The Babuk Report

Category: sustainability

An Expanding Role for Babuk Presentations

The relationship enjoyed by Canada and the United States is a model to be envied around the world. While the cross border relationship thrives in many ways, the intertwined nature of both countries’ economies is fascinating: not only are both countries each others’ largest trading partner, but the value of exports from one virtually equals the value of imports from the other.

The premier of Saskatchewan once made a presentation in Chicago about hot dogs with mustard and Chicago Cubs baseball at Wrigley Field. The United States exports baseball as a national past time and cultural phenomenon, Canada exports virtually every bit of mustard consumed in the States that supports baseball. It’s that entwined. In another presentation I recall, the Canadian Minister of Industry once recounted travelling with the materials of an automotive part – from the extraction of raw materials to the completion and installation of the manufactured part. He crossed the border between Detroit and Windsor seven times.

Naturally, I go back and forth quite a bit between the two countries, and I’ve made extensive presentations on both sides of the border. For some time, through an outgrowth of public presentations, I’ve helped companies understand the markets on the other side of the border. It just never occurred to me to formalize that as part of Babuk Presentations, Inc.

Until now.

Linking international connections with professional, architectural knowledge to the cross border import / export Architectural / Engineering and Construction communities of Canada and the USA.

That’s us. It’s just a natural extension of what’s been happening all along.

November 2, 2010
Happy New Decade!

Happy New Year. It’s surprising to see that we’re already a decade into the new century.

Previous posts have spoken about vacant storefronts and even vacant buildings, all from the aftermath of the latest economic turn. There is so much vacant space out there that based on current absorption rates, some markets have several years supply of some building types like… condominiums. It could take several years to recover to get back to where we were. This empty space in empty buildings simply sits and waits. No one has really caught on to the idea that this space could be re-adapted to different uses.

In the meantime, one may deduce a similar “oversupply” of the people who design and build. In this case, many of these people have “re-adapted” out of necessity. While this is good for them, it has left an enormous void of talent, skill and expertise that has left the marketplace. A colleague (formerly) in the print publishing business suggested that it may take as long as twenty years for the architectural profession to make up lost ground, lost to a “brain drain” caused by the current economy.

There are fascinating opportunities coming out of all this. While cities that best depicted the late twentieth century – the Sunbelt – have stalled from an oversupply of built space that led to sharp drops in real estate prices; many cities of the early twentieth century – the Rust Belt – are retreating.

It’s like Las Vegas vs. Detroit.

Las Vegas just opened an incredibly huge hotel complex; its economic viability is yet to be seen. Residential housing prices in the Las Vegas area are still depressed, though many feel this reveals some “great buys” in the real estate market that services retirees. The retiree market doesn’t depend on finding employment to sustain housing costs.

Detroit has even better deals – well, lower prices – in residential real estate. At first glance, Detroit may seem to be unsustainable and unaffordable: although prices are low, the potential market is people who work. In a city without jobs, housing at any price is unsustainable and unaffordable.

I’ve heard many a seminar presentation about cities like Detroit recently, and Detroit is the oft-cited example. It was a much larger city in its heyday a few decades ago: having shrunk in population but not geographical area, it’s saddled with much more infrastructure than it needs and can support. Many are projecting Detroit to be a very viable city if it trimmed its infrastructure and broadened its economic base to support a city of its current population levels – still one of the largest cities in the United States. Some are even proposing urban agriculture for Detroit, a very novel “reuse / re-adapt” concept.

Michigan Central Railroad Station, Detroit

Speaking specifically about Detroit as a precursor and example, it has the potential to be a very vibrant smaller city; the buildings that supported a larger city have been left behind. Several buildings buildings have been left in ruin – the former Michigan Central Railroad Station, various hotels and office buildings, even industrial complexes where automobiles were once assembled.

In archaeology, we know of classical ruins, of medieval ruins and the like. Here, we have a new category: modern ruins. Quite fabulous modern ruins, at that.

Regardless, it’s still a decade into the new century. Just as the nineteenth century economy was different than the twentieth century economy that followed; the nineteenth century set up the twentieth century’s economy. The same may be true of the twentieth and the twenty first century’s economies. The economic structure of the new century hasn’t revealed itself.

Yet.

January 5, 2010
If Buildings Could Walk…

A previous post described “if walls could talk”, but what about if buildings could walk?

It’s not that far fetched an idea.

Taking cues from the railroad industry, it wasn’t uncommon at the turn of the 20th century to find fixed structures – buildings – with large moving parts.

Bridges were prime examples.

It took the use of steel used as structure to give rise to this. The first structure built of steel was a bridge built in 1775 over the River Severn near Coalbrookdale, Shropshire, in the western midlands of England – the “Iron Bridge” as it’s called today. Steel was a lighter-weight material that permitted more flexibility in shape than did masonry, with the advantage of superior strength when compared to wood. Moving ahead a century or so, shipping lanes along rivers located on flat plains required a way for bridges – built relatively low to the ground – to be built so as to give way to permit relatively tall shipping traffic to pass.

Turntable Bridge, Chicago, 1898

Confining this description to bridges found in Chicago: some of the first bridges designed for this were turntable bridges. There still are a couple of these left in Chicago. They are configured as steel trusses set onto a central pier in the middle of the river. Train tracks were built inside the truss structure. When shipping lanes were needed, train traffic would come to a stop, and the entire truss – hundreds of feet or dozens of metres long – would rotate around this pier.

Pennsylvania RR Bridge, Chicago, 1908

Turntable bridges had their limitations, not the least of which was the central pier becoming an obstruction in a shipping lane. Finding ways to raise bridge sections vertically, rather than rotating them horizontally, became the issue at hand. Those types of bridges appear in all sorts of variants. Some have a truss spanning between two towers, this central truss raises and lowers between the towers. Still others rotate truss sections vertically to give clearance along the waterways, the most dramatic examples are those with truss structures raised above, rather than below the track bed.

Western Avenue Pennsylvania RR Bridge, Chicago, 1907

Beyond bridges, other railway structures rotated (roundhouses with turntables) and lifted materials (coal towers and granaries).

The SS France – a complete floating community of thousands of people

Railways – and shipping lines – gave rise to buildings – entire communities – that were mobile. It could be possible for one to live their entire life on an ocean liner; all lodging and dietary needs cared for in addition to entertainment, recreation, socializing, even employment and well being. In a stretch, one may make the same case for a transcontinental train.

The Walking City, Archigram

Going back to our history lesson studying some of the early modernist architects: many – like Le Corbusier – had a vision of “buildings as machines”. Looking to what’s traditionally defined as architecture, this concept taken to mean “buildings that move” really hasn’t come to pass, save for a couple amusement park rides, or visionary works from think tanks like Archigram.

In a mobile society, having one house that could move with its occupants could be a sustainable concept. It reinforces the notion of small housing, since that would take less energy to move around. Part of one’s housing could be detachable and self propelled for personal transportation. Perhaps a workplace concept also becomes something that one takes with them and “plugs in” to a workplace community.

The ideas are endless, and seemingly appropriate.

October 17, 2009
The Vancouver “Laneway” House

Within the last year, the City of Vancouver (British Columbia) recently amended the City’s zoning ordinance to permit coach, or “laneway” houses to be built along back alleys (rear lanes) in certain areas. In a nutshell; in specific single family zoned areas, on lots 33’ (about 10.8 metres) or wider that have a back alley or corner frontages, in the rear of the lot; with specific distance separation, lot size and on site parking requirements. The lot where the laneway house is to be built cannot be strata-titled.

Laneway Houses, image courtesy of Lanefab Development Company, Vancouver, BC www.lanefab.com

At least of couple different design / build companies have emerged catering specifically to this market. The “laneway housing” concept is an easy way to increase density in a neighbourhood without altering its visual character. It can bring a human presence to an area previously a “no-man’s land” and create safety within a neighbourhood. Laneway housing can increase add to the local tax base while providing a method of providing affordable housing, and more than likely catering to a different age and social group than currently resides in a community – an important feature allowing people to “age in place”.

An entire lane developed with "laneway houses", image courtesy of Lanefab Development Corporation, Vancouver, BC www.lanefab.com

It also supports my notion that our housing stock has come to be much too large, and that an easy to bring about sustainability in design is to simply build on a smaller scale.

As with other tiny house concepts, laneway housing may appear to have a higher construction cost per square foot than a conventional house. A unit-cost-per-square foot includes not just the foundation, floor and roof, but also walls and all systems contained inside those walls. A building with smaller rooms will contain more walls per square foot, so that makes sense. In order to conserve space, many features that would otherwise be store bought furniture are built-in. Frank Lloyd Wright used built-in features generously in his Usonian House concept – even the catalog bought “Sears House” of the US Midwest used built in features to increase living space. Paying for these features as part of a base building or as furniture from a store, well… It’ll all get paid for somehow.

Other municipalities in the Vancouver area are considering zoning amendments allowing laneway housing. Most municipalities in the Chicago area – including the City of Chicago itself – disallow new habitable “coach house” construction. Oh, how I wish that could change…

August 27, 2009
The Idea That Came Around

A freshman design studio professor warned us many times that whatever in-depth design synthesis we went through to invent something original, that we could always find that someone had already come up with it before.

Pullman, a neighbourhood on the far south side of Chicago is touted as one of the first ‘planned communities’. It was home to the Pullman Company and the Pullman Works, which built sleeper cars for passenger trains.

The Pullman Sleeping Car

As a sidenote, Pullman owned and operated many of these cars that in turn were part of trains operated by major railroads. Sleeper cars are always a fascination for me, since they are designed for near total living experiences in absolute minimal space. Kind of like a pre-cursor to minimal housing. But that’s literary irony at this point.

The Pullman neighbourhood was self contained and self supporting, containing housing, employment centres, retail and recreational facilities. Its housing included both temporary (the Florence Hotel) and permanent housing, its housing catered to all different social strata.

A street of Pullman Workers’ Cottages

Zeroing in on the “Pullman Workers’ Cottage” this fourteen foot ( 4.2m) wide housing type had two floors and an attic above a basement. Built of masonry, it had two bedrooms on the second floor; with a living room, kitchen and dining room on the first. While it has taken a century to happen, Pullman Workers’ Cottages have become quite trendy, rather chique one may say.

Grow Homes in Montreal

About twenty years ago, The School of Architecture at McGill University in Montreal and the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation jointly developed a housing type called “The Grow Home”. Exhaustive and groundbreaking research into housing types and formats was performed, uncovering typical “one bedroom wide” and “two bedroom wide” formats in narrow European and eastern North American historical housing types. From this, to develop the optimal entry level house for the Montreal real estate market, optimizing both market forces, land costs and building technology The Grow Home was devised. It’s also 14 feet (4.2m) wide. The first floor had living and kitchen spaces; the second floor was envisioned to be one large loft that could be subdivided through sweat equity.

I don’t recall seeing the Pullman Workers Cottage example in the research but then, there are many examples of this type of building throughout the world. The sixteen foot (4.8m) wide rowhouses in Baltimore’s Federal Hill (discussed in a previous post) are my favourite.

“…dinner in the diner, nothing could be finer…” the Dining Car on the 20th Century Limited.

My thought is – why aren’t we looking at the railway cars as examples for the tiny home movement?

August 3, 2009
Sustainability and recent wood technology

It was fascinating to see a recent proposal for the Sears Tower to include all glass ‘look out pods” – a cantilevered glass structure of nothing but glass on five sides including the floor and all supporting structure. No apparent supporting structure – or at least what we would think to be supporting structure, like steel – at all. An architect who interned under me years ago became fascinated with all glass structures and developed this into a market segment, designing things like all glass stairways and all glass trusses – very showy stuff. The way he explained it was simple: glass is a material whose structural qualities are much like concrete – excellent in compression, limited in tension, not great in shear. A major difference between glass and concrete is that one can’t cast an eight inch thick slab of glass in whatever shape with reinforcing bars, the fabrication method is that different.

Glass Stairway, Chicago

One only need to look at the glass staircase in the Macintosh computer store on North Michigan Avenue, an all glass stairway whose stair treads are perhaps an inch thick. Imagine a slab of concrete one inch thick, and one probably could envision patio blocks. Not the sort of material that one could use to span an entire stairway width.

The same comparisons are true for wood products. I was invited to attend a seminar held by the Canadian Wood Council and the Forest Products Association of Canada last Thursday. Wood has good compressive and tensile properties. In Chicago, it tends to get overlooked due to this fire we had back in 1871, before the days of building codes and fire-resistivity research. A professor of mine once described it this way – if you were given a choice a sitting under a flaming steel beam or a flaming wood beam, which would you rather? Steel melts when heated, whereas heavy timber develops a protective char, preventing further damage. When used properly, wood can be safer than steel.

While wood may be a piece of tree shaved down to a dimension, modern wood technology is based on taking smaller, perhaps scrap pieces of wood and gluing them together in a way that aligns the direction of wood grain to perform to specifications. Wood itself is composed of directional fiber and cellulose, the cellulose acting as glue. Today’s methods essentially take wood fiber and glue them back together with engineered resins.

2010 Winter Olympics Speedskating Oval, Richmond, BC

The new 2010 Winter Olympics Speedskating Oval in Richmond, BC is the world’s largest all-wood structure. Its graceful, curving roof is made up of many pieces of wood, glued and bolted together. By understanding the importance of structural shape and direction of wood grain, the graceful curves allow impressive spans. A “V” truss shape incorporates fire sprinklers.

Murray Grove, London, UK

One of the more dramatic displays came with a British project, Murray Grove, a nine story apartment building in London, constructed entirely of cross laminated timber panels. Imagine plywood but six inches thick. This system could be constructed to be even taller; it offers many sustainability advantages over steel or concrete systems.

Murray Grove Construction

Murray Grove, Panel Diagram

This system met or exceeded all firecodes, provided ease of constructability and negligible construction waste.

Using proper connections, wood construction of this type offers superior seismic resistive cabilities, as entire panels can absord twisting without breaking.

Some people think that wood is like taking a chain saw and killing a tree. Not so. The amount of energy, water and carbon involved in making wood from seedling to reforestation in a properly managed forest is less than what it would take to make a unit of steel or concrete. Trees are most efficient at producing oxygen up to a certain point in their lifespans. A properly managed forest respects this and will target selective trees for harvest while supporting the ecosystem, much like how nature takes care of itself.

Canadian forests consistently rank among the world’s best managed and best documented, managing a small portion of forest while leaving the majority of forests in their natural state. This approach makes wood a highly sustainable building product that is just beginning to be recognized by the “green” industry.

June 26, 2009