THANKS!!!

18 years ago in December of 1993, I had just finished a degree in psychology, Linda was teaching and our Daughter, Kira, was a baby. I started taking on small remodeling projects intended to last until May when we would move to Austin for graduate school.

Times were good and I soon had a couple of employees and lots of work. Graduate school deferred. But I have not given up on learning. In fact it has been a little like perpetual graduate school.

Thanks to our wonderful clients and team members for a great 18 years!!! Using a new blog that will soon be on our web site and our company Facebook page, we will provide a resource for homeownership as a means of giving back. We hope that you find this useful. If you have any suggestions, we would love to hear them.

Getting Into the Gutter

Roof gutters are a functional necessity. They help direct water away from the home avoiding rot, mold splash-back and other undesirable circumstances.

Sometimes, with an integrated design, landscaping can be used to break up water as it falls from the roof placing it into immediate use for nearby plants.

Gutters can become an architectural feature.

Or they can even become an artistic feature.

Unfortunately gutters can also cause a lot of problems, if they are not properly installed and maintained. If gutters and downspouts are not regularly cleaned they can become clogged and back up causing rot on the fascia behind the gutter and the soffit under the gutter.

Though messy, gutters are a maintenance item that can easily be done by the home owner. We recommend cleaning gutters in late December and again in early March. These are just after the two times of year in Central Texas that most leaves fall.

Because of the amount of damage that can be caused without it, we provide gutter cleaning services for our regular customers. If you are agile and motivated this is a good way to spend a couple hours getting intimate with your home.

Air Filters

How often do you change the air filters in you your home? Did you know that if you use traditional filters you should change them every Month? Regularly changing your air filters will:

• Help reduce the dust in your home.
• Help maintain healthy air quality in your home.
• Help extend the life of your Ac equipment.

Here are some hints to help you with this important household chore:

• Change your filters on the 15^th of the month (we will remind you.)
• Write the date on the filter so that you know when you last changed it.
• Make sure that the filter fits tight so that air does not leak around it rather than going through it. Fold a piece of paper towel and place it at the outside edge of the frame to help push the filter tight against the frame if necessary.

TRANSITIONS - A New Approach

At Stearns Design-Build we have developed a design theory that deviates a bit from traditional green design. Traditionally, green design has focused almost entirely on a building's relationship to the natural environment, in an effort to minimize the home's energy consumption. While we recognize the importance of the relationship of a building to its environment, we feel that the inhabitant's relationship to the natural environment is more at issue. Home energy consumption is only part of the overall picture of sustainability.

Transitions to the natural environment

Traditional green design creates ultra-insulated, airtight boxes that tend to isolate people from the natural environment. Our designs invite people into their natural environment . While this may not be the most dramatic way to limit a building's energy transfer, it does help encourage people to be better connected to the environment and to their community. We call this theory of design, Transitions.

Modern home design is a study in isolation. We once had walkable neighborhoods, and homes with large windows and big porches. Now neighborhoods are often built without sidewalks and homes are built without usable porches. A typical homeowner drives up to their home, pushes a button to drive inside the house (garage,) then closes the garage door, shutting out community and nature before even getting out of the car. Their time at home is not spent on the porch listening to birds and in conversation with neighbors; it is spent in front of the television or computer, shut off from community and natural environment. This may be a good way to conserve home energy but it does not create a sustainable lifestyle.

Green Materials

The construction of our homes consumes huge amounts of natural resources. We should be very mindful of the environmental impact of the materials we choose. Issues like the distance those materials must travel, their renewably, and their refining processes are crucial criteria in the design process. We are grateful that our culture has become more attuned to the need for green building.

We must also be aware of “green-washing.” There are many products marketed as "green" that do not necessarily meet a rigorous consideration of what that means. An example of this is bamboo products. Bamboo grows very fast and is very hard which makes it potentially a green product. Unfortunately, at this time every bit of the bamboo building material sold in this country is shipped across the Pacific Ocean. While we have yet to find a quantifiable means of considering the full effect of transportation, we have to ask, is shipping material across the Pacific Ocean really green? Additionally, most of the bamboo sold has no quality control standards placed on it, meaning that it may contain toxic adhesives and finishes, and it may not be durable. There are also issues of local economies, environmental and labor practices where the material is harvested and manufactured. It is not easy to create an equation for what is and what is not green. We try to weigh a wide range of considerations, including health and durability, when recommending products that fit into a Transitions design.

Knowledge to the Green Meme

The most important factor in expanding the green meme is knowledge and understanding. We can think about knowledge and understanding in two categories: Individual and community knowledge. Knowing what mileage your car is getting informs your individual knowledge base. Posting MPG on the sales stickers of new cars informs provides a community knowledge base.

Generally speaking, we become more adept at making decisions with increased knowledge. When automakers started posting MPG information on new cars, we as a society started making decisions using that information. New hybrid cars provide a great deal of information on how the car is performing relative to MPG in the moment. If you pay attention to this information it tends to change the way you drive. I have had more than one large, student driven, pickup truck pull up to my bumper and honk as I coasted slowly up to a red light from a great distance because I could see how much this was impacting my MPG.

There is a great deal that can be done to raise our community and individual knowledge base of building efficiency. The current high bar are rating systems such as LEED or the city of Austin’s rating system designed specifically for their climate zone. These work on a point system. No one thing beyond code is mandated but points are awarded for various approaches to making the building green, so that a unique approach can be created for each design situation and each building is award a ranking for its overall level of efficiency. The LEED system awards colors from bronze to platinum. Austin’s system uses stars.

Short of a complete rating system there are steps that can be taken to better understand a building’s energy efficiency. One very simple thing to do if you are looking at buying an existing building is to ask to see the building’s energy consumption over the past year. As you compare buildings you will get a sense of which ones perform best.

Another step that some communities have taken is to require various tests before a building is put on the market. These tests provide the buyer with access to information about things like insulation and air leakage.

As a consumer, one of the best things that you can do is hire a green building professional t. At Stearns Design Build we provide site and building consultation. Another important professional is a certified green real estate agent. In the Brazos Valley you can find this service at Connective Realty.

Local vs. Organic: A False Comparison

Bias is a strange and often subtle thing. Green America is a great publication promoting saner paradigms for healthy alternatives in a seriously unsustainable world. They are supported in large part by a bunch of great companies committed to the principles of social justice including environmental stewardship. They are not, for the most part supported by small family farms. Nonetheless, they do their best to honor these businesses and acknowledge their importance, but perhaps a bit of bias has slipped into their assessment of the choices between locally grown and organic.

In this linked article writer Tracy Fernandez Rysavy says, “The local food movement isn’t just about food miles—it’s about the importance of asking questions about where your food comes from, and really connecting with your food and how it impacts your community. It’s a way to break free from corporate agriculture—and its chemicals and processed corn and soy end products—and support family farmers.”

As much as this statement seems to “get it” the article sort of belies the sentiment. It presents the whole local verses organic as an either/or proposition, which could not be further from the case. She lays out the arguments against chemical farming as if small local “non-organic” farms are using the same practices that factory farms are using. That simply is not the case. More often than not the local farmer is working to get organic certification or they have just given up on a certification process that has been co-opted by organic agribusiness. Regardless of their position, small farms cannot use the level of chemicals that large farms do simply because the cost of those chemicals are paid in an economy of scale that only exists on factory farms.

But as Rysavy does a good job of pointing out, one of the most important aspects of local farmers is your ability to talk to the farmer and know what you are getting in your food. If you demand absolute organic certification, including the many acceptable yet way less than healthy options permitted within that certification, you will find many local farmers who can provide that. And if you want a little more reasoned, less scripted approach to food production you can also find that. My experience is that there are few people who know more about the biology of food than the folks with dirt under their fingernails at your local farmers market.

Unfortunately, in her discussion Rysavy does not make this distinction and implies that a “non-organic” local farm is the same as a factory farm when it comes to chemical use.

One of the really wonderful things that we see happening is the cooperation of small local farms and some of the smaller certified organic farms. A good example of this is sort of leadership comes from my friends at Saw Mill Hollow Family Farm. This is a certified organic Aronia Berry farm that is working hand in hand with their community and area farmers to help challenge the practices of the huge chemical drenched farms that surround them in Iowa. Vaughn Pittz is a former Kraft foods executive who began working long ago on this American wonder fruit. He is now a champion of getting this plant into the fields of farms as a means of reducing or eliminating chemical dependence. Along with his wife Cindy and Son Andrew, Pittz is a revolutionary working with a new breed of plant and a new breed of farmer to provide an alternative to our dependence on factory foods.

Though somewhat of a tangent, this is a design issue in at least two respects. 1) Sustainability is a social design issue. 2) Something as intimate as food has to be a design issue in our homes. How we select, grow and store our food are issues of residential design. Granted, very little falls outside of my definition of design. That is sort of the point.

Part One - Designing to a Human Scale: The automobile’s impact on urban design.

The Book A Pattern Language has become an indispensable desk reference for many designers. Most of what this book deals with has to do with scale and proportionality. While this may seem like a mundane technical aspect of design, it is anything but. This issue, in fact, has epistemological dimensions.

In his Book Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil, Rudiger Safranski writes, “Central to Reflection on technology is, therefore, the question: Should man…adapt himself to technology, or should…technology be cut back to a human scale?” While this may seem abstract and unrelated to the need for design at a human scale in our homes and our communities, the connection is real and significant. The isolation that comes from the expanding scale and dimensions of our technological creations seeks balance in intimate spaces.

While the philosophers are pondering scale at the level of nuclear weapons and autonomous technology, in design the rubber hits the road …well, at the road. Few technologies have affected design more than the automobile. In urban design we have gone from communities that were designed for walking as a mode of transportation to suburban sprawl where scale is dictated by the automobile. In College Station Texas, where I am a Planning and Zoning Commissioner, the city was incorporated in 1938. Its name came from a connection to the railroad but its development has been dominated by a pattern tied inextricably to the car. Our sister city, Bryan, also owes its existence to the railroad. The citizens of Bryan voted to incorporate in 1867 on the new rail line. Though the rails helped determine where communities would spring up, railroads did not so significantly impact the ways in which the community would developed. The difference in auto driven patters of development from those scaled to walking are well illustrated by College Station and Bryan. Bryan has a downtown that College Station lacks. And Bryan, as developed before the dominance of the automobile, is laid out on a logical grid to facilitate direct connections. College Station and the areas of Bryan that developed after about 1930 have distant neighborhoods laid out with little concern for economy of transportation.

With the advent of the automobile, no longer were neighborhoods snuggled in as close as possible to town to facilitate access by foot or horse. Now people could live further out. Goods and service were no longer spaced at a walking distance. With cars, stores and other services could be many miles apart. Malls with massive parking lots replaced downtowns. Big boxes replaced mom and pops. The spacing of services meant that more driving had to be done and congestion ensued.

Most communities now stretch along major roadways. Small towns shrink as large supper centers in nearby larger towns seek to attract commerce from larger distances. These supper centers tend to go in at the perimeter of towns where land is less expensive but that is not so far out that consumers are reluctant to make the drive. As the town expands older large retail centers are closed in favor of larger ones further out. And so sprawl begets urban decay.

All of this happened slowly.

Within the span of a couple of generations sprawl has become the norm and assumed to be a fair trade off for economy of scale pricing, expanded selections and life in the suburbs.

Are these sound assumptions? And is it within our capacity to make more deliberate decisions for our communities? We will address that question in part three of this series.

Roof Mounted Rocket Launcher

We were having a little trouble with our neighbors so we mounted this rocket launcher on our roof. Okay, actually it is an evacuated tube solar water heater. A part of the Stearns family renovations.

Walking On A Fractal

I was recently hiking on the Blue Ridge Trail, which is a great study in design on so many levels. I am not sure what a studied definition of “design” would be, but one that works for me is “the intentional creation of patterns.”

Though at times design seems to betray obvious patterns, they are there. An obvious example of this is the work of Jackson Pollock, that silly man splattering paint on canvases in the 40’s and 50’s and calling it art. Many people ridiculed Pollock. They were sure that any child could do what he did. In a sense they thought that his paintings lacked pattern and were simply random splattering of paint on canvas.

As it turns out they were wrong. Pollock’s paintings have the repeating patterns of rather high level two dimensional fractals. Something that is not accomplished by others randomly splattering paint on canvas. Though, a cleaver physicist did figure out how to create paintings that also reflect fractals in this range. He calls his devise a “Pollackizer.” It captures the random movements of nature such as tides and wind and uses them to distribute paint drips on canvas. Fractals are made up of patterns that repeat in approximation at any scale. Pollack was a force of nature able to project these patterns.

Back to the Blue Ridge Trail. In the forests of North Carolina I walked in amazement of the huge, towering trees and everywhere fractal designs. The trees themselves, the distribution of any one species of tree, the distribution of all of the trees, the distributions of places that the trees thinned to let just a bit more light pour in projecting the patterns of the branches. And the trail that I walked on undulating in fractal patterns along the mountain’s edge. The plane of the trail sliced into the mountain was a fractal reflecting the pattern of erosion on the mountain. It was a graph of erosion at a single point in time. But you could also imagine a fractal plane in a perpendicular direction as the mountain eroded over time. This added dimension of time and how it affected the physical geometry made me wonder about the ratio of those two equations and other fractal equations. Is the one slice similar to the other? In other words, does their ratio come close to 1?

As far as I know the physicist Richard Taylor has only looked at the pattern of Pollock’s splatters as they fell on the canvas. What other patterns could be revealed? What is the pattern in the shades of color on Pollock’s paintings or in the woods of North Carolina?

Built-ins

We consider The Not So Big House Book required reading for our clients. We want clients to think about ways to reduce their square footage through good design. One encouragement that author, Sarah Susanka, provides that I question is the use of Built-ins.

Space should be more versatile than what is presented with built-ins. We have ripped out many a built-in. At times it breaks our hearts because they are well crafted and simply do not fit the needs of the current owner. At other times we gladly deconstruct ghastly forms more faux than functional. It is wise to think of a home through the span of a family’s life. This does not lend itself well to spaces that are not flexible. Americans tend to live by the values of disposability. We tend to change things before they are worn out. Think wall colors, cabinets and countertops. Far better to change out a piece of furniture that can be reused by someone else, than to rip apart something that has been built in and send it to the landfill.

Built-ins often evoke imagines of good design and great masters such as Greene and Greene. But there is also a great tradition of designers who integrated interior design to architectural design, designing furniture, wallpaper and even silverware. The art of design must lend itself to the landscapes of our lifestyles. For most Americans, and especially for most American homes, this should exclude built-ins that will inevitably fall victim to whim or fashion.

Welcome to Greenprint

The word blueprint refers to a set of, usually detailed, architectural plans. It comes from the type of printing that was once used to create these plans. Greenprint refers to plans whose aim it is to build something that steps more lightly on the planet. By fractal extrapolation it also means an inclusive plan to save our bio-system.

Green is in vogue. As such there are green bits and green washing. Green bits are the little nuggets of something that may be green… or not, but that is presented in a disconnected way that, at best, obscures its value and, at worst, distorts its lack of value. Green washing of course is the act of taking anything and presenting it in a green light regardless of its quality as something green. Think of it this way, the bots are what gets washed.

On an integrity scale, green bits and green washing do not rank very high. But, let’s not throw the baby out with the green wash. Despite a lack of integrity, these ploys of marketing carry with them the green meme into popular culture.

When I took my first class in “ecological design” in about 1976, the term green referred only to a color. We have come a long way. Predominant cultural paradigms are not unilaterally good or bad. They exist as a pool from which we draw a great deal and, contribute to, if at all, only a very little.

This Blog is an instrument of Stearns Design Build, a residential design build firm in College Station, Bryan and now Austin, Texas that seeks to develop projects in a system that, among other things, is as holistically green as possible. We design and Build custom homes and remodeling projects.

Stearns Design Build works under a design paradigm, developed by company founder, Hugh Stearns known as Transitions. We will use this blog to define, examine, challenge and develop this design paradigm. We invite others in the industry to participate.

We will also explore aspects of particular projects, materials and anything else that pertains to the world of residential design build.