. From that distorted perspective, I had a low impression of the homebuilding trades. Given the pace and the standards, I took it to be a place where knowledge and safety considerations were a professional liability. Lots of fingers were missing.

Later, on the East Coast, I discovered there were still some craftsmen homebuilders, and that there was indeed such a thing as "builder literacy." Meeting real craft builders solved the mystery for me. I grew up in an excellent 1895 home my dad saved from demolition by having it moved a mile up the street. I knew the guys I had previously worked with weren't capable of the quality and precision I had experienced in that old home. I spent lots of time in the company of good construction and I often wondered what the guys were like who did the work. Who figured out how to frame up that complex roof? What tools were used to carve that mantle? Who turned those balusters, each one a little different? Would I get along with men like that? Would I want to be like them?

I still wasn't sure about that yet, but I was very challenged, which was enough at the time. For those guys, builder literacy had much to do with tools and technique. It turned out the framing square is a tool capable of providing answers to numerous complex geometric problems, from compound roof framing to spiral and elliptical stairs. How would you layout and cut a hip rafter for an octagon? The answer is on the framing square. They cared about keeping tools clean and sharp. They had stones for chisels and plane blades, and special files for the handsaws. Their toolboxes were often examples of their best work.

Certain tasks were exemplars of skills. Stair construction was such a task, as was building up door jambs and sills from raw stock, setting hinges, hanging the door, and installing hardware. There were lots of hand tools required for these tasks. Proficiency and efficiency required an efficient process and a facile ability with basic tools. It was also expected that good builders understood how to keep water away from the structure by using various overlapping wood strategies, metal flashing, and tar paper. Wood was very often used for the framing, siding, trim, flashing, and roof shingles. That was the case in the home I grew up in. I replaced the roof around 1990. The original wood shingle roof had lasted 95 years. Most of the original wood shingle siding is still on the house today.

How many carpenters and builders today have the knowledge and skills that were standard expectations of the trades before 1950? Who still knows how to use the framing square? How many carpenters can still hang a door from raw stock and door slab? The answer is pretty obvious: very few tradespeople know about those those skills and that knowledge because they don't need it and there's no training system to provide them with the historic skills of their trade. Therefore people just learn what they know from the people on the building sites from people who learned what they know from people on the building sites. With less and less tradespeople fortunate enough to come into contact with people who have good information and good skills, the generation-to-generation chain of trades knowledge has more broken links than connected ones. The connection to the past is nearly gone.

Since the fuel crises of the 1970's, there has been a scattered but deliberate development of the building knowledge and skills we will need for the future of homebuilding. It got started in the early 1970's and gathered momentum during the second energy crises and into the early 1980's. Builders lost their focus again when the federal tax breaks and subsidies went away and fuel became cheap again in the mid-1980's. By the 1990's and into the 2000's, the building community had mostly become stupid, with no knowledge of the past or the future. The growth in housing starts far outpaced the ability of skilled workers to keep up with the production, which meant that unskilled workers had to be pressed into service and the builders themselves often weren't builders at all, just project managers.

This, at the same time that consumers wanted their homes to be big, and gaudy with amenities.

With consumers willing to buy junk, the building community was more than willing to deliver it. What therefore happened for many years is now our shame and also the source of the current national financial debacle. It is one thing to have paid too much for a bar of gold; quite another to have not only overpaid, but to find out that that what you own is fool's gold, all glitter with little substance.

So here we are. This is the worst slump in housing starts since WWII. Fuel costs are high again. Those with the need, means, and courage to build in these very challenging times are demanding value and high performance. If they wanted less, there's much of that available for less money and hassle. Builders who are going to survive in these times need to perform at a very high level on every basis. Costs are expected to go down, quality has to go up. And quality not only means traditional craftsmanship, it also means high energy performance. In other words, builders now need many of the values, skills and knowledge of the past, along with all the building science progress of the present. Precision and craft in fit and finish still matter, but so does knowledge about moisture management, air quality, pressure balancing and all sorts of issues the master builders didn't have to consider in earlier times.

Builder literacy is now being redefined. All of the sudden, consumers get it. They want the home of the future and they want it now. It has to be affordable, super energy efficient, and still contain certain expected conveniences and amenities. The bad thing about the building recession is that so many people are out of work. The good thing is that the number of homes needing to be built is much more proportionate with the available knowledge and skills. Those who are still in the trades are hitting on all cylinders, learning what they don't know quickly and competing in an arena in which the bar is significantly higher.

In the midst of this, our company is in a good place. We've been very invested, all these years, in traditional building skills through timberframing. Its standards and demands were established many hundreds of years ago. But our company was also formed in the energy crisis years of the 70’s and we have been committed to energy efficiency and the development of better building systems for the past 35+ years. To keep up with these past and future challenges, we've been humbled on both sides. We still chase the temple and cathedral builders of 500 years ago for timberframe quality, and we are well aware that high performance in building construction is not a destination, but a path.

We know what we know and we know what we can do better. That's why we have always seen the need for both on-the-job training and classroom-oriented education. Moreover, we feel that builder training and education needs to be mandatory. Remember, the beginning of all literacy is self-awareness and humility. In his defining work, Walden, Thoreau quotes Confucius as saying:

"To know that we know what we know, and that we do not know what we do not know, that is true knowledge."

Learning only that is the very first requirement in Builder Literacy 101.

A passage I read in Chris Hedges' book, The Empire of Illusion, so stunned me I had to check his references. Sure enough, it appears to be true:

"Nearly a third of the nation's population is illiterate or barely literate--a figure that is growing by more than 2 million every year. A third of high school graduates never read another book for the rest of their lives, and neither do 42 percent of college graduates. In 2007, 80 percent of the families in the United States did not buy or read a book."

In summary, lots of people can't read and lots of people who can read, don't use that ability very fully. I don't believe we can be a great nation while this trend persists. It is surely the harbinger of our undoing. It undermines our ability to compete economically because ignorance is the bane of innovation and efficiency, but furthermore--and perhaps worse--the vast vacuum of individual learning is quickly becoming the black hole into which the legitimacy of our democracy is disappearing. Knowledge feeds real power and is the key to true freedom, while ignorance sucks the life out of both. Watching television is the replacement for literacy, but knowledge doesn't come via packaged messages over the airwaves. Those who can't get their information independently are easy prey to propaganda and lies. They push "truth" into the brains of consumers in the same way they push Viagra and hamburgers. Ultimately, it's actual beliefs, and eventually votes, that have been pressed into the informational vacuums.

One of the tenets of the Pythagorean brotherhood (a following of the mathematician and teacher, Pythagoras, who gave us the mathematical theorem without which we builders would be lost.) was that ignorance itself is not the problem, but ignorance of ignorance was to be considered a grave sin because it describes a personal abyss from which there is no escape route. When you don't know what you don't know, you therefore don't have the self-awareness that would motivate you to learn.

As a kind of religious doctrine, what Pythagoras (circa 500 BC) preached is that ignorance of ignorance becomes its own Catch-22, an avoidable condition that traps its victims in a vicious, dead-end cycle. For him, that trap was the equivalent of hell on Earth, and those in its thrall were to be avoided because they are generally unredeemable. On this point--and on his theorem), I too am a Pythagorean. I call the condition Compound Ignorance (or Ignorance², or just I²) and have made it the number one personal deficiency to ferret out in job interviews. We can coach, teach and train (which we want to do anyway with new associates) but it's pointless when individuals aren't interested in learning anything because they think they already know it. I guess I'm admitting to a particular hiring discrimination, and as far as I can discern, it's still legal: the Compound Ignorant need not apply.

Chris Hedges' writing about the American literacy problem got me to thinking about the literacy rate for those employed in the homebuilding trades. Is it more or less? I don't know the answer, but I do think there's a correlation between low literacy and compound ignorance, and there's plenty of the latter populating the workforce of our industry. The building industry is a pretty good place to hide out if you don't have an education and don't have the means or desire to learn. Most of the building industry trades have no learning requirements in one's past, and no specific learning expectations going forward. If you can physically accomplish the task at hand, that's generally qualification enough.

I suppose my attitude might sound a bit rough. I do understand that those who aren't literate or who are stymied by their own bullheadedness still need to have decent jobs. I also have great sympathy for those who didn't get a decent education, and I don't even mostly blame them. I give the blame primarily to us; to the priorities of our country. We're a democracy, after all, so apparently most of us don't think providing a good education for everyone ought to be a national mandate. How can we justify our low achievement in literacy rates among the industrialized countries? (#19, with Cuba #1 and Russia well ahead of us) All of this upsets me. But I don't think the solution is to dumb down our jobs as a response to our deteriorating educational standards.

And I certainly don't think the homebuilding industry is a good place for those without an education or learning potential. For most people, their home is their biggest financial investment, and for everyone, homes play too significant a role in our lives to allow the quality of this essential product to be diminished and compromised by low-performing workers.

For the past 60 years, the homebuilding industry has gone in the direction of accepting low education and skills in construction, using the excuse that it is a smart strategy for reducing costs. It's not smart. By allowing the uneducated and the compound ignorant to play such a big role in the building of America's homes, we've ultimately paid the price in a half-century legacy of low quality in our housing stock and paralysis in progress and improvement. The entire industry--including all the suppliers, equipment and fixture manufacturers, builders, developers, and designers--have acquiesced in ways large and small to the inevitable drag of ignorance and its demand for stasis.

I have been in discussions with executives and representatives of the manufacturers and suppliers to the homebuilding industry. When confronted with the gap between their own capacity for efficiency and quality improvements, and the final product in which their materials and equipment become a part, they always talk about the inherent inability to bring change or innovation to the homebuilding process. They always point to the fact that is too fragmented and under-skilled to be able to move or shift beyond a snail-like pace. Therefore, the vast majority of American homes have been designed so that mostly unskilled people can build them. Everything in the design and construction of the typical home has been oriented to the idea that innovation and improvements must be avoided because, essentially the problem is, "our guys can't handle new information or change."

Because of this built-in industry resistance to change and improvement, the homebuilding process and product is pretty much just as it was a century ago. We've substituted in some good new materials, more advanced equipment and fixtures, and tons of cozy-comfort amenities, but the underlying home itself is stuck in a time warp. Much of this is attributable to prevalence of low skills and compound ignorance.

If you can find one in this recession, walk up to a home construction site and ask the first worker you see how he knows how to do what he does. The answer will be that he learned it there, on jobs just like the one he is on that day. Ask him (there are precious few women--they are much less prone to I² and just might a part of the solution) if he ever took courses relevant to his trade, or even a seminar. If he's honest, the answer will almost certainly be no because he's not required to do so, and besides, there's almost nowhere to go to get that kind of education and training. And then ask him if he's sure he knows what he's doing. If he's typical, he lacks a lot of things, but not certainty of his knowledge and skills.

In my early carpentry experiences, I worked on job sites with the dumbest, foulest humans I had met up until then. I didn't know so many expletives could be strung together. I didn't know the wide variety of ways the F-bomb could be used in speech. Noun, verb, pronoun, adjective; whatever; it was hard to tell. I didn't know every lunch and break conversation could be x-rated. These guys had nothing to teach and nothing to learn because in their minds there was nothing they didn't already know. I cringe now at what I built with those guys back then.

Later, I was fortunate to work with crews where there were a few shining examples of true building craftsmen, people with real knowledge, deep skills, a love of their work, and a reverence for their trade. Just as ignorance tends to compound itself, knowledge does too (K²). The best craftsmen know what they know but also what they don't know and they spend their lives continually pursuing higher levels of trade excellence.

Having experienced both sides, I developed a conclusion about those in the homebuilding trades: The deeper the ignorance, the more you'll find arrogance, uncivil behavior, and incompetence; the greater the knowledge and experience, the more likely you'll find humility, civility and mastery.

When I founded our company, the primary goal was to create a model for better homebuilding. A key ingredient of that model was to somehow establish a true craft discipline and a learning culture. After more than 35 years of building, my proudest personal accomplishment is my role in helping to engender an atmosphere of learning and ongoing improvement. At this point, I can't take more than a small share of the credit for this. Good people draw in good people; good learning and skills draw in more learning and skills. I may have been a prime fractal for this kind of culture at the beginning, but I feel more like a beneficiary today. Surrounded by great people, good skills and deep discipline, my worries are few and my job is easier.

As we now launch the company renewal and reconfiguration I talked about in a previous blog, one big component is to give a more formal structure to our education and training. We're working on establishing a complete curriculum, with a full complement of courses and training opportunities. While we have always had in-house education and training, we feel it now needs to be ramped up as we ready ourselves for the challenges of trying to set the highest standards for 21st century homebuilding.

I'll say more about that curriculum as it develops. In the meantime, what top ten courses would you include?

News from Haiti is heartbreaking. It brings to stark relief the capricious tragedy meted out to those afflicted by the most persistent and awful pestilence to afflict humanity: poverty. Poverty's fate is extreme vulnerability made worse by invisibility. People who aren't also consumers don't matter enough to receive the benefits and protections our human world otherwise has to offer in the 21st century. The advances of the modern world don't seem so great when the images and stories from Haiti this very morning reveal their vile discrimination.

Most of the deaths in Haiti were senseless. Tens of thousands of lives were lost simply for lack of rebar. Most of the buildings would not have collapsed nearly so completely had the concrete only been reinforced with skinny little bars of steel. For want of rebar! Any first year engineering student could have told you exactly what would happen to those buildings in the event of an earthquake. It's not a guess anymore; there's plenty enough science and deadly hard evidence to know it as a promise.

It is wonderful that the world has responded to the emergency in Haiti with such compassion and urgency. Hundreds of millions of dollars are now being spent by dozens of countries in attempt to bring assistance--albeit late--to those victimized by this awful crisis.

But somebody, somewhere, is surely calculating how infinitesimally less it would have cost us to provide Haitians with free rebar and pictorial instruction pamphlets about how to use them. We could have given them away with the only requirement being the institution of a basic structural building code. In comparison to what we are doing today, this would have been easy and cheap. But their poverty didn't move us to act until the result of it caused their bodies to pile up like cordwood on the streets of Port-au-Prince. Rebar!

All this grim news is a reminder that good quality homes are one of greatest of advancements of our civilization and should never be taken for granted. It's also a reminder that the good quality that matters most is in the building shell and structure, not in its amenities and superficialities. Did you see the photos of the Haitian Presidental Palace before and after the earthquake? It's shining extravagance was clearly about pomp and illusion. Attention to construction detail wasn't much more than skin deep. When veneered quality matters more than substance, someday there will be a price to pay, as the pancaked rubble of the Presidential Palace made so obvious.

I cry today for the Haitians. At the very least, its lessons give me renewed resolve to never compromise building substance for superficialities. The fundamental purpose of home is a secure place to be in a sometimes hostile world. Our core mission as builders is to have the knowledge, skills, and integrity to first provide the fundamental secure structure. On a day sometime in the future, for a reason we can't know with certainty, building well could be the difference between life and death. Ask any Haitian.

Next day update:

Emotion affected my quick entry and I failed to give references for my lack of rebar assertion and its impact on lives lost.

The first came from Joel Aschenbach of the Washington Post who, like me, noticed that the fallen buildings revealed very little evidence of reinforcement in the concrete. This is from a post in his Achenblog, with my highlights:

Obviously the U.S. will send aid and relief workers, but we should do more than that: For a small fraction of what the United States is spending to bail out banks and auto firms we could help Haiti rebuild with reinforced concrete. Because that's what I keep thinking when I look at these awful pictures coming from Haiti: Where's the rebar? It's like the lack of mosquito nets in malarial Africa: Such a simple thing, and it would save so many lives. This is the 21st century -- and yet people around the world are living and working in buildings that are certain to crumble when the earth moves.

When I was doing research on earthquakes a few years ago, a geologist told me: "Earthquakes don't kill people. Buildings kill people." Meaning that these natural disasters aren't purely natural. The planet's crust is shattered by faults, and if you live near one, particularly one that is predicted to break in the near future, you need to live in reinforced structures so that the roof doesn't fall on your head.

David Brooks, writing in the New York Times on January 14, amplified Achenbach's point with a real-world example:

On Oct. 17, 1989, a major earthquake with a magnitude of 7.0 struck the Bay Area in Northern California. Sixty-three people were killed. This week, a major earthquake, also measuring a magnitude of 7.0, struck near Port-au-Prince, Haiti. The Red Cross estimates that between 45,000 and 50,000 people (now closer to 150,000. TB) have died.

This is not a natural disaster story. This is a poverty story. It’s a story about poorly constructed buildings...

Well reinforced buildings don't necessarily survive magnitude 7.0 earthquakes, but they do greatly increase the chances that the building occupants can survive. It's similar to the materials and methods we employ to prevent fire spread in buildings. The purpose is primarily to save lives in the event of fire. The building is a secondary consideration. With that in mind, even a minimal rebar schedule in many cases would have saved scores of lives, even when the buildings themselves might have been demolished.

A CNN reporter mentioned that looters were seen stealing rebar from the rubble because it's so valuable down there. They know about the reasons for it; they just can't afford it.

I've been doing lots of plotting, and not much blogging these past few months. It's been an intense period for our company and for me. Innumerable discussions, many different analyses, a series of company and group meetings and lots of personal dialog, have now led to a redirection and reconfiguration of our organization.

Our motivation for change did not come from intractable problems or economic difficulties. In fact, 2009 was a remarkable year for us. At the end of 2008, we decided to "opt out" of the Great Recession. Our strategy was to extend deeper into our projects and further into the homebuilding market by utilizing our broad capabilities instead of being restricted to our more narrowly defining specialties. Simply put, if there was work to be done, we wanted to do it ourselves if our quality and efficiency would advance the goals of the project. As a result, we not only survived, but thrived in the most difficult economic conditions for builders in at least 70 years.

We also learned something incredibly valuable. What we can do is much bigger, broader and better than what we historically have done. We're much more capable than we previously knew. Ironically, the robust (and often "irrationally exuberant") economy of the past 15 or so years kept us in a more limited definition of ourselves and our skills. It was the challenge of the recession that caused us to discover our deeper abilities.

I'm not suggesting we're exceptional or special in this regard. I assume our situation over the past 18 months has not been different than what millions of people and thousands of companies experienced. Hard times tend to tear away the superficial protective veneers--the cozy routines of habit and history--and enforce the otherwise difficult choice most people have in regards to change. We know from nature that adaptation is synonymous with survival, yet it seems we're still as a species wired to resist--until "change or die" is the well understood option.

Up until then there was no alternative to it: our company resisted change too. But when the time for choice came, it was like choosing between a dark alley with a dead end and a scary bridge with sunny prospects on the other side. We stampeded toward the untested bridge. But it was fear of the alley, not the courage to cross over that took us to the other side.

Now here we are, not even able to remember the reasons for our resistance not so many months ago. Here we are, doing things we didn't know we could do; getting more done in less time, with fewer people; improving quality and reducing cost. It turns out we were already proficient at what is most important in homebuilding: craftsmanship, building science, construction efficiency, communication, leadership, teamwork, and a culture of service. And so here we are, coming off a strong year in a weak economy, realizing we have come through this while still being more organized for our past than our future. It had come time to change that too.

Two quotes accurately bracket our intentions in the reconfiguration. Henry David Thoreau wisely pointed out that, "In the long run men hit only what they aim at." And celebrated 19th century Architect Daniel Burnham suggested that such an aim should be high. "Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men's blood and probably will not themselves be realized."

And so we are specifically reorganized to aggressively refine and perfect our Open-Built approach to design and building, and in doing this, we seek not only our own success, but to also have a significant influence on the way homes are built throughout the country. We aim to make a difference in this world.

Our commitment to our vision now has the full force of a new strategic plan and a reconfigured organization that will keep us on the path of achieving certain audacious objectives. Our competition is the status quo; the barriers are mostly in the accepted equipment, materials, process and technology of the conventional building systems, and the conventional wisdoms that feed its negative constructs and paralyzing paradigms.

We want to further improve, implement and demonstrate a better way to design and build. The traditional methods have run their course. Conventional building systems and processes are now an impediment to giving the American homeowner the quality they deserve in return for their investment. This calculation isn't just about money. In fact, the real issue is that homes don't provide security and comfort on a more visceral, emotional level because usually there's nothing of real quality in the home beyond the superficial amenities and the homeowners' own stuff. In the underlying building shell and structure, the American standard is no more than a miner's shack. By building its antithesis for the same dollars, we intend to make a mockery of this practice and product.

We are sure that homebuilding can and should be executed in a way that can give the consumer the same efficiencies and defect-free outcome as Toyota cars and Maytag appliances. Today's assumption is that homes are so complex and unique that they stand apart from every other type of product where quality is rising and costs are falling. The conventional assumption is that homes are best made with the same attitude and approach that has been used for millenniums. It's perceived to be somehow better because it's so archaic. It's the 21st century. We intend to prove that a high quality home can be constructed on site in less than 20 days, while also improving its beauty, durability, functionality and sustainability. Yesterday's processes need to be displaced, even while the 2000 year-old Vitruvian principles remain.

We reject the notion that those who can't afford to pay more therefore must suffer the fate of also being subjected to the added cost of homes that have the built-in financial burden of poor energy performance. It's a cynical irony that only the wealthy can afford homes that are energy efficient. We intend to innovate systems and develop strategies to give those who need the energy savings the most the opportunity to live in high performance, sustainable, healthy living environments.

Good design and aesthetic delight are essential attributes in quality building. Architects have abandoned residential design because their process is too time consuming and expensive for the average home. We believe we can use technology in both software and hardware to allow architects to apply their training and skills in a way that's affordable and sustainable. The key to homebuilding efficiency and affordability shouldn't be to first have to accept the bland and repetitious. Most of the homes built today are constructed by production builders with mind-numbing repetition; most of the rest are built without the benefit of good architectural designers. The bleak residential landscape is all the evidence one needs that architecture is nearly dead in the homebuilding sector. We can do better and we intend to prove it.

I've been on the same path to improve homebuilding for over 35 years. It's been a stimulating journey, marked equally by exciting achievements and humbling setbacks. In all, we're well prepared for what's next. We know what's possible and we know what we're up against. We know we can do it. It seems somehow appropriate that our renewed commitment and sharpened focus comes at the beginning of a new decade, in these very trying times. It seems like the appropriate moment to push the reboot button. It's the right thing to do when the system is malfunctioning.

So I have something new to blog about. This will be my forum to report about our progress. I promise to tell you about our problems and difficulties as well as our successes. In return, I'm hoping to get your ideas and opinions. What we are attempting will be very far from easy. All the momentum of an entrenched industry--along with the consumer mindset that has learned to accept its fallacies and shortcomings as inherent to the product we call Home--is against us.

If you are willing, please pay attention and weigh in when you get a chance. We could use your help.

Onward!

Reader James commented about my last blog with this:

Yesterday, I mean twenty years ago, I relocated to Colorado and began building "luxury" custom homes. Now don't get me wrong, the work has been good but more and more it seems that during the completion of these projects I get a sick feeling. How many 12,000 sq. ft. "cabins in the woods" do you have to build before our wealthiest clients will learn less is more and bigger isn't better. Hopefully, this recession has not only tightened up peoples wallets but made them think twice about building some trophy home that they only visit two weeks out of the year. I know this sounds a bit self destructive but the last project I finished was hanging doors, trim and building the kitchen cabinets for a small remodel. How satifying is that? It makes me long for the days of buying your Harley Davidson in a basket or spending a couple of hundred on your work truck.

What happened?

It reminded me of one of the big reasons I became a builder. I was one of those who very likely had my life radically improved by the opportunity to live in a good quality living environment. So I responded with this:

The only thing that gives me hope about some of those big, underused trophy homes is that I grew up in one. Our home was built in 1895 for a wealthy goldminer's sister. It's huge. When she passed away, it was turned into a rooming house because the area was in a recession. After that , it became an apartment building. After that, it was to be demolished to make room for a new bank's parking lot. But my father saw the situation and bought it for a dollar and had it moved to a lot on the north side of town. There, 13 rowdy Bensons made a move from a two bedroom tract home to a place where we could all experience space, privacy, security and an atmosphere exalted by quality workmanship. Somehow it all added up to hope and possibility. We were always sure the goldminer had built that place for us.

As a builder, the experience of my growing up has always affected my attitude about building homes that cost too much and make little sense. The original owners are only the patrons, so don't get sidetracked by the things that may bother you about their limited use of the building. Instead, imagine the Bensons of the future who will desperately need a better place to live and who will immediately give that home a higher purpose. What seems frivolous now might well transform lives later. I know it's possible.

I recently spoke at a conference for the New England chapter of the American Society of Home Inspectors (ASHI). My speech was on the second day of the conference and directly followed a lengthy and detailed presentation about inspecting plumbing systems and fixtures. After I spoke, there was a presentation about high efficiency boilers and furnaces. My talk therefore made up a sort of reverse sandwich. I was the bread between layers of meat.

I realized the role I was playing and opened my talk with an apology. I didn't apologize for the less weighty content of my presentation, but rather for the underlying implications of a professional builder making a speaking appearance before an association of home inspectors who were gathered primarily for educational purposes.

You see, ASHI not only requires testing and certification, but also continuing education. The attendees at this conference were getting credits for their continuing education requirements. What I apologized for, therefore, was this: if I was speaking to a gathering of New England builders, it is likely that less than half of them would be licensed in any manner whatsoever and none of them would have been formally getting continuing education credits because none are required.

I hadn't thought about this in advance of the conference, but as I sat through the lecture on plumbing inspection and learned some things I didn't know, I became increasingly uncomfortable and embarrassed. It's absurd that there are more requirements for the qualifications to inspect a house than to build one. In other words, the person who builds your house doesn't necessarily have to know anything, but the person who inspects it long after it's built is required to earn a license and maintain ongoing educational updates.

Houses have always been complex, but the complexity is increasing rapidly. "Building Science" is trying to improve the thermal performance and control moisture migration; structural engineering is attempting to overcome the tragedies of natural events like hurricanes and earthquakes; and mechanical systems have increasing sophistication to increase energy efficiency and improve air quality. But the builders and tradesmen who would supposedly implement all of these advancements have very few places to go to learn about any of this and absolutely no regulatory pressure to do so.

Until the homebuilding industry gets serious about raising the standards of knowledge and skill within the building trades, we can't expect good quality homes to be the American standard. Quality can't arise from a sea of ignorance and poor discipline. In that respect, the current homebuilding downturn is a blessing in disguise. My hope is that the housing recession will force much of the untrained, unskilled and uncommitted work force to find jobs in some other sector where less damage will be done.

I didn't go to the ASHI conference unprepared for the topic about which I apologized. In many ways it was my topic. Here is one of my slides, which speaks for itself.

Here's a random piece of advice. If you ever find yourself attempting to ride a mountain bike over the Alps with people who live there and think pedaling up a never-ending 15% grade is like a walk in the park, prepare to seriously suffer. With very little imagination, you can probably accurately picture me learning this lesson: I'm the guy hunkered over the bicycle in sheer agony, grinding in the lowest gear and only dimly cognizant of the grand and bucolic countryside he’s passing through. A need for survival caused me to develop some creative defensive strategies. It turns out, for instance, that you can slow down your fellow riders by asking them questions that require long, detailed answers. Let them talk and talk, while you focus on breathing...and keeping up. (You can see my view of my fellow riders in this photo)

In this comical way, I was recently doing some “research” about European homebuilding processes. In our biking group of about ten, my fellow riders included three builders, a finish carpenter, and the founder and owner of one of the premier automated CNC equipment manufacturers for the building industry. These guys have become good friends and this wasn’t our first Alps biking tour, so I’ve had some time to learn something about their philosophy and approach to the building process.

Before I say more and let it sound as if I think the Europeans are inherently better builders than we are, you should know they cheat. They sell their homes to people who care more about the underlying building structure and thermal efficiency than they do about superficial amenities. Obviously, this isn’t fair. Anyone could do good work in that environment. It is much more challenging to try to build high quality buildings in a society that tends to consistently choose short term indulgence over long term performance.

In both Europe and America, the characteristics of what is being built are a reflection of what homebuyers count as important, for good and ill, respectively. In both cases, you can equally applaud and blame both the builders and the consumer society in which they work for the outcome in their built environment. U.S. builders can and should do much better, but we do have certain cultural disadvantages. However, I’m not complaining because I think these are exciting times. Attitudes and priorities are starting to change here and we have a golden opportunity to be at the forefront of setting new standards for American homebuilding. What should those standards be? Listening to European builders talk on a long bike ride might be as good an approach as any to finding an answer.

Riding through the pristine forests of the German and Austrian Alps was a perfect context for our conversations about building as it invigorated our mutual enthusiasm for the natural benefits of wood. Wood was also our common language. As I listened to these guys talk and learned about recent changes in their building practices, I realized their dedication to wood has a somewhat different orientation than mine. For all its terrific attributes, I am prone to use wood judiciously, even sparingly. It's a precious resource, after all. Appreciating the same attributes in wood, they are motivated to use it in abundance. The more wood, the better. As the European fixation on green and energy-efficient building deepens, the use of wood as the primary construction medium grows.

Despite what you might think about Europe, their forests are healthy and extremely productive. Along with Scandinavia, they are the best managed forests in the world. The forests are preserved for their beauty, for recreation (our bike paths snaked through heavily forested lands), but also for the important resource. According to one of my comrades, their forests add twice as much fiber in annual growth as is harvested for use. "We should use more," said Hans Möst, whose company was close to where we were riding that day. "It's here, it's natural, and requires very little energy to get it from the forest to the new house."

As if on cue, we were soon riding through an area that was designated as wilderness. The forest seemed to thicken and the hiking/biking path narrowed, yet there was logging activity. We could see evidence of selective cutting because there were fresh piles of logs at the edge of our path every few kilometers. It was a beautiful "wilderness" area, but there was no apology for the fact that it was a managed forest that could be preserved and productive simultaneously. It's a different perspective, from a different history and ecological narrative, and given all that, it made sense to me. I'd also like to have access to those amazing logs.

Listening to these guys talk, I realized that they view wood building as the way forward, not just because it is natural and abundant, but because it is perfectly suited to high-tech building processes and to supporting modern lifestyles. As it is easily machined, it can be effectively utilized for a variety of structural situations and finishes. The Europeans are masters at laminating and engineering wood in a variety of ways to reduce waste and enhance its visual and structural characteristics. So this is another way in which they cheat. Anyone could make great buildings with those materials!

Karl Schafferer's company is in Austria, not far from Innsbruck. His website touts wood as the ultimate "high-tech building material" and everything about his company exudes a forward-looking modern enterprise. His buildings are often extremely contemporary. They are clean and simple, but are also sophisticated studies in the composition of wood and glass. Karl said his "high tech" promotion comes from all the facets of building with wood. Using modern machinery, it easily made into improved products, which are in turn easily machined with modern machinery into a variety of building components. In the completed construction, wood is durable, beautiful and is the best basis for comfortable, energy-efficient buildings. Wood isn't toxic and takes finishes well. When the building needs to be changed, wood is easily demounted and can be easily reused or recycled. Given Karl's unabashed evangelism for wood, I was surprised Karl wasn't riding a wooden bicycle. It's probably in the works.

With their abundant forest resources, their automated machinery, and their attitude about the role of wood in green building, it should have been no surprise to find out what these guys are up to now. If more wood is better, why not ALL wood? Indeed! They are making buildings that are almost nothing but wood. Solid wood floors; monolithic planks a foot thick or more. Solid wood walls and roof structures. Even the interior partitions are often solid and continuous planks of wood. Karl's company and that of another companion on the ride, Uli Hermann are both doing a lot of their building using this system. Karl's company is currently working triple shifts to fabricate and ship precut solid wood elements to the Abruzzo region in Italy to help build homes for those displaced by the April's earthquake. (If only we had responded like that for New Orleans!)

In some ways these new solid wood homes are a throwback to older forms of wooden building, but this isn't your great grandfather's log building. All the wood is dried and machined to improve its stability, moisture diffusion and even sound deadening characteristics. Every aspect of the building components and the buildings are highly engineered and automated. There may be a lot of material used, but most of the labor is either at a computer keyboard for manufacturing and shaping, or in the actual on-site assembly.

Solid Wall and ceiling: note the thickness

Wall section after machining, including routs for wiring and boxes

If this doesn't seem practical, take into consideration the European attitude about building. They tend to look forward as far as they can look back, and that is a very long ways, to be sure. When you are planning a building in terms of centuries, lots of things that would otherwise seem overdone or wasteful, make sense in that context. While the volume of wood is high, they are wasting nearly nothing by using low grade wood for the inner cores of the elements. They've essentially turned pulpwood into core-wood, which seems like a pretty good upgrade, given the comparative lives of paper and homes.

When I later visited Hans Möst's company, he showed me another method that is also all-wood construction. When they build Passive House homes, they use a wall system comprised of an inner and outer wood structure filled with wood fiber. That's right...wood fiber. It's a product that can come as loose fill, or dense-packed as a board product to be applied outside walls or roof systems for additional insulation in the same way that we typically use foam insulation products here. Of course, this product isn't available in the U.S. so we have a disadvantage here as well. I tell you, these guys cheat!

Wall thickness is about 18 in.; Wood is used for both structure and insulation.


Laminated structural wood has a built-in wood fiber thermal break. It also comes in 40 ft. lengths.


It is typical for even small builders to have nice shops and automated equipment. The joinery machine in this photo came from Hans Hundegger's company. He was also on the bike ride, but of course he cheats by living at the base of the Alps and riding up those mountains on a regular basis. Not fair!

I’ve been traveling in Germany and Austria this past week. I’m on one of my regular “study” trips overseas trying to get a view of the future of American homebuilding. When we come to our senses--and I have undying optimism that we will—we’ll finally have the humility to learn something from the societies and people who set better standards for housing quality. In homebuilding, America is perhaps ten years behind many other countries in process sophistication, and a complete paradigm shift behind in product quality. I’m here to see where we’ll eventually be when we wake up and catch up.

Here in the towns and villages at the base of the Alps, buildings aren’t even remarkably old at 300 years because there are so many remaining that are 400 and 500 years old, still standing erect and beautiful and in continuing use for shops, restaurants and residences. The European builders’ advantage comes from this tradition, this long history of building craft development. The bar was set very high, a very long time ago. In this setting, it would be seen as a bad investment for both the individual and the country to build to a lower standard today than they did yesterday.

In this part of the world, “green building” isn’t a marketing gambit; it’s the only way to build; it’s the ante into the game. As in the U.S., competition among builders can be fierce, but here it begins with a commitment to build durable, energy-efficient homes using sustainable materials and practices. Here, you don’t have to teach people that we live in a finite world anymore than you would have tell them that homes should be built to keep out the wind, rain and cold. Consumers demand homebuilding to be just as much about husbanding resources as it is about the fundamentals of shelter. Builders compete on how well they make buildings in the right way; then price.

In this part of the world, the quality emphasis in homebuilding is about the core building (structure, insulation, siding and roofing), not the amenities, appliances, and superficial finishes. Good quality isn’t free and people are willing to spend what is necessary to get quality where it matters. It is common for the core building to consume more than 50% of the total building budget, where the standard American home often is built on a budget that allocated only 20-25% for the same core structure and insulation. In effect, we have decided that what matters most is the stuff that lasts the least long. We pour most of the budget into the shorter term aspects of the building, like fixtures, appliances and surface finishes. Much of it won’t even last the length of the mortgage. But here in Europe, a new home is often spare, as the owners typically choose to get a good building over fine finishes, knowing they can eventually get the things they want. Priorities and patience are cultural keys to better building.

In this part of the world, “know how” in building means education, training, apprenticeship, discipline and certification. One gains the right to be a builder the old fashioned way: you earn it through education and training that often lasts more than ten years. People here choose the path of the building trades because there is pride in a profession that is committed to making a positive and long-lasting contribution to society. The opposite is true too. I have found it depressing to see homebuilding crews in America populated by workers who don’t know and don’t care and weren’t hired for their skills and attitude, but for their wage scale. This is the basis for the compound stupidity of American homebuilding: start with cheap materials, then use low-skilled and wholly untrained labor to shape them into a building. With that formula, we get what we deserve. The European standard, on the other hand, comes from a cycle of quality that expects the best from well-trained workers who are given great tools and entrusted with the very best of building materials. Funny how simple it is!

In this part of the world, technology and homebuilding aren’t mutually exclusive terms. As one builder said to me yesterday, “we no longer build like the holy Joseph, but he would be proud of what we do.” Craftsmanship doesn’t require regression and isn’t defined by a slow pace. Good builders have always been able to look both backward and forward, knowing what to take, what to leave behind, and continually finding ways to improve. Tradition demands excellence, not the exclusion of technology. Here is where I come to find software, advanced machinery, clever tools and better fasteners. We are grabbing whatever we can to make better buildings, built more efficiently. We have learned that technology stretches, rather than diminishes the skills of the tradespeople. In addition to all the traditional skills the European craftspeople are required to learn, they are required to become facile with computers, automated machinery, and a barrage of newly developed materials. It’s the way of the contemporary building crafts and leads to better, more sustainable jobs.

As a result of our company’s connection to Europe (including my many treks over here), our software comes from Switzerland, our two large CNC machines are German, and our processes would be far more familiar to a European builder than our colleagues in America. Over the last twenty years, we have also been able to hire numerous young interns and apprentices from the trade schools and training programs in Germany, Switzerland and France. As a part of their education, they are able to stay with us for up to a year, almost always resulting in a mutually beneficial exchange.

The criticism of European homebuilding is that it's more expensive, resulting in less homeownership. It’s true. But given the incredible difference in quality, it’s quite impressive that the cost difference isn’t greater. And given how poorly built and disposable the average American home often is, one has to wonder if giving people the opportunity to own such poorly built structures is in their best interest--or ours. From my current perspective sitting on a plaza outside a 600 year old cathedral, having dinner at a restaurant housed in a magnificent 400 year old building that also has 15 occupied apartments in the upper floors, it just seems wrong.

But I see a better future coming.

My last posts about building in a recession (#2 and #3) probably sounded a little extreme, but I really believe there’s a similar model that ought to be available to anyone. We need to give primacy to what truly matters in homebuilding and also find a way to give people an opportunity to get what they want and need in a way that suits their abilities and financial constraints. One of the problems our country needs to overcome is the prevalence of low-quality, poorly-performing homes that are also the biggest investment in the lives of most of our fellow citizens.

But first, why do people submit to living in junk?

It has probably always been so, but it’s still somewhat depressing that otherwise smart people can act so stupidly. Bernie Madoff’s victims were eager to believe that one genius guy had figured out how to continuously make money at a constantly generous rate, when all other investment possibilities fluctuate rather erratically. Hundreds of thousands of adult Americans were duped into buying homes they could not possibly afford, apparently happily jumping to the conclusion that it was their good fortune that the rules they learned in 4th grade math were no longer applicable in their personal case. Snake oil, in all its forms, sells well.

Cheery bunkum finds quicker believers than hard truths.

The people who build most of America’s homes are no different. Part of me has wanted to think they are devious characters, but I’ve come to the conclusion that most of them have made a similar leap of blind hope. When the framing lumber is dropped off on the building sites, they have convinced themselves that underpaid and under-skilled people will still work with enough motivation and care to make a decent building. They are sure that stick framing is so easy nothing serious could go wrong and if there are oversights or mistakes, the structures are probably over-engineered anyway. They have further convinced themselves that they are doing the right thing because low cost is the critical factor, not good quality.

Besides, America’s homebuilders have come to understand that consumers really only care about appearances and amenities. It’s cheaper to be fooled than to require authenticity and substance. Nobody wants to pay for mundane elements like foundations and frames and insulation, which are like the hard truths; boring and inconvenient. What people are willing to pay for is the cheery bunkum. Houses are all too often built to minimum standards under conditions that cause them to be even worse than that; defect-ridden underpinnings clad in faux siding and flimsy roofing, but with complex-looking fake rooflines, containing four-headed showers, plush carpets and cavernous, chandelier-bedecked entries.

In the end, though, the illusion of wealth and comfort can come at a very high price. The Wall Street Journal recently ran a story about serious problems in new homes built during the housing boom. The story, “Cracked Houses: What the Boom Built,” reports that “hundreds of thousands of people from California to Georgia say their almost-new homes need costly repairs because of construction defects. The furious pace of home building from the late 1990s through the first half of the 2000s contributed to a surge in defects, experts say. It caused shortages of both skilled construction workers and quality materials.” In some cases, the cost of repairs is more than the houses would be worth on the market, but it’s often the case that repairs aren’t practical at all because the defects are at the foundation level. One man said the losses related to his defective house were worse than his retirement income losses in the stock market.

In contrast to that story, a few weeks ago I did an informal assessment of an old house in a nearby town that is scheduled for demolition. I was asked to help determine how much of the building might have value as salvage. Often old homes have structural parts that can be used again, so it was a good question and an admirable goal. Due to some unusual circumstances, the house has not been occupied for 30 years. It is very weathered and is almost devoid of mechanical systems, as it doesn’t even have indoor plumbing. The new owner assumed its long abandonment condemned it, but I found that not to be the case. It is actually in great structural condition. Although it was built in the post Civil War years (1860-1870) and had been completely unoccupied for three decades, the original building is strong, straight and true. The roof didn’t leak; the foundation didn’t yield and the critter damage was minimal. So, one hundred and fifty years ago, they could build so well that a house could survive over 120 years of use, then fall into complete abandonment for another 30 years and still be structurally sound and secure; yet today, houses are being built and sold that are challenged to survive even their first 30 years.

These contemporary standard houses aren’t very different than a Bernie Madoff scam. In both cases, what appears to be a reasonable investment is actually missing the very essence of what it is supposed to be. A financial investment is supposed to be invested in something; a house is supposed to be a structure, not a teetering theater set.

When will we stop falling for cheery bunkum? Perhaps never, but at least for awhile, I think people will be more attuned to search for real value in their investments, whether in the markets, or in real estate, or in anything for that matter.

This, then, is a good time to promote what I think is the right way to build, whether in a recession or a boom. It begins with rethinking our image of what a house is and how homebuilding should therefore unfold.

As described by Stewart Brand in How Buildings Learn, a house appears to be one thing, but it is better understood as layers of elements that live in time differently. The right way to design and build is to acknowledge the different cycle times, allowing the building to be more easily upgraded and changed to meet its maintenance challenges and adjust to the needs and desires of its inhabitants. Stewart called the layers the "Six S's"

Seen this unique way, only the site itself is ultimately permanent, but the man-made structure which is attached to that piece of the earth ought to be proportionately durable. Therefore, the underlying building structure should be built to last centuries. Protecting the structure is the exterior skin of roofing and siding. This also should last a long time, but it’s likely to need maintenance or alteration every 50-75 years. The interior functioning of the building is defined by the space plan, which is the organization and partitioning that delineate and separate the public and private living areas. The specific plan and rooms are really just a prediction about what will work best and who will live there. Properly built, the space plan should be more mutable and flexible, allowing the occupants to adjust the original prediction more easily as the ever-changing dynamics of their lives suggest and require. Think of this as a 10-20 year cycle. Services are the various (and increasing) mechanical systems that deal with everything from low voltage entertainment systems to heating and cooling equipment. Some of this stuff is almost as permanent as the structure, but most of it should be designed to be upgraded and changed, allowing for new technology and shifting needs. Service systems should be considered to have a 1-15 year life cycle. Finally, there is the stuff of our lives: furniture, equipment, art, books, etc.; all the various baggage of our complex lives. Stuff churns daily, monthly and only occasionally sticks around for as long as the space plan.

Brand’s numbers and organization are a little different, but the concept holds. What we have concluded as we have embraced the truth of it is that long term elements and short term elements should not be entangled. Wires and pipes shouldn’t cut and worm their way through the structure. They should have their own space, which doesn’t affect the structure and gives access for inevitable changes. Similarly, the interior space plan shouldn’t also have long term requirements because it more likely needs to change in time. This kind of thinking has led to what we call “Open-Built,” which is a complete system of design and building, intended to give predominance to a high performance building shell, with interior systems and finishes and exterior cladding that can be installed or uninstalled as needed, as the life of the building plays out from its original construction through all its future mysteries and adventures.

We have based our business model on this concept. How does it relate to building in a recession? This method of building is perfect for owner-builders who hire us to design and build on their behalf. What we actually do in many cases is simply build the high performance building shell, giving our customers themselves the opportunity to manage or execute the exterior and interior finishes and mechanical systems. It also allows buildings to be finished incrementally, as owners can afford it. This is exactly what I did on my own house as described in How to Build in a Recession #3. I think everyone should have the option of building and financing slowly, if they so desire. It’s the best way to get what you need and want, paycheck by paycheck, rather than with the expense of a multi-decade mortgage. It also puts first things first and leads to the high quality buildings which are the ultimate blue-chip investment.

My blog droughts have been long, but I have something to show for it. When October 2008 happened, our near future looked extremely bleak. I stood up in an anxious company meeting to tell our associates that we would do everything and anything necessary in order to “opt out” of the impending recession. I meant it. Our team responded with an astounding effort…and for now, we have done it.

About seven months later, I can say with certainty that we have successfully fought off some of the worst effects of the bad economy. Last week, we even had a modest (honorarium level) mid-year profit sharing. Recognizing that in the business of homebuilding, big losses are the norm, Chapter 11’s are common, and thousands of homebuilders have simply gone out of business, we had a happy celebration over the good fortune from our efforts.

How have we accomplished this? “The old fashioned way” is an essential part of the answer. There has been an extraordinary hard work effort throughout the company for months on end, but there are other reasons too. We also responded with one of the most creative and innovative periods in our company history (36+ years). We turned ourselves around quickly; in months, not years, we have simply become much better at what we do.

We have long been adherents of Lean Production principles and strategies. Most of our associates have taken a course on the subject and in the past several years we have also held several Lean educational forums at our facility. Like many things, though, the ultimate success of Lean requires both knowledge and motivation. What we learned recently is that while we’ve had the knowledge, the critical level of motivation had to be thrust upon us by outside forces.

Waste has always been the enemy, but seeing its many facets with clarity sometimes requires a different perspective. A deep homebuilding recession cleared the scales from our collective eyes. There are now many fewer elements of redundancy, inefficiency or waste in our process and products than there were even a few months ago. We have done little things like reduced the steps taken to get a tool and the number of times a piece or element is handled, but we have also done big things, such as eliminating unnecessary construction documents and automating layout.

Sometimes it is necessary to literally invent ways to circumvent waste because it’s so embedded in how things have always been done. In homebuilding, wasteful systems and processes are the norm, not the exception. So we have been creating and inventing in software innovations, new tools, better work stations, and improved building system details. Only the quality goal at the end is unmovable; all else between the starting point and the end point has been fodder for improvement, upgrading and reinvention--whatever it takes.

As a result of intense company-wide efforts, we are already accomplishing highest quality work, with significantly increased cycle times. Better work; less time. It turns out that even in extremely difficult times for the homebuilding industry, a formula that offers the possibility that quality, time and cost can all be optimized simultaneously will draw potential clients like bees to honey. It’s not as if we didn’t know that before last October, but we had to be jerked out of our comfort zone to get there as quickly as we have in the last few months.

What is the definition of quality? This has long remained the same for us: finely crafted, high performance buildings with the features and amenities our clients need and want. We are building homes that range from the low $200K range up to several million. Each client gives us a unique quality goal that becomes its own “no plan B” target. We customize ourselves to fit them. We are also aware that people are looking for a life improvement that goes well beyond the physical aspects of a building. In all that we do, we aspire to improve the quality of lives, which is the ultimate reason new homes are built.

What is the definition of faster time? Through prefabrication and parallel processing, we can cut typical on-site construction times by two-thirds or more. Our off-site fabrication methods are the most creative and innovative in our industry. Our Open-Built systems allow us to take a unique approach in the fabrication of building elements that includes everything from rough framing to fine finishes, without submitting to the dull architectural constraints of modular boxes.

What is the definition of cost control? Our immediate intention is to meet or beat the cost of typical on-site construction. While we eventually hope to achieve costs that we expect to be much lower eventually, for now higher quality and much faster delivery are the primary goals.

As a result of these accomplishments, we now have the same backlog we’ve had in banner years in the boom economy. It would be foolish to say that we have become immune to the travails of this hard recession (actually a Depression in homebuilding), but our team is rightly proud of having “opted out” of the recession (at least for now), exactly as planned!

Next time: back to "How to build in a Recession"