I recently got a query from one of the editors of Mother Earth News regarding a news story she had read in the New York Times. The writer, David Pogue, had been a judge in a contest sponsored by by the History Channel and the National Inventors Hall of Fame titled "Modern Marvels/Invent Now." A $25,000 prize was awarded to one amoung 25,000 contestants, and the winner was the Enertia House, which was invented by engineer and former log-home architect, Michael Sykes.

The Mother Earth News editor said that these homes had been featured in their magazine before. They essentially provide two wooden shells for the home, one inside the other. She said that there was no mention in the article about the cost per square foot. She was wondering what I thought about the concept from the standpoint of sustainable architecture.

Here is my response:

Double envelope house designs have been around for several decades and they definitely offer some benefits, as well as raise some questions. Any house that takes advantage of the geothermal properties of the ground will be doing its inhabitants and the earth a good turn. This can take the form of earth-sheltering in general, or some clever system of circulating air like the Enertia concept; coupled with sensible passive solar design, it is possible to approach a "zero energy" home.

The concerns about their system that I have are: The use of wood as the primary building material is not generally sustainable in this day of lost forests. With the double envelope design, you are practically building two houses to end up with one. Relying on wood as a thermal mass material compromises the potential thermal performance because wood does not serve this function nearly as well as traditional masonry thermal mass materials. So, I guess what I am saying is that a more sustainable and less costly design can be accomplished in more traditional ways.

Answering the same question, Paul Scheckel wrote, "At first glance, this looks a lot like sunspace design from the 70s (without the stone-filled basement to store heat) which overheated in the daytime and lost lots of heat at night. Consider also that this giant convection oven requires a temperature difference, which in this case is driven by the sun and the cool basement. A New England winter has precious little sun, so my heating system will drive the convective loop, increasing heat loss (in addition to the insulation-free envelope). I haven't heard too many people (ie: none) say that wood is bad for houses and better for biodiesel, but there are good arguments for not using so much material in a home. Does it work? I'd like to see one built in the northeast and see the resulting energy data, wherein the proof will lie."

Clark Snell of www.thinkgreenbuilding.com wrote, "I spent five minutes looking over the web site, so these comments are only based at looking at marketing materials, i.e. they may be inaccurate. Ditto what has been said so far. A couple more “red flags:”

1. Solid wood envelope. They seem to be using the old “mass enhanced R-value” argument for why solid wood walls perform well thermally. I think it’s well established that this is true only in very specific climatic situations. Touting solid southern yellow pine walls in comparison to solid white pine walls is like saying a Chevy Suburban gets better gas mileage than a Hummer…that’s not really a useful statistic.
2. Energy without oil. The presentation intimates that this is a completely passive design. For example, no heating system is mentioned. That simply isn’t credible for most climates using the technology they are describing.
3. Passive means local. You simply can’t create a design that relies heavily on passive techniques and generalize it across climates. In my area where we have high humidity, I’d wonder about this convective loop through the attic and basement, for example.

I could go on. I’m a passive design freak, so I’m all for the basic concepts they are dealing with. However, I don’t see anything really new here, but see marketing claims touting what they are doing as a major breakthrough and “the answer”. That always makes me nervous."

David Eisenberg, of www.dcat.net wrote, "After a skimming around their website, I see that they sell kits and their base prices don't include a lot of things - some of which are enumerated:

Finley Residence

Architecture & Interiors by: Avroko
Location: New York, USA
Specialty: Restaurants, Hotels, Residential, Convept Development, Furniture
Project Highlights: Sapa, Quality Meats, European Union, Park Avenue Summer
Interior Photography: Avroko



Park Avenue Summer

Just a couple of quick things:

The wonderful blog DO Research has closed shop - it is already missed. The upside is they've bought land and are building a Flatpak. I am wildly jealous!

Read the story behind the sea container Holyoke Cabin on the Hive Modular blog. So cool.

Skinny Japanese Houses on eye candy (via Things Magazine). Only in Japan [sigh].

The amazingly hip Alan Family Happy New House is complete. Check it out in The New York Times. It turned out just like the renderings - very, very cool. It shows you just how much you can do with a remodel.

I just picked up a good book, Small Eco-houses. Loaded with interesting, green, modern homes from all over the world. Two thumbs up!

it won’t take you long to figure out that dolan geiman’s chicago place isn’t what we typically feature in our sneak peeks. but looking through his images and reading through his descriptions felt like i was unlocking a treasure chest full of great stories and memories into the world of dolan geiman. it’s funny to think about where everything we own comes from and the stories behind it. and it’s very clear from dolan’s work how his surroundings inspire him. be sure to click here for more full-sized images, with complete descriptions, and you can find more of his work here (psst…there’s a sale!) and his blog here with all sorts of fun stuff he has in the works. [thanks dolan and ali!] -anne

[Above: This is the area I refer to as “the waiting room”.  This is where my pal Chris Nightengale, fashion photographer extraordinaire, does some of his shoots. The mint colored chest of drawers is entirely metal and was a gift from my friend Denny, who always has been a wonderful inspiration in my life. He lugged this heavy thing to me when I was down on my luck and living in an unheated rat-hole apartment in Virginia. Now it looks a little better, as does my luck.  I found the globe in a dumpster in Charleston, South Caroline, and the artwork, Jazz Atlas (2008), is one of my collage constructions made from magazines I found in old farm houses. [Photo credit: David Schalliol]

Yours truly at work. . . This is the Art Machine. There is a long story behind the Art Machine, but essentially I made this out of old doors and found objects from a soon-to-be-demolished house I was living in when I first moved to Chicago.  Hockshop refers to the name of my previous studio and gallery in the Pilsen neighborhood of Chicago. Under the moniker Hockshop, the Art Machine debuted in Chicago during a yacht-based art show organized by Bridge Magazine (now called Bridge Art Fair, they produce expositions in London, Miami, New York, and elsewhere). The top of the Art Machine is an old canvas tent that my granddad used when hunting in Canada and which I screenprinted with various images. The little squares of metal on the front are hand-cut signs I grabbed in a scrap yard in Stuarts Draft, Virginia. The little Panel Paintings, on the wall behind the Art Machine, are the staple of my art business. I make about 1000 of these things a year, out of recycled wood, recycled paint, and water-based silkscreen ink.  This is my carnival area, I like to say, because the combination of the Art Machine and the Panel Paintings presents a nice sideshow feel. [Photo credit: David Schalliol]

This is a cabin-like installation just inside the front entrance of my studio.  I created this out of salvaged wood, found billboards, and old signs I’ve found along the road driving to and from art fairs. The raw wood slats were given to me by my pals over at Circa Ceramics who were using them as shelving. I found the deer head while exploring an abandoned barn in Ohio. I saw one of the antlers sticking out of the floorboards. The rusted milk can was used by my dad when he milked cows as a kid. The old glass bottles adorning my bottle tree surfaced outside my warehouse building when the City dug up the cobblestone street in preparation for resurfacing the road. The green bucket is full of shotgun shells I gathered from a shooting range in southern Illinois. The buoys have been collected from various coastal towns including Key West, Cape Cod, and New Orleans. I grabbed the screen door from an abandoned general store in Virginia, and I bought the lentil above the door at a yard sale here in Chicago for only five dollars. I’ve started collecting green and greenish-blue boxes from abandoned warehouses here in Chicago. [Photo credit: David Schalliol]

This is the back side of the entryway installation.  This is where I feel most like a mad scientist. And yes, in case you’re wondering, there is a whiskey flask in the bottom drawer. I found the chair in an old farm house in North Carolina and screenprinted the back and seat myself. The desk was left in the basement of my last apartment and could kill an elephant if it fell on it. I had to use a truck jack and three retired football players to transport the desk when we moved into this space. The framed oil painting on the floor was hanging in my grandma’s den when I was a kid. She was trying to throw it out when I intercepted it.  The red dolly in the corner I bartered from an old (semi) drunk barber for two six-packs of Old Style beer. I think he got the better deal, but at least it looks cool. I snagged the green metal hanging light from a warehouse here in Chicago. Above my desk is one of my inspiration clotheslines. I’ve found this is the best way for me to display various ideas and my notes to myself. The little white paintbrush holder sitting on my desk with the face on it is a ceramic mug made by my pal Ed Brownlee. Ed is about two pints away from being mistaken for a criminal, but he’s a damn good artist and has an enormous heart. [Photo credit: David Schalliol]

Our building has a green roof, which Ali helped plant, and this is where the plants were stored before they were given the outdoor penthouse suite. The equipment featured in the photo is one of our landlord’s lathes; he collects old, industrial machinery amongst other things.

This is my little shrine to Johnny Cash. On the day Johnny Cash passed away, I was getting ready for an opening at Unit B Gallery, formerly in Chicago and now in Austin. The work I was showing was loaded with connotations of death and resurrection and was called the Tombsigns of St Emmeline. The synchronicity of the event was really overwhelming and would have seemed spooky, except that I seem to attract energy like that and I am open to it. The week before I was eating pizza in St Louis and some kid was skateboarding nearby with a boom box and he was playing Johnny Cash’s last recording. When I asked him about it, he said he didn’t know it was Johnny Cash, and that he had just found the tape under a tree and liked the sound. I found the whiskey jug on the bottle tree in the dirt behind the warehouse. The butterflies are screenprinted on wood and were part of a spring window display for a local shoe store . . . I use one corner of the studio for staging photos, both for Etsy and for print brochures. The mantel was a gift from a T-shirt printer (48 Industries) in the building, a fellow scavenger. [Photo credit: David Schalliol]

Stuff I love: plastic dice, old painted nail, orange train ticket to California (1898), list of numbers in Spanish, green feed tag, hand-drawn family album for collage, Virginia text from a high school Math book cover. [Photo credit: David Schalliol]

In this entryway installation close-up, the fresh eggs (fresh eyes) sign was a studio warming gift passed on to me from my buddy, artist Michael Merck, who grabbed it from a little Mexican street cart.  I found the paintbrush hanging on a hook in a bathroom of a warehouse I was occupying while living in Virginia. It’s the only paintbrush I own that’s never been used for painting.  Below the brush is a catfish sinker I bought when I went fishing in Kentucky last year.  The rooster painting, Dirt Road Series IX, is one of my own, silkscreen and acrylic on recycled wood available here. He’s a good pet and doesn’t eat food or make any noise.  He just sits there lookin’ pretty. The books to the left of the rooster are my sketchbooks.  I use old books for my sketchbooks, pasting ideas and collage materials into the existing pages, instead of buying new white-paged, sterile sketchbooks. I think it’s important to be surrounded by many different textures, so I started collecting the softballs over the past four or five years. Almost every time I make a trip down to a river, I find softballs stuck in leftover flood debris and so I started saving them in this locker room bin. If you like metal baskets like this one, you can find some here. The blue oar is a mystery. I found it one night in the middle of the road while I was driving through West Virginia. The strange part was that one end of the oar was tied to a tennis shoe.  I kept the oar; the shoe didn’t fit, so I left it. Above the fresh eggs (fresh eyes) sign is a wooden gun I made from a piece of billboard I found in Indiana and then adorned with little metal objects from an old trade school parking lot. Finally, the rooster painting is sitting on an old hen crate, used by my granddad to take chickens to market. Ali won’t let me get chickens yet, but I’m working on it. [Photo credit: Kara Elliott-Ortega]

Included in this shot are an Ed Brownlee mug (paintbrush holder), comic book collage materials, old picture frames found in a barn in Kentucky, a bluebird collage in progress, and a couple print proofs. Used paint cans, thrift store mugs, and Quaker Oats bins are used to hold brushes, pens, and markers.[Photo credit: Kara Elliott-Ortega]

‘sleep’, 2008 (source imagery: jean-bernard restout)

deitch projects, new york
november 1 - december 20, 2008

‘down’ is an exhibit of new paintings by kehinde wiley which opened earlier this month at new york’s
deith projects. a wide selection of wiley’s large-scale works will be on show including four new works
each referencing images of fallen warriors, saints, and classical mythology. using source imagery
from classical paintings, wiley contemporizes them with elements of other painting styles including
graffiti. wiley also examines the notion of ‘the master painter’, while also casting young black males
in the role of the subject.

http://www.deitch.com
http://www.kehindewiley.com

all photography by max yawney


‘morpheus’, 2008 (source imagery: jean-antoine houdon)


‘christian martyr tarcisius’, 2008 (source imagery: auguste falguiere)


‘the virgin martyr st. cecilia’, 2008(source imagery: stefano maderno)


‘femme piquee par un serpent’, 2008 (source imagery: auguste clesinger)


‘lamentation over the dead christ’, 2008 (source imagery: mantegna)


‘a dead soldier’, 2008 (source imagery: velasquez)


‘down’ by kehinde wiley, installation view at deitch projects

An idea whose time seems to have arrived is the use of stockpiled shipping containers as modular units for building homes. Because of the balance of trade in the United States, these hefty steel boxes are piling up in ports around the country and posing a storage problem. Several architects and builders are taking advantage of this surplus to recycle the containers.

According to David Cross of www.sgblocks.com, "a container has 8000 lbs of steel which takes 8000 kwh of energy to melt down and make new beams etc... Our process of modifying that entire 8000 lbs of steel into a "higher and better use" only takes 400 kwh of electrical energy (or 5%). Granted it takes a bit more "muscle" but we call this Value-Cycling which we feel is that next step up from Re-cycling."

Each container measures 8 feet wide by 40 feet long by 9 feet tall. SG Blocks sells the finished structural systems (also called SG Blocks) for $9,000 to $11,000 per unit. The finished units have one or two walls removed and include the necessary support columns and beam enhancements.

According to KPFF Consulting, a structural engineering firm in St. Louis with extensive experience working with shipping containers, the units are stronger than conventional house framing because of their resistance to "lateral loads" -- those seen in hurricanes and earthquakes -- and because steel is basically welded to steel. The roof is strong enough to support the extra weight of a green roof — which has vegetation growing on it — if the owner should want it.

As for their energy efficiency, they claim that when the appropriate coatings are installed, the envelope reflects about 95 percent of outside radiation, resists the loss of interior heat, provides an excellent air infiltration barrier and does not allow water to migrate in.

One idea that has occurred to me is that this system might benefit from the use of SIP's (Structural Insulated Panels) for the roofs, rather that standard truss framing. SIP's are very well insulated, install quickly, and use much less wood than convention roofs.

Shipping containers are self-supporting with beams and stout, marine-grade plywood flooring already in place, thereby eliminating time and labor during the home-building process. Cross said construction costs are comparable to those in conventional building. Four to seven units are used in a typical home, he said.

Instead of nailing the siding they use "Super Therm", a ceramic paint made by Superior Products of Minnesota; it can be used as a paint, an adhesive, an insulator, a fireproofing material and an acoustic barrier. With this ceramic paint, they claim the insulation capacity is equal to a conventional house.

Adam Kalkin, of www.architectureandhygiene.com , has also become enamored with shipping containers as an architectural solution. The idea to do something with shipping containers came to Kalkin, a New Jersey resident, when driving to New York City, where he saw sky-high stacks of the unused cargo containers in the shipyards he passed.

"The cargo containers, with a life span of about 20 years when used for their original purpose, have an “infinite life span” when stationary and properly maintained," Kalkin says. “To me they are like a treasured antique: they may not be inherently valuable, but the history and the storytelling add value.”

Environmentalists have embraced the design, applauding the recycling inherent to Kalkin's designs. And advocates for affordable-housing like the design, since according to Kalkin, "the total cost of a house—between $150,000 and $175,000 after the buyer settles upon the various options—works out to be between $73 and $90 per square foot, about half the cost of the conventional $200 per square foot for reasonable quality, new construction in the Northeast.”

Kalkin has recently opened a factory—“a hangar at a little airport in New Jersey”—to manufacture Quik Houses. “There are a lot of elbows flying in this process, and this is the best way to protect the quality of the house, to keep the accounting transparent, and to make sure I am not unwittingly responsible for heinous crimes to the built environment.” Once the factory is fully functional, Kalkin plans to export many of his products, commenting that “the possibilities of working on a world scale are exciting.”

Twenty-one thousand containers hit American shores every day of the year. Containers can be shipped to the interior of the country via trains and trucks. Shipping containers are like Lego toys and the modules can be assembled in thousands of ways.

In general it is a good thing to recycle materials that otherwise have no further use for their intended purpose, and this is true here. As for whether one can make a comfortable house out of these metal boxes, the biggest question is: insulation...it is essential, but there are many ways to insulate these containers, so this is not a big concern. Another concern that many people would have is whether a metal box would have adverse health effects because of EMF (electro-magnetic frequencies) generation or propagation. Some people are sensitive to these while others are not.

There is no doubt that these containers can be used to fabricate very strong shells that would withstand substantial abuse from the ravages of nature.