Steve reflects on his work and the field of environmentally sustainable building in this interview with Alex Wilson.
Steve Loken has been building houses and enjoying the Montana wilderness for fifteen years. In the mid-’80s, Steve began to see a conflict. The forests he so enjoyed were disappearing, the houses going up were getting bigger and bigger, and the lumber they had available to them was getting worse and worse. Out of that realization grew the idea of a demonstration house—ReCraft 90—that would showcase more resource-efficient materials. His research efforts evolved into the non-profit Center for Resourceful Building Technology and a busy schedule of speaking engagements throughout North America. Steve reflects on his work and the field of environmentally sustainable building in this interview with Alex Wilson.
EBN: Let’s start with wood, which is the focus of a lot of your work at CRBT. What do you have to say about wood as a building material today?
Loken: Wood’s an excellent material for building construction. I wish I could still use lots of good wood in the houses we put up. It’s renewable and environmentally benign if properly harvested. It’s easy to move around on the jobsite, it can be fabricated into larger pieces, and it’s easy work with. The problem is that we’ve been using so much of it for the last 300 years that, in the West and intermountain West, we’re at the point where we now have to go to very high elevations and very steep slopes to harvest extremely slow-growing timber that’s full of knots. This is not plantation timber up here. And what we’re doing to those fragile ecosystems that are highly erodible with short growing seasons is not good. I would like to think that we don’t have to turn the entire wood products industry into industrial forests where we grow trees in windrows like corn, although we are doing that in many many parts of the country. There is something very lively to me about a natural dynamic ecosystem. And I think it can be sustained. But in the building industry a lot of the responsibility falls on us to use that resource much more judiciously than we have in the past.
EBN: How should builders and designers balance the environmental advantages of wood with the concerns over resource limits?
Loken: Dealing with resource limits goes well beyond wood. I think it starts with population control—all of us have a personal stake in that. Secondly, I think we have to begin building smaller houses. We don’t need the square footage that we’ve gotten used to. It is projected by the Forest Products Laboratory that the square footage of houses will actually grow over the next decade. As the square footage of houses increases, so too does wood use. Through better design, including improved fenestration and space utilization, you can build a house that feels larger even though it isn’t. Making the connection between inside space and outside space is another real important way to give you an expansive feel of space.
On the issue of building materials, those that are light and strong, such as lightweight building panels, are often more resource efficient compared with those that are heavy and dense—even if the lighter materials are made from a nonrenewable resource. Energy efficiency also enters into the equation for designing for the ‘90s—making sure that houses are tight and well insulated. Then there’s embodied energy. If you’re using any manufactured or glue-based technology, the embodied energy goes up proportionally. But we need to be careful not to overemphasize embodied energy. It’s part and parcel to everything else we have to consider; something may have a much higher embodied energy, but perhaps its durability is much greater than a sawn board.
EBN: On the issue of laminated wood products, how do you answer the concerns related to indoor air quality—offgassing of chemicals from those adhesives?
Loken: Everyone knows that source control is the most important issue and that phenol formaldehydes, in proper formulation, don’t offgas nearly as much as urea-formaldehyde glues. They do still offgas, however. We’ve tried to find mostly isocyanate or phenol-based adhesives and we try to use pieces of wood that contain a smaller percentage of glue. With stair treads, for instance, instead of particleboard glued with urea formaldehyde, we use 2x2s edge-glued with phenol formaldehyde, so far less glue is required. And then we put in a whole house ventilation system, run continuously for three seasons of the year, to ensure that we get a good air change all the time, rather than relying on passive ventilation.
EBN: On the ReCraft 90 house, when you built the house a lot of the products and materials you used had to be special ordered; some were prototype materials under development. Are more of those materials now available?
Loken: Yes. For instance, Space Board, which was a research project of Forest Products Lab, has now gone into commercial production by a company called Gridcore, in Carlsbad, California. We see much greater use of the natural linoleum products now all over the West, as well as some of the natural-fiber carpets. Two of the tile products we used are now stocked as standard items everywhere from Boise to Denver to Missoula and Spokane. It’s almost like there’s this crescendo of activity happening. More and more people are suddenly aware of these things.
EBN: Could you comment on the learning curve for a builder who wants to try out new materials like these?
Loken: You have to have a real interest in it and a commitment to wanting to make it happen. I’ve seen three different builders in a room who have used the same material and have three different reactions to its use. One will say I’ll never use it again; another will say he had a great time with it—it really saved him a lot of hassle; and the third one will say he could go either way. So to me it’s really a function of the people you have working with you and your own attitude toward working with the material—assuming, of course, that the availability is there and that warranties are in place. It’s difficult to promote change in the building industry. New materials usually have to be cheaper or save a lot of labor before anyone will consider using them.
EBN: Since the time you built that ReCraft 90 house, are there some new products that have come along that you’re particularly excited about?
Loken: Yes, there are. This Gridcore product is very exciting to me because it means a whole new substrate for structural and dimensional application as well as door cores that are much stronger and have much better fire ratings. Gridcore is made from short-fiber recycled paper pressed into a laminar honeycomb and then laid up in different thicknesses, and then it’s faced with whatever facing material you want. The James B. Hardie Corporation, which makes a fiber-reinforced cement product, has become established in southern California and is now marketing their product all over the Southwest. Strawboard is another. It looks like a commercial plant is going to be built in the mid-Atlantic states. Strawboard will be used as a substrate for hardwood veneers in the furniture industry.
You’re going to see more and more development on the glue front, too. New glue bases are being developed constantly. Innovative Formulations Corp. makes a chlorine-based adhesive in Tucson that’s been in use now for 14 years. It’s made from saltwater, it’s chemically stable, and it’s flexible. It’s one of the best adhesives ever developed. As well as being used as a glue, it can be used as a waterproof membrane or vapor barrier, and it’s safe for rooftop water catchment systems. We’re working with the company right now to get some formulations created where it’s combined with straw and other paper products.
EBN: What’s next for you and CRBT?
Loken: What we’d like to do right now is try to attract some foundation support. We’d like about a quarter-million dollars to put together a multi-family or cluster housing project—an eight-plex, perhaps—that would be intergenerational in its market appeal. We see nationally an increase of 30 to 40% in the group consisting of the elderly—people on fixed income—and single mothers with children. These are people who have very few housing options. What we are hoping to do with this intergenerational cluster development is put to these two groups together to create at least the physical semblance of an extended family, and we think it could be a safe way to raise children and have them live in affordable and clean housing. We’ll do all this using the resource efficiency approach we used in the ReCraft 90 project. That’s one of the projects I’m real excited about.
EBN: What about publications? Anything new planned in terms of getting the word out?
Loken: We have a new handbook that will probably be off the press here in about a month. It describes fabrication of the ReCraft project: what things we did, why we did them, and what problems and successes we ran into in the application of some of these materials and technologies. That will hopefully act as kind of a rudder for builders and architects who want to try some new things themselves.
EBN: Anything else that you want to comment on relative to the environmentally sustainable housing field?
Loken: The whole experience of doing ReCraft 90 really underscored to me the importance of stewardship in our resource use, particularly in wood and forestry. Foresters may be doing a good job in areas or climates that have the ability to grow trees quickly, but unless we temper our incredibly rapid consumption of resources, I think trees are going to have a difficult time catching up to us.
CRBT’s
Guide to Resource Efficient Building Elements (reviewed in EBN
Vol. 1, No. 2) is available for $20 from CRBT, PO Box 3413, Missoula, MT 59806; 406/549‑7678.
