Site News
About a year ago, greenhomebuilding.com was averaging about 400 visitors each day. Since then I lost track of the this statistic because what had been a free service suddenly was too expensive. Then a few months ago our server offered free website tracking information, and I was surprised to see that the popularity our our site has grown considerably. For last few months, greenhomebuilding.com has averaged over 1500 unique visitors each day!

As a result of attending the Natural Building Colloquium last October, I am pleased to report that greenhomebuilding.com has three new panelists who are willing to answer questions from the public on the Ask the Experts page. All three are highly qualified within their field of expertise. Below are their biographies and pictures, so you can become acquainted with them, and hopefully put them to work answering appropriate questions.

RAMMED EARTH

Bruce King is a structural engineer with a private consulting practice in Sausalito, California, and is the author of Buildings of Earth and Straw - Structural Design for Rammed Earth and Straw Bale Architecture. He has completed many projects using straw bales, stabilized earth, fly ash, and many other alternative materials as structure, has written and lectured extensively on more ecological approaches to structural design, and advises building officials around the country on building codes and alternative construction. He is the founder and Director of the Ecological Building Network (EBNet), a non-profit information resource based in Sausalito. EBNet recently completed a large testing and research program on straw bale construction and earthen plasters, available as downloadable PDF files at the website www.ecobuildnetwork.org. Mr. King earned a Bachelor of Science with Honors degree in Architectural Engineering from the University of Colorado, and is a member of the Structural Engineers Association of Northern California, the International Conference of Building Officials, and the American Society of Civil Engineers.

NATURAL MATERIALS

Janine Bjornson is a natural builder and educator with a penchant for natural finishes. She has worked and studied in the natural building field since working with The Cob Cottage in 1996. She has been on the organizing committee for two Natural Building Colloquia. Janine does freelance natural finish work and teaches natural paints, plasters and pigments workshops in Canada.

ROCK

Jose Garcia has been a landscape contractor for 24 years and has gravitated to doing a lot of rock work. He has built innumerable retaining walls of timbers, boulders, drystacked and mortared stone. He has built foundations out of stone and mortar and put rock veneer around the base of a straw bale building to raise the level of waterproofing. He lays about 20 tons of flagstone a year in patios and walkways. Over the last couple of years he has built a half dozen mortared flagstone staircases. In Colorado we are blessed with a wonderful red flagstone with great tensile strength that he uses to make benches. He tries to work with the stone's shape as it comes, and can generally lay out a patio with a minimal amount of cutting or chipping, and the benches are free form and distinctly shaped. Mostly He's out rolling boulders and flipping flagstone on a daily basis.

General News
According to a study by California's Sustainable Building Task Force, green building savings far outweigh their initial costs. In evaluating 33 green buildings in the United States, and factoring in the cost of energy, water and waste disposal in California, the report found that it costs nearly 2 percent more on average to construct a green building than one using conventional methods. However savings of more than 10 times the initial investment can be expected during the life of a building, conservatively assumed to be 20 years. Greg Kats, the report's principal author, says that five years ago there was a 5 percent to 15 percent cost premium for green buildings. "Now, materials and design processes have become standardized, and more people know how to do it." The report concludes that constructing green buildings to LEED's gold level -- the third highest designation in the green building rating system -- makes the most financial sense. To download the report: www.ciwmb.ca.gov/greenbuilding/Design/CostIssues.htm#Cost&Benefit

Site of the Month
Founded in 1991 as a non-profit organization, The Development Center for Appropriate Technology (www.dcat.net) draws on extensive experience in traditional and alternative building to provide strategic support for sustainable building practices. They envision a world where communities thrive and are built in harmony with nature, because people understand the consequences of their choices and make decisions for their own and the Earth's benefit. David Eisenberg, the Executive Director of DCAT, has well over twenty years of construction experience including troubleshooting construction of the steel and glass cover of Biosphere 2 in Oracle, Arizona. Much of his time now is devoted to developing relationships with members of the building, design, and building regulatory communities, promoting a sustainable context for building regulation and offering trainings on alternative building approaches. DCAT is deeply involved in the very important work of bringing an awareness of sustainable architecture into international building codes. They need the support of all of us!

Book of the Month

The Hand-Sculpted House: A Practical and Philosophical Guide to Building a Cob Cottage by Ianto Evans, Michael G. Smith, and Linda Smiley, 2002. Micheal G. Smith is a panelist for cob at greenhomebuilding.com. The authors build a house the way others create a natural garden: They use earth, clay, sand, straw, and water, blending them to create organic shapes. Building with cob requires no forms, no cement, and no machinery of any kind. Builders actually sculpt their structures by hand. The limits of cob are defined only by the builder's imagination. Cob has been a traditional building process for millennia in Europe, even in rainy and windy climates like the British Isles, where many cob buildings still serve as family homes after hundreds of years. Cob houses (or cottages, since they are usually efficiently small) are not only compatible with their surroundings, they ARE their surroundings, literally rising up from the earth. They can be full of light and are cozy, with curved walls and built-in, whimsical touches. The Hand-Sculpted House is theoretical and philosophical, but quite practical as well. This book will give you all the how-to information to undertake a cob building project.

In association with greenhomebuilding.com , I am planning to launch a new related venture which features alternative, sustainable house plans for sale. In fact I will be creating a whole new website for this: dreamgreenhomes.com (not yet up), which will focus completely on describing and selling green home plans. Greenhomebuilding.com will also feature many of the plans available and direct people to the new site. Marketing house plans via the internet is a huge business, with dozens of competing sites, but very few of them offer anything that I would consider truly sustainable. I found only one site that says it is devoted to green architecture, but in my estimation this claim is only validated by a few of the presented design concepts. There is a tremendous need for well designed, sustainable house plans available to the public!

Many architects and designers slave to create original, well designed homes that employ solar heating, utilize natural building materials, feature renewable energy devices, conserve water in various ways, include solar greenhouses or naturally cooled pantries, are substantially bermed or earth-sheltered, have a compact floor plan that conserves materials and energy, and are designed to last a long time. Now these unique and wonderful designs can find a new life. What I am visualizing is a kind of consortium of innovative architects and designers, pooling their novel designs at one highly visible and accessible website.

There are, no doubt, refinements that will need to be made to this concept, but I hope I have conveyed the gist of the idea. If you are interested in participating in this venture, or if you know someone who might be interested, please contact me or forward this message to others who might be interested.

General and Unsubsrcibe information
Greenhomebuilding.com E-zine is copyright Hartworks, Inc. 2003. Please feel free to use excerpts from this newsletter as long as you give credit with a link to our homepage http://www.greenhomebuilding.com .