form, function & cutting edge: west coast sustainable/alternative housing

Distinct West Coast landscapes coupled with a population with an independent streak—everyone from ’60s back-to-the-landers to top-flight architects like Arthur Erickson—have produced innovative home design here in B.C. All over the province there is an interest not just in building smarter for ecological reasons but building different, sometimes just for the fun of it.

To some, this means getting their hands dirty by building cob housing—using a mix of straw, sand and clay to build a The cozy interior and exterior of a modern yurt (Yurtco Mfg)durable structure as evidenced in English homes dating back to the 16th century. To others, building smart means laying down clean modernist lines on the computer screen to design energy-efficient homes that will waste zero building materials while under construction.

With a wealth of island homes showcasing environmentally friendly features—everything from the most up-to-date solar heating systems to hemp straw bale walls to recycled blue jean insulation—the Salt Spring Island Conservancy thought it might be a good idea to offer up an Eco-Home Tour in 2005. The organization was wowed with an attendance of 400 in its first year and has since drawn an audience of more than 600 people.

The home with the recycled blue jean insulation belongs to Paul and Becky Niedziela, who run the design firm Ravenisle Graphics out of their home. After a year of research into various alternative home design and construction techniques, the Niedzielas decided that a single approach couldn’t quite fulfill their aesthetic interests, environmental aims and climate requirements. With the help of specialists at Cobworks on nearby Mayne Island, they began with a main floor surrounded by cob walls and finished the house with a stacked cord wood construction. The result (see www.ravenisle.com/cob for action photos) is a unique 1700 sq. ft. home that marries the heavy, earthy curves of cob with an airy West Coast second floor.

Tom Chudleigh’s Free Spirit Spheres are habitable
tree houses for the 21st century (Tom Chudleigh)“Because of the health concerns associated with most insulation, such as glass shards and formaldehyde, I decided to look for alternatives,” says Paul. “ I looked into recycled paper cellulose but thought it might not be right for our climate. And then I came across the recycled blue jean insulation made by a company called Bonded Logic, sold at the Environmental Home Centre in Seattle.”

Designs that nestle naturally into the landscape, like the Niedzielas’ home, are one approach but the future may serve up something radically different if a new direction in architecture takes off.

Carsten Jensen’s “E Cube” sounds more like a Macintosh product than a home design, but that’s not a bad connotation given the tech company’s reputation for innovation. Jensen aims high, dedicated to incorporating new environmental features into his glowing white modernist frames. Four designs ranging from 1398 to 2244 sq. ft. are featured online at www.carstenjensenarchitect.com

Jensen opened an office in Qualicum Beach, B.C. in 2004 with an eye to focusing on sustainable, prefabricated designs. He did his post-graduate work in enviro-friendly prefab design at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts after a master’s degree at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, one of the foremost architecture schools in the U.S.

The clay and cob exterior of the Niedziela home
while under construction (Paul Niedziela)Jensen, who maintains an office in London, Ontario for commercial work, is one in a growing cadre of architects who are on a mission to make the term “prefab” synonymous with “cutting edge” rather than “cookie-cutter”—which suggests the post-war tract homes that defined the rise of the suburb. The idea is to reduce construction costs and waste by offering consumers a variety of stylish factory-built homes that are easily assembled on site.

“It will require half of the energy needed for heating and cooling the average home,” Jensen says of the E Cube. “This is done mainly through insulation. The object is to decrease reliance on fossil fuels until it’s completely autonomous.”

Jensen says the prefab advantage is that a home can be built “better, faster, and with less waste. Typically 15 to 20 percent of building materials in new home construction end up going straight to the landfill. With the prototype, we have no waste. We don’t even have a disposal bin on site.”

The 2244 sq. ft. E Cube prototype, completed in August on Jensen’s College Rd. property in downtown Qualicum, includes features for rainwater harvesting, thermal solar collectors for hot water pre-heat and supplemental space heating, and green roof technology. Two other E Cube projects are under construction, one in the Queen Charlotte Islands and the other in southern Ontario. Jensen says construction costs are comparable to the provincial average—$150-180 per sq. ft.

Artist’s rendering of the first E Cube home
to be built by Jenesys Buildings Corp in
Qualicum Beach, B.C. (Niklas Andersson)Jensen readily admits that consumers have been slow to buy into the new directions in prefab but such designs certainly have had no shortage of media coverage in recent years. In fact, they have been met with great enthusiasm in architecture, design and visual arts circles.

“It’s not a boom industry, it’s a stealth industry and I can tell you why prefab has become popular in one word—Dwell,” Jensen says referring to the popular U.S. lifestyle magazine that has teamed up with architectural firms to create designs for the “Dwell Home.” (See www.thedwellhome.com).

The art exhibit Some Assembly Required: Contemporary Prefabricated Houses, featuring the Dwell designs and others, was assembled by the Walker Art Centre in Minneapolis and seen at the Vancouver Art Gallery in the fall of 2006 (see design.walkerart.org/prefab). The Emily Carr Institute of Art + Design’s Innovations in Wood Design program weighed in with Build + Carry, bringing together ECIAD design students and UBC architecture students to work on prefab designs in a workshop that included a field trip to BCIT’s Centre for the Advancement of Green Roof Technology.

Is all this energy on prefab design going to add up to actual homes being erected? Or is it just an academic pursuit driven by the soaring price of oil?

The rustic upstairs bathroom at the Niedzielas’
home on Saltspring Island displays the combination
of clay/pine walls and fir floors (Paul Niedziela)Jensen is cautiously optimistic: “The wind has blown in this direction before, in the ’70s, during the oil crisis, but then it shifted as oil prices went down and interest vanished. But oil is $70 a barrel now and could easily go up to $100 as we approach peak oil. After that we’re looking at $300 to $400 per barrel, at which point it seems to me ridiculous to burn oil to heat homes.”

With a different take on prefabrication is Yurtco, which draws inspiration from homes Mongolian nomads have made portable for millennia. The Burnaby-based company shipped approximately 100 of their customized 12 ft. to 32 ft. versions of the round, domed fabric and log structures in 2006. About 80-85 percent of sales are domestic, although they’ve also shipped globally to Australia, Asia, France and all over the United States, including Alaska.

The yurt in North America premiered in a back-to-the-land phase over the past few decades but Yurtco sales and marketing director Beverley Hamann says, “There’s no longer a typical customer. We see one go up in a new area and suddenly there will be more orders from a similar location.”

She says buyers are often looking for a funky cabin option and like the high-ceiling ambiance—but also the safety and durability. Yurtco testimonials include a note of pride from a Japanese owner whose home withstood a hurricane, and a warm and fuzzy letter from an owner in northern Alberta who relaxed by his wood stove while a –45°C wind chill threatened outdoors. Another area of growth is the resort market where owners are seeing yurts rented before more traditional structures.

Cedar staircase with fir railing and
fir/pine walls in the Niedzielas’
home (Becky Niedziela)Yurtco’s edge in the market is that rather than two-by-fours, their yurts are built of ecologically harvested lodgepole pine beams and latticework of Douglas Fir. The walls are a space-age vinyl.

The base price ranges from $5,280 (12 ft.) to $16,880 (32 ft.). A fully insulated 32-ft. yurt with 60-inch French doors, rain catchment system and bronze-tinted dome would double the bill. Assembly takes you and a few good friends from between four hours to four days of committed work, which doesn’t sound so bad for those of us who’ve spent as much time struggling with various IKEA constructions. Check out the assembly video on the Yurtco site at www.Yurtco.com.

In a natural/futuristic twist on alternative design, Tom Chudleigh’s Free Spirit Spheres are tree houses for the 21st century. “Eryn”, for example, is a spruce sphere 3.2 metres in diameter suspended from trees on Chudleigh’s property about 45 minutes north of Nanaimo. There is a full galley and loft bed. The floors are made of Costa Rican teak.

Could you live in one? Chudleigh says a man from the U.S. has been renting one for two months. Free Spirit Spheres rent by the day or week—Eryn for $150 per night and the smaller Eve for $100 (see www.freespiritspheres.com).

If spherical is a shape that suits you, Chudleigh will fashion you a fibreglass version moulded from Eryn starting at $150,000 USD. He recently sold one to a British investment banker for his summer home in Nice, France. At the end of the summer, Chudleigh placed another sphere swinging in the trees—this one for a studio shared by eight masseuses.

Chudleigh ultimately envisions a more secluded site for his world of spheres. “Maybe up on the Sunshine Coast on one of those little fjords—some place with only float plane access.”