the commons » Regulations and Standards

Building Permit!

dustin — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 18:38:17 +0000

Finally, after many months and over $9,000 in fees we’ve our building permit in our hot little hands. We’ll be breaking ground either tomorrow or Monday. Stay tuned…

FSC vs. SFI

dustin — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 22:26:47 +0000

A nice 2001 case study by Yale comparing the Forrest Steward Council (FSC) and the American Forest & Paper Association’s Sustainable Forestry Initiative (SFI). Reading the summary of findings makes it all too clear that the SFI certification falls well short of being sustainable. Even Google seems to back this up – the number one result, when searching “SFI certification”, being dontbuysfi.com.

Seeing Red…

dustin — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 22:12:21 +0000

One of the biggest prerequisites of the Living Building Challenge is the Materials Red List – materials that are deemed toxic, persistent (in the environment) and otherwise unsavory to all involved and cannot be used on a Living Building. Upon first blush I didn’t assume this to be too difficult, but, to put it bluntly (my friends expect nothing else), it’s damn hard.

My latest bout with the red list has been fought over formaldehyde (both urea and phenol based). I assumed since formaldehyde is most famous for its usage in the preservation of all things dead and stored in coffins and big clear glass jars that it wouldn’t be too hard, in this era of green building, to spec. something without it. Wrong, dead wrong. All structural grade plywood, that I could find, contains formaldehyde… The exception came with Columbia Forest Products – who makes hardwood plywood, (for cabinets, etc.) which is free of formaldehyde, but of course it’s not an appropriate product for structural plywood. I thought I was going to face the same difficulty with Glulams, but good news -John Parr from Certified Forest Products can get me FSC glulams with PVAC (polyvinyl acetate) glue – the same stuff used, for over 20 years, in Elmer’s. So I’ve got to check with Cascadia to see if PVAC will fly, it doesn’t sound good, what with polyvinyl, but if it’s in Elmer’s glue it couldn’t be too bad, right? Right? The cynic in me is worried…

No more baby steps

dustin — Sun, 20 Apr 2008 20:11:01 +0000

After lots of coffee and many miles driven (we wish a craigslist rideshare could have materialized or the train schedule could have meshed with ours) Garrett and I have made our pilgrimage to the Living Future Unconference in Vancouver, BC and back to Portland. Jason McLennan, the CEO of the Cascadia Green Building Council, delivered a great opening talk on our, the building industry’s and society’s, need to shift from the current status quo way of living and building. He stated that people resist change big or small – the process of change is difficult for most people. He said that often when people try to change the status quo they do so in baby steps, hoping to make it more palatable for people, but since people don’t like change, even in baby steps, they resist and push back. So the baby step is met with resistance and subsequently the path towards the goal is modified. This process happens ad nauseam, affecting the trajectory away from the goal (see doodle below). With this paradigm in mind, Jason said it was time to make a radical change, no more baby steps. We couldn’t agree more – I’ve been telling people this for quite a while. The other analogy that I like, in this regard, is from Daniel Quinn – he says society is like an airplane, everybody thinks we’re flying, nobody notices that we’re actually in free fall…

We attended workshops; I attended Wholistic Engineering: Applied to a Living Building Water System (Mark Brewer from 2020 Engineering) and Big Barriers: Financing and Codes (Peter Wilcox of Renewal Associates, Clark Brockman of Sera Architects and David Eisenberg of Development Center for Appropriate Technology). Garrett attended The Birds, the Bees, the Flowers and the Trees: Biodiversity in the Urban Environment and Sustainable Design: Ecology, Architecture and Planning (Daniel Williams). Garrett presented in the “15 minutes of Brilliance” session in front of probably two to three hundred architects and building professionals, while I sat in the chair up on stage and “looked pretty.”

We met quite a few contacts who we’ll need to stay in touch with, people, I hope, that will want to help us achieve our goal. Overall it was a great experience and I’m looking forward to attending next year – hopefully we’ll be able to present on the commons in a completed or near complete stage.