Wall framing on a structure with an organically curved roof is going to be a little different. I've played around with lots of ideas. This post reflects my latest thinking. Rather than attempt to explain in writing I've created a short video which is embedded below.

 

Insulating the foundation of a building is important in order to prevent the concrete from acting as a thermal bridge. Othen this is done by applying foam board to the outside of the foundation's concrete walls. With a curved foundation wall I was curious how this might work. Yesterday I did a little test. I scored one side of a piece of 2" foam board and was then able to bend it without a problem. This should work very well with my foundation wall, which consists of short curves and longer straight runs.

I'm considering using Hemcrete® for the walls of the organically-curved structure I'm designing for my Yestermorrow practicum project. I learned about Hemcrete from Thomas Simon (of Hempfully Green) during Robert Riversong's Hygro-Thermal Engineering course at Yestermorrow last March. Thomas brought some samples of Hemcrete and shared them with the other students in the course during breaks. Recently he very kindly provided me with some materials so I could mix up and experiment with my own batch.

I built a simple curved form yesterday using some scrap wood. The curved sides were formed with brown fiber board, which can easily handle the gentle curves of my design.

I'm thinking of using PVC tubing for posts so I placed a piece of tube at the position where posts will be located.

The mixture is three parts hemp shiv (the woody core of Industrial Hemp) to one part water and one part a lime based binder called Tradical® HB.

The three parts mix up easily into a material that has the consistency of a dryish concrete.

Wearing gloves (the lime can do a job on skin) I hand placed and gently tamped the mixture into the form.

I'd seen Tom remove a form only a few minutes after loading and tamping in a mix of Hemcrete so I knew it should be OK to remove the formwork. Still, it was with a bit of trepidation that I gently started releasing the form. There was nothing to fear, the mix held its shape beautifully.

I'm very pleased with the experiment. The material is easy to work with, environmentally friendly, and handles curves with aplomb! 

Yestermorrow is a wonderfully creative and quirky design/build school I've been attending since last September. I'm in their Sustainable Building and Design certificate program and have just one weekend class left to complete my coursework. I've spent over six weeks in residence at the school since starting in September and have a pretty good sense of Yestermorrow's culture. My background is in education so while I've been absorbing all kinds of great information about design and building I've also been observing and thinking about the pedagogy used to convey that information. If I have any design strength it is in the use (and teaching of) SketchUp. Some of my SketchUp work can be found here and here.

In my three week sustainable design core class I was the only student who made significant use of SketchUp. I wrote about this experience in a previous blog post. There was an interesting discussion about SketchUp at the end of the my project's crit session. During this discussion it became clear that the Yestermorrow teaching community is struggling with whether to continue teaching traditional drafting techniques or bite the bullet and move to SketchUp. John Connell, Yestermorrow's founder, participated in that discussion and mentioned that he was going to teach a sustainable prefab design course in April in which SketchUp use would be required. I attended that course last week (see previous post) and want to share some thoughts about how SketchUp was taught/used.

Most students in the class arrived with very little SketchUp experience. There was an optional Sunday evening session for students who wanted help getting a handle on the program. The intuitive nature of SketchUp's interface, especially the Push/Pull tool, allows students to start using the program quickly, but without a solid understanding of good SketchUp practices a quick start can often lead to signifcant modeling problems down the road. That dynamic very much characterized the use of SketchUp for many in the class. There was much more frustration than there needed to be, and the students' house designs could have developed much further than they did.

So the question is, how to quickly develop good SketchUp use practices?

Here are some suggestions.

1. Require students read SketchUp for Dummies by Aiden Chopra before the class. Aiden is an architect and SketchUp employee. His book is by far the best introduction and reference to SketchUp that I've found.

2. Have a scanner in the classroom so that floor plan drafts done on paper can be scanned and imported into SketchUp. 

3. Teach students how to use groups and components as early as possible. All significant elements of models should be grouped as soon as they are created.

4. Show students how to grab site information from Google Earth as soon as possible.

5. Have students set up and memorize (or learn the default) keyboard shortcuts for at least the Move, Orbit, Push/Pull, Line and Hand tools. 

6. Require all students to have a mouse.

7. Teach students to pay attention to the hints that SketchUp is constantly providing.

8. Teach students how to effectively use the Dimensions box.

9. Provide a SketchUp house model made with best practices. This model could include basic elements which students could copy into their models.

In the following video I build a simple house model making use of some of the practices listed above. If students master the techniques I present in the video they would tend to have a much more positive experience with SketchUp, and teachers could focus more on design concepts and less on SketchUp. (Note: This video was made in one take and a number of the illustrated techniques could be better explained in shorter better prepared presentations.)

I had the distinct pleasure of attending a course on sustainable prefab housing last week at Yestermorrow. The course was taught by architects John Connell (who founded Yestermorrow) and Giocondo Susini. One couldn't ask for a more thoughtful, kind, knowledgeable and entertaining pair of teachers. John Connell is massively connected into the architectural and building community in the Mad River Valley and surrounding environs. These connections benefited the class via the field trips and speakers John was able to arrange.

My classmates were a delightful mix of folks hailing from as far away as Austin, Texas and having a wide range of design/build experience. Everyone was in good spirits and we all shared many ideas through the week as our projects developed.

I worked on a possible retirement house design based on modules offered by Huntington Homes, a family-owned company whose factory we visited early in the week. Below are a couple of renderingsof the ranch-style home model I developed that would use four HH modules for the main structure. The garage and screened porch would most likely be stick built on site. Larry Roux, a HH homes sales manager, was kind enough to provide a preliminary quote for the building, which I'm pleased to say was within our price range.

HH is producing a very well constructed module with a 12" thick double 2x4 wall using dense-pack cellulose for insulation. This wall assembly struck me as a good compromise solution to a super-insulated wall, reaching an R-value of around 40.

We also had a great visit to the Connor Homes factory. Connor produces all the components for its higher-end houses and ships them out to the building site as contractors are ready for them. They produce really beautiful versions of the region's tradtional vernacular architecture.

In addition to the field trips we had guest lectures from representatives of structural insulated panel (SIP) maker Vantem and the famous (at least to fans of This Old House) Benson Wood timberframe/prefab company. Both lectures were extremely informative.

The class used SketchUp right from the start for all our design work. Students were required to bring a computer to the class capable of running SketchUp. I applaud Yestermorrow for taking this step, and hope that they apply it to the core class for the Sustainable Design and Building certificate program. There are still some rough edges in the approach Yestermorrow is taking to using SketchUp (more on that in my next post) but it is definitely the right way to go in a world with increasingly powerful digital tools.

If you are considering building a home you could do yourself a big favor by attending a future meeting of this course. 

 

How to smooth a surface composed of irregular triangular faces like this?

It's a problem that I hope to solve using hard paper mache. If I can find a mache that hardens to the right consistency then I should be able to work up a smoothly curving surface by covering the triangles with a varying thickness parge of mache. This surface would need to be covered in turn with a waterproof layer of some kind; shingles or a monolithic membrane are both possibilities.

I've been using cellulose insulation for the paper ingredient of the mache experiments. I started with cellulose that uses ammonium sulfate as a fire retardent, and it produces a very strong and hard mache. There are some potential issues with ammonium sulfate however, so I'm also experimenting with cellulose that uses borate as a retardent. My first experiments with the borate cellulose were disappointing. The mache did not dry to the same hard consistency I've been obtaining with the ammonium sulfate cellulose. I'm continuing to experiment but suspect there may be something about the borate which interferes with the mix hardening and cohering. I recently mixed up identical batches of mache with the excepttion that each has only one of the cellulose varieties. The mixtures take about a week to dry fully so I should have a better sense by the end of April whether the borate cellulose will work.

I use 32 oz. plastic yogurt containers as my measuring unit. In the following ingredient list "cup" refers to one of these containers. The mix below seems to consistently produce a strong hard mache when using the ammonium sulfate cellulose.

1 cup industrial hemp fiber cut to 1" to 2" lengths (loose) *
1 cup cellulose (packed)
1 cup water
1/2 cup joint compound
1/2 cup saw dust
1" (in the cup) of wood glue

*I've also used cut up Phragmites tufts. which seem to work just fine.

Here's a picture of my laboratory. Very high tech.

To give you a sense of the strength of the mache I took this picture of a piece of mache bridging between 2x4s and supporting my full 200+ lbs.

In the next picture you can see the thickness of the mache piece in the image above.

A hard stable strong mache has many possible uses in building construction. I think of it as being almost like moldable wood. Definitely an interesting material with potential. If you are doing any experiments with hard mache, or would like more information about my experiments, please get in touch!

 

 

Last weekend I attended a welding class at The Steel Yard in Providence. The Steel Yard is kind of an urban version of Yestermorrow. They offer courses in metalworking, ceramics and jewelery. I hoped a welding course would help me make progress with my exploration of using steel for the hubs in my roofing framework. While I picked up a few ideas for hubs, the course, and the instructors, were not really geared to this problem. The lead instructor, Nora Rabins, did have some suggestions about using a mix of aluminum and steel. She also might be able to prototype some steel hubs if I need to do that down the road.

I did become much more familiar with steel and some of the tools available to work with this material which is so essential to our civilization. My favorite tool was a horizontal bandsaw steel cutter that is probably older than me. It was quiet, simple, slow and very effective. 

MIG welding, once you get the hang of it, is quite enjoyable. Most of Saturday was spent receiving instructions and demonstrations about how to use welding, cutting and grinding tools. On Sunday we started off with a project in which we split into two groups and each group had to build half of a bridge that would eventually connect to the other group's half. It was a chance to brainstorm how to connect various shapes of steel and lots of practice with the MIG welders. We collectively produced a delightfully funky structure.

After going through a bit of a funk on Saturday when I realized that I was not going to be able to prototype a steel hub, as the materials to do this just weren't available, I hit on the idea of producing a logo for my organically curved roofing system. I used my iPad and the Paper app to draw the shape I wanted, then rummaged through the available steel inventory for the pieces I'd need.

On Sunday, after we finished the bridge, I used the bandsaw to cut the pieces I needed and then spent some time with a wire brush removing rust from the base plate. I was planning on using the Oxy-Acetylene torch to heat up the bar I needed to curve for the roof line element, but Mark, the class TA, showed me how to bend the piece using a simple bending jig. After I'd bent the roof piece into something like the shape I wanted (I had a limited amount of time before we had to drive back to New York) it took only a few minutes to weld everything together with the MIG. For a first attempt I think it turned out reasonably well.

This is the first post documenting design efforts related to my Yestermorrow practicum project process; which must be completed by September 7th. The outcome of the process will be a complete set of buildable plans for a small curved-roof studio. The project proposal is available here. An earlier, more visual version, is available here.

I've been doing some preliminary sketches of the type of building form I'm trying to achieve.

With this project I hope to make a small contribution toward bringing to residential architecture a design vocabulary similar to that revolutionizing commercial and institutional architecture.

I've arrived where I am in the design process through the help of many considerate and knowledgeable people. I hope if you have thoughts or suggestions about this project you will share them. Comments are most welcome!

 

The New York Times ran an article titled "A Silicon Valley School That Doesn’t Compute" on the front page of Sunday's paper. The first picture below, accompanied the story, and was also on the front page. The second picture is explained in my comments, also below.

Will Richardson, Jonathan Martin, and Ira Socol all wrote good rebuttals to the article in their blogs.

I wrote a short comment in response to Richardson's post, then a longer one prompted by a comment by Paul Thomas.

Loved the picture of the girl lying on the desks engrossed in her book. Would it really have made any difference if she was reading from a kindle and not a paper book? No. What was great was that she was clearly enjoying what she was reading and that the school was cool with her lying on the desks.

The big flaw in the school's mindset, and the author's, is not being clear that books, pens, pencils, desks, blackboards, chalk, lights, etc.. are all technologies. They are all, like computers, human inventions. 

Plato thought writing would destroy thinking. I suspect he was just uncomfortable with a new technology and rationalized an argument to avoid overcoming his discomfort.

Technologies of any kind don't make or break a great school. It's what's done with the stuff that matters.

Time showed Plato was wrong. Time will also show the no computers approach is wrong.

 

Back when chalkboards were the new technology many felt about them the way you do about interactive whiteboards. I like Alan Kay's thought related to this. "Technology is anything invented after you were born, everything else is just stuff." There is a natural human tendency to feel the stuff that was around when we were young is more legitimate than the technology that came later. 

Steve Jobs touched on this in his Stanford commencement address.

"No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because death is very likely the single best invention of life. It is life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new."

Yes, Capitalism promotes creative destruction, and Jobs embraced that ethic, but really, what's the alternative? Become Amish? Choose some random period of time and lock that time's technology in place?

I'm all for curbing rampant commercialism, forcing corporations to be responsible for recycling the products they sell, and schools making decisions about new technology thoughtfully and carefully. Having been the director of technology at a K-12 school for many years I know that it's impossible to always make the right call on new technologies. (My biggest goof was buying twenty Apple eMates.) I also know that experimentation is absolutely necessary, and that when you experiment you make mistakes, but that's not a bad thing, it's called learning.

One could argue that experimenting with technology is expensive, and may crowd out expenditures on tried and true technologies. This is not what I've experienced in my almost 30 years working in independent schools. In fact, as information technology has become more powerful I've seen the more traditionalist oriented educators become strong advocates of computers. 

Automating library card catalogs made it easy for librarians to see which books -year after year- aren't circulating. It turns out there are a lot of them sitting on the shelves gathering dust. This has caused school librarians to wonder if their role is to shelter unused books or is it to help students find and evaluate the information they need.

An ancestor of mine was a very successful clipper ship builder in East Boston. His firm wasn't able to make the transition from sail to steam driven ships. One could say they failed to see that they were in the boat building business, not the sail-driven wooden boat building business.

We can make the same mistake today, and fail to see that schools are in the education business, not the book, blackboard, pen and paper education business.

I've been going through a frustrating phase with the curved-roof prototyping project, but had an insight today having to do with fractals and recursion. One of the challenges involves supporting a roof membrane with a triangular irregular network (TIN) structure. Adding smaller triangular structures on top of the larger triangular structures may provide one solution. 

This is just one of many, many problems that need to be resolved, but having a possible solution gives me encouragement to soldier on.

Now if I could only get some help making these.

We would be well on our way to making these.