New House Rules

I was surprised and pleased to see an article on the front page of the New York Times about the remarkably energy efficient Passive Houses. I have been following the German-born “Passivhaus” movement for quite a few years, but I hadn’t envisioned that there would be much enthusiasm in the U.S.—yet—for the extremely rigorous requirements of the Passivhaus standards. I must be wrong. For the next four days (Dec. 27 – Dec. 30) the Passive House article was the Times #1 most emailed story. During those days, I was getting multiple copies from every direction: friends, family, colleagues and even people I don’t know. It seemed that nearly overnight Passive House had entered the American vocabulary.

The Passive House (PH) concept is both brutally simple and extremely difficult. We have long known how to create an energy efficient building: face the sun; insulate, seal and mechanically ventilate. Passive House takes these rather obvious goals and establishes an extremely stringent standard for each of them, applying basic building science and its own tough formulas to set the bar at the very top of the green building stanchions. Moreover, it’s a pass-fail system; you achieve it or you don’t. It stands alone as the most energy efficient construction standard in the world. Over 15,000 Passive Homes have been built since the early ‘90s, mostly in German speaking countries and Scandinavia.

The main question I have been asked the past few days is how Zero Energy buildings, such as those (Unity House and Brightbuilt Barn) we built last year, compare with Passive Houses. The best answer, I think, is that they are perfectly complementary, not competitive. The ideal way to build a Zero Energy building is to start with a base building constructed to Passive House standards. From that platform, using renewable energy sources to get to zero (or positive) energy performance is made much easier.

Performance standards are set by the Passivhaus Institute in Germany. The building can’t consume more than 15 kilowatt-hours per square meter in heating energy per year (equivalent to 4746 BTU per square foot per year). This typically requires that the wall, roof and floor insulation must be between R40 and R60. The building can’t leak more air than 0.6 times the house volume per hour at 50 pascals of pressure, as measured in a standard blower door test. An energy recovery ventilator provides a constant, balanced fresh air supply, and may be outfitted with an electric resistant heater element to provide auxiliary heat in worst-case situations.

If the building clears the bar of the PH requirements, it no longer needs a furnace. The intention is to substitute the money spent on a heating system (along with the fuel to fire it) for money spent on insulation, careful detailing and good workmanship. Basically, it locks in heating and cooling fuel cost at zero. For the life of the building.

Why, then, isn’t everyone clamoring for it? I don’t know. We seem to have been born with a switch that allows us to turn off the memory of painful lessons that should have been learned; and with blinders that limit our ability to see that which is unsustainable when it is us. How else to explain the great interest in high performance buildings when fossil fuel costs were high only a few months ago, but now that the fuel costs have fallen, interest has suddenly waned? Is this short-term memory a defect in our species or just a peculiarly American defect? How did we come to make decisions in a dense fog, from which neither the past or future is visible?

I live in southern New Hampshire, near the Vermont border. In this area, the heart and soul of most towns are the many old houses, churches and town halls that were built 150-250 years ago. They remain in good service after many generations of use and remind us of the best of our capabilities as citizens, communities and builders. They are emblems from the past, but also beacons for a better future. If we could think and act with a vision beyond our own mortality, like the builders who constructed these enduring, defining structures, Passive Houses and Zero Energy buildings would now be much more common.

If a priority for high performance buildings doesn’t come from a social or ecological conscience—you know, looking out for the survival of our species, for instance—perhaps it would come from simple math calculations when our energy costs brutally and finally reflect their actual value.

What I hate to think about, but believe to be true, is that high fuel costs won’t really do it either. It will take a genuine crisis in which money isn’t the only issue. Just as you don’t get a new traffic light at an intersection until enough people have died in car crashes, it will take some large-scale disasters to give us the collective will to do something that is possible right now.

First, many people will have to suffer when an infrastructure entirely dependent on cheap fossil fuels completely collapses.

Then, higher standards will finally be mandated and people might at last be willing to give up flat screens and full-body showers for a home that will keep them warm and comfortable without any fuel whatsoever; in good times and bad, through decades, through generations, and on and on into a brighter future.

It's such a good idea. Why don't we just start doing it and NOT wait for bigger problems and human tragedies?

I am first of all a carpenter and builder. I like shaping and assembling materials and I like to see buildings rise from the ground because the forces of brain and brawn made it happen. It’s a process that gives honest and direct feedback in response to physical effort, which is nearly always equal parts gratifying and motivating. You can literally measure the quantity and quality of the work achieved in any time period and therefore know, with some objective certainty, that it will have a lasting affect on lives and communities. But those same observations incessantly reveal that it could have also been done better. Good builders are proud, humble and addicted.

After nearly 35 years and over 700 buildings, I can say that our company has continuously improved and, project by project, year by year, made some remarkable achievements in nearly every phase of design and building. I can also say that nothing we’ve done has been perfect. Somehow we’ve managed to both improve dramatically and still have as far to go as we did in the year of our founding.

I am also a timberframer. As a young carpenter and builder, I worked to relearn and reinvigorate the craft of timber joinery as a way to infuse the building process with more craft and greater inherent beauty and durability. I couldn’t understand why timberframing had been abandoned by the late 19th century. If it had proven to be labor intensive and inefficient in the days of hand tools, why wouldn’t it fare better in the age of sophisticated power tools and material handling equipment? And if the old style timberframe house—with its typical poor insulation, low ceilings and dark spaces—was obsolete, then what about a modern version with expanses of glass, open living areas and super-efficient insulation? I essentially squinted hard and saw timberframing as a structure upon which we could build a bridge to the future of homebuilding, not as a reversion to ancient methodologies.

Even more than I could have imagined, the effort of reviving timberframing has proven to be an excellent basis for rethinking and reinventing the process of homebuilding. It has grown into a healthy industry and has attracted to its ranks scores of great craftspeople and builders throughout North America and overseas. Inch by inch, we have collectively raised the bar of homebuilding craft and quality. Over the last 25 years or so, our impact has been real and profound.

In my company, I am now dog-paddling in a pool of talent and energy, as I work with a large group of hard-charging carpenters, engineers, architects, building systems specialists, woodworkers and project managers. I can no longer say that my skills are the best in any of those disciplines. Luckily, I still have a role. I keep my eyes on what’s next, as we continue to improve on that bridge to the future of homebuilding. A better way is always just around the corner and there’s always another corner. I’m finally at peace with the notion that the original dream is, in fact, a towering cathedral that won’t be finished in my lifetime. It’s satisfying enough to see it taking shape and rising upward.

But it is important to understand that just as a bridge is not the destination, the medium (in this case) is not the message.

Timberframing has indeed taken us away from the loggerheaded conventional wisdom about how homes should be built and turned our whole emerging industry towards innovation, both by inclination and necessity. Here are few things we’ve learned from the timberframe perspective:

-- Homes are better when they are infused with well-executed and visible craft. Architecture and building crafts should not be separated.
-- All built volume is valuable and shouldn’t be wasted.
-- A sustainable home is a durable home. The design and construction goal should be projected in centuries, not decades.
-- Structure and insulation can be separated, with benefits to energy efficiency and potential building durability.
-- All homes can be energy misers.
-- Shell and infill can be separated, with benefits to adaptability of the building to its inhabitants over time.
-- Homes' environments should be malleable to the inhabitants.
-- Fabricating building elements in controlled conditions, and using the site for assembly only, improves quality and efficiency.
-- The discipline of fabricating exacting building elements is a building solution in itself.
-- Advanced CAD software improves quality and efficiency. "Virtual before actual," is the modern equivalent of, "measuring twice and cutting once."
-- Applying the best of modern technology to the building process can help to make buildings better and more affordable.

Now that most of my professional life has been spent with timberframing nearly always playing a central role in our building process, I have come to realize that it has matured into a system that, like the conventional methods we have tended to spurn, has potential for its practitioners to get mired in ruts of conventional wisdom. Timberframing has limits:

-- A timberframe doesn’t automatically make the house better.
-- A high performance, durable building results from keeping an eye on every detail.
-- A well-crafted timberframe in a badly designed home is a waste of time and timbers.
-- Neither a frame nor a building shell is a house.
-- Most local contractors aren’t able to work with timberframe buildings effectively and efficiently without training.

All good building stems from keeping the priorities balanced and focused. The oldest surviving book about design and building was written by the Roman architect Vitruvius over 2000 years ago. His famous triad of objectives for buildings still describes the fundamental goals for good quality building today. He essentially said that good buildings are a composition of function, strength and beauty (utilitas, firmitas, venustas) and that none should be sacrificed for the other. I suggest that when buildings achieve this, they are also sustainable because they are loved for their beauty, appreciated for their usefulness and survive the rigors of time because they are structurally strong. It goes without saying that the principles defined by Vitruvius don’t describe a method, but a result.

After 35 years, I will always be a timberframer, but I won’t only be a timberframer. The objective of making high performance, sustainable, beautiful and affordable buildings is far more important.

In Monday’s By Design blog, Allison Arieff challenges the focus and relevance of the Museum of Modern Art's (MOMA) Home Delivery exhibit, making the obvious and salient point that cutting-edge technology is always interesting, but when it comes to homes, people matter.

"Home Delivery has tons of cool stuff to look at, but it really does feel odd that a show about homes has so little to say about the experience of actually living in one.”

It’s a fair criticism, and I made a similar point-out in my own thoughts about the exhibit. I mused that it would have been instructive if the MOMA exhibit would have tried to make their presentation like a living history museum, such as Old Sturbridge Village, in which actors play the part of the period village inhabitants. It would have been interesting (and fun) to see people trying to live in the little neighborhood of prefab homes on display at MOMA. I think it would make life in an early American village look pretty good. They may not have had amenities back then, but they had space; and they may not have the blessing of modern structural materials to create high perches in metal, plywood and glass, but they had the blessing of being on a firm foundation, living in a dwelling built with solid, natural materials, and an intention of endurance, not with a built-in plan for a fast demise.

Since I agree with Arieff that the lives of people are what really matters in any new housing idea, I’m a little confused as to why Arieff references the Whitney Museum’s Buckminister Fuller exhibit and seems to suggest that, compared to the Home Delivery exhibit's architects, Fuller was correctly motivated and on the right track, even though he ultimately failed. If that is truly her point of view, I disagree. Even though I found fault with the houses displayed at Home Delivery, I applaud the fact that most of them are attempts to create innovative ways in which buildings could be built, rather than an attempt to create a perfect solution for how people should live.

Fuller’s focus was on people, yes, but he wanted to engineer their lives as much as he wanted to engineer a method of building. To go with his grand alternative, disrupting vision about structure, shape and space, he also had a parallel vision to reshape the daily lives of humans. The Dymaxion House, his most ambitious home-focused project, wasn’t just an innovative building. In Fuller’s view it was THE single solution to the big post WWII housing shortage. He saw Dymaxion as the way every family should live and assumed it would be heralded by all, and would wash across the country overnight, finally making all domestic life neatly organized and efficient, while also completely transforming the architectural landscape with a pox of his round pods. He may have been a genius, but he was also completely full of himself and wrong.

There are few things as personal as one’s home. To remove the inhabitants from the process of defining and organizing the spaces in their home is unfortunate; to postulate that people should submit to a pre-canned and identical home for everyone is both arrogant and ignorant. We are living mammals and after tens of thousands of years of evolution, our need to create our own nest is only more deeply refined and crucial. It is our home that defines us, makes us and remakes us, as we in turn define it, shape it and reshape it, in the constantly unfolding drama of our lives.

Therefore, the only good homebuilding solutions are the ones that create and expand potential, giving increased opportunities for the inhabitants to have the opportunity to self-express, self-create and constantly change. Conversely, bad homes are those that lock the inhabitants into a preconceived notion about who they are and how they should live, and gives them little opportunity to do otherwise. Fortunately, most of those attempts, like the Dymaxion House, fail pretty miserably. Some that exist, like the block buildings in the Communist countries, are evidence that even architecture is capable of being a high crime against the human spirit. Others, like the urban tenement housing projects of the 60s, were imploded to cheering crowds, demonstrating that the human spirit will eventually prevail over bricks and mortar.

But architects keep trying. The house as manufactured widget is still compelling, it seems. But it won’t work. Humans are boundless creatures. The best homebuilding ideas won’t attempt to tie them down; homes will be designed and configured to let their imaginations and lives soar free.