European Builders Cheat!

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!