​Whether you’re wondering why some houses have plants sprouting from their gables, or you’re considering building a living roof on your property, I’d like to point out the benefits of living roofs and show you a few Communitecture has designed. Most of these are not open to the public so please enjoy this exclusive tour.
 
Firstly, they’re just kind of fun. Creating a living habitat over your head sparks the imagination. When you see a living roof, you may start dreaming of a world where humans don’t destroy an ecosystem with each square foot of development, but live in harmony with other species.

​When you see a living roof in your community, you can thank that neighbor for taking responsibility for their impact on stormwater and the urban heat island effect. Since green roofs retain most of the rainfall that hits them--and slow and filter the rest--they don’t make our sewer systems overflow after a storm. In Portland, like many cities, our combined sewer system allows raw sewage to overflow in to the river after a storm. While the city is working to correct this, living roofs can be part of the solution.  The urban heat island effect is a result of dark colored roofs and pavement absorbing and then radiating solar heat, throwing the local climate out of balance and making air pollutants more toxic. Rather than heat up the area, living roofs can provide habitat for native birds and pollinators.
 
Living roofs certainly provide significant benefits for the building owner as well. When a roof is protected from the elements by soil and plants, it often lasts two to three times as long, reducing costs and landfill waste over the life of the building. The additional mass of a living roof protects your interior environment from heat, cold, and noise. Especially on hot sunny days when the roof’s soil is dryer, it significantly reduces inside temperatures. In an urban environment, the sound-dampening quality of living roofs is quite noticeable. At the Hawthorne Hostel, which boasts a living roof over its front porch on a busy street, I’ve been told that simply by not reflecting noise, the living roof makes the bedrooms quieter.

​Lastly, living roofs are adaptable. They can be modest and endearing to sleek and modern, inviting and inspiring. They can provide a much-needed natural oasis in a bustling urban environment or a place to grow vegetables at home. Living roofs can be designed in many different ways to compliment different architectural styles and serve a variety of purposes. 

​So, how is a living roof built? Typically a water-tight heat-sealed membrane is adhered to the roof sheathing. Then a permeable plastic mat and filter fabric are placed on the membrane to provide drainage to the growing medium which goes on it. If the growing medium (or "engineered" soil) is three inches deep or less, it is considered an extensive green roof, which supports sedums and other small plants. Deeper systems are called intensive and can be built to support anything from vegetable gardens to trees, if the building is designed to support them.
 
If building a living roof, it is important to have it designed by someone with expertise. Rainwater will be retained and sitting on your roof, so it’s critical that the details are designed well to keep water out of the structure. A designer who is well versed in passive solar design is also important, so you get the most benefit from the living roof’s insulating properties. As you can see, Communitecture has overseen the construction of green roofs of many shapes and sizes and on a variety of building types. We love it when our architecture sprouts life and hope to design many more living roofs.

Roofs pictured, from top:

• Pistils Nursery mixed use building, private roof top garden
• Residential porch roof & brow roof retrofit, attached to original house structure, planted with sedums and native grasses
• Backyard cob sanctuary/meditation room with conical roof of varying slopes
• Backyard cob sauna planted with sedum, prickly pear cactus, and grasses
• Cob pavilion at the Hawthorne Hostel with conical roof and oculus
• Strawbale residence with skylights, planted with grasses
• Pistils Nursery from another angle

Post by Taz Loomans

The best part about Light Straw Clay is that building with it is like throwing a big party. Portland's first permitted Light Straw Clay project in inner Southeast Portland was built last month during a huge three-day building party led by natural builders June Bonnheim, Wolfgang Kahler, Frances Michaelson and Joseph Becker. 

It was a simple process of making clay slip, mixing straw with it in this giant mixer built by Joseph Becker, and then hand-tamping it into the Larsen trusses.  It's a wonderful and easy-to-implement process that is perfect for community builds. 

The community Light Straw Clay install was for a garage conversion into living space. Communitecture is the architect that designed and permitted the project and Steve West is the contractor that installed all of the components that allowed for the easy community installation of the Light Straw Clay, such as the Larsen Trusses, the plywood sheathing, and the vent holes I mentioned in my earlier post about this project.  

Check out the photos from the building party. Photos by Amit Ziman.

The Communitecture team believes that Portland needs a mayor who champions sustainable development, proactively tackles the housing crisis, and addresses local environmental issues. We are proud to support Sarah Iannarone for mayor!

She’s sharp as a tack, energetic, and articulate. Her progressive policy positions are spot on for land use, transportation, affordable housing, and our environment. She’s a working class mom and a small business owner from the east side of town who cares enormously about our city, and has refreshing clarity about what it will take to build an equitable future. While we have some strong mayoral candidates, Sarah brings a spunk, vibrancy and the fresh perspective we were looking for in our next mayor.

Would you like to meet her?

Please join us for a party at our office this Tuesday, April 19th, 5:30 - 7:00.

Details:

- Join us in the conference room located on the corner of SE 9th Avenue and Alder Street.
- Healthy refreshments provided by Communitecture.
- Bring a checkbook if you like, but it's not required.
- To learn more about Sarah and her campaign, visit SarahForPortland.com
- To RSVP, visit the event on Facebook.

Portland's annual "placemaking season" has begun!

Lead by City Repair, dozens of teams from all over town are busy designing structures, intersection paintings, pollinator habitat, and permaculture gardens for their neighborhoods. These projects will be implemented in a 10-day blitz, supported by hundreds of volunteers. Helping to build these projects is an excellent way to learn about natural building, sustainable gardening, and much more, and gives you the satisfaction of making a mark in your community.

Mark your calendar for the Village Building Convergence: June 3 - 12, 2016.

As most of the underused lots throughout central Portland are turned over to developers, some planners are thinking about ways to weave green space in to the growing density. A new type of linear park, known as the Green Loop, is a concept developed and promoted by the Portland Bureau of Planning and Sustainability.

The Loop would provide a safe, navigable path linking each quadrant and spanning from the new Tillikum Crossing to the South to the Broadway Bridge to the North. The path would encourage walking, jogging, biking, rolling, and connecting to public transit. It would bring continuous tree canopy to areas of town with little green space or bird habitat. The proposal even includes a new pedestrian/bike bridge over I-84 at NE 8th Avenue.

The project is currently only a proposed concept, with minimal funding to get it started. Community groups are getting engaged by presenting the concept to the public and designing key nodes along the path. With community support, this idea may become the next big step in growing smarter as a city.

Read much more about the proposal HERE.

Post by Taz Loomans:

Did you know that you can legally build a structure using light straw clay in Portland, a natural, non-toxic insulation material that has been used for centuries throughout the world? We are proud to say that we helped the first such structure be permitted in the city of Portland and it is now under construction.

[Aside: Light Straw Clay is a combination of straw and clay. The first known instance of this natural building material is from the 12th century in Germany.]

An environmentally-concerned client came to us last year and requested that we transform her garage into a bedroom with a greenhouse, except that it must be built with Light Straw Clay. Luckily, we knew from previous experience and from a process we helped pioneer, that there is a legal path to building with Light Straw Clay thanks to this recommendation of the Alternative Technology Advisory Committee.

Because we were converting an existing garage into this wonderfully insulated Light Straw Clay living space, we retained the existing studs and sheathing. Light Straw Clay is never used structurally, but rather as a "filling" in structural Larsen Trusses. Below is what the Larsen Truss looks like. It is two 2x4s connected with a cross member creating a hollow frame that can be filled in with Light Straw Clay. Light Straw Clay walls are a full foot thick!

It is important to keep the Light Straw Clay within a wall completely dry so that the clay doesn't get wet and therefore lose it's form and attract mold and pests. So it's important to add venting in the walls on both the top and the bottom and make sure there is air flow throughout the wall. These vent holes had to be coordinated with our structural engineer to make sure that we had enough shear reinforcement to meet seismic code requirements. You can see the vent holes below on this project:

This mesh helps keep the Light Straw Clay away from the plywood sheathing, creating an air-gap that is necessary for air-flow:

Because you want to keep Light Straw Clay walls dry and we live in a wet climate, it's important to have a deep overhang to keep the rain from directly hitting the wall:

The benefits of Light Straw Clay is that it is a natural, non-toxic and locally-source insulation material. And it is a material that can be installed with community help, because it is done by tamping down the clay and straw mixture in courses and with a little guidance is easy to learn. The one-foot-thick walls also make for very nice and deep window openings.

Our friend and natural building expert Wolfgang Kahler will be installing the Light Straw Clay. And the walls are slated to be finished with a plaster finish which will be done by our friend and plaster expert June Bonnheim. On the exterior, they will have 4" lap wood siding. 

If you're interested in building in Light Straw Clay, contact us and we'll help you design and permit your structure!

As the City of Portland prepares to relocate the Right 2 Dream Too homeless community to inner Southeast Portland, the site plan is up for approval this week. This design is a product of a collaboration between Merrill Architecture, The City Repair Project and Communitecture, working hand-in-hand with members of R2DToo and City Council. Stay tuned here for further updates!

Within a block or two in any direction from our new office in industrial SE Portland, someone will be trying to shelter themselves from rain and cold tonight with a tarp or tent or coat, with nowhere else to go. Homelessness is a very visible and much talked-about issue these days. While a true solution must involve addressing many interwoven issues, it seems self-evident that many people in Portland are in need of some kind of shelter from rain, cold, random violence, and eviction. As shelter-designers ourselves, we’re eager to help with this need.
 
You may have heard that the City is making plans to move the Right 2 Dream Too homeless camp from inner Northwest Portland to a more permanent site in industrial Southeast. You may not know that they are consulting our own Mark Lakeman for the site plan. Mark’s experience in establishing and developing Dignity Village has made him—and his collaborator Tim Merrill of Merrill Architecture—the choice architects of homeless people in town.
 
Right 2 Dream Too (R2D2) was established in 2011 on West Burnside both to provide a safe place to get a good night’s rest and to protest the City’s anti-camping rules. Rather than be raided by police as single people camping under bridges, this group of organized homeless citizens has managed to engage in negotiations with City government over the last four years. They have now secured an $850,000 budget for developing a more permanent site to camp, shower, do laundry, cook, and store their belongings. Forty people will reside in the camp and will admit up to sixty guests per night to sleep and use all of the facilities. In addition to the health and psychological benefits of meeting these basic needs, for some people, a place to rest and clean up can help them go out and earn money to improve their situation.
 
The site plan for this complete village infrastructure will be reviewed by City Council on February 4th, after which development of the new site can begin.
 
Dignity Village and R2D2 have shown that living collectively has significant benefits, and homeless people and their advocates are taking notice. A new camp, known as Hazelnut Grove, has recently sprung up near Overlook Park in North Portland. This camp features a food garden secured by OSALT to help people provide some of their own nutrition. At the Planet Repair Institute, an affiliate of Communitecture, permaculture students are preparing to design a sustainable site plan to guide campers in their development.

Meanwhile, as environmentalists and urbanites drool over magazine spreads of cleverly-designed tiny homes, some students and volunteers are seeing them as a step up from the urban tent. Linda Pope teaches environmental sustainability classes at Portland Community College and this year she’s engaged her students in building a simple home for Dignity Village. Communitecture donated the blueprints and students worked with Dignity Village residents to build the structure. This term, students are working in teams to develop an electrical/solar/wind system, a graywater system, a rainwater catchment system, and built-in furniture.
 
We may be nowhere close to solving the problems of homelessness in our community. However, every person sleeping on the street counts. and every shelter we create makes a difference. At the same time, homeless people who form villages and stand up for their rights have lessons to teach the rest of us. If people without any material wealth at all can be cooperative neighbors and create ecologically-responsible settlements from garbage, what excuse do we have not to form the most beautiful neighborhoods in the world?

Like nearly everywhere else, in Portland you are required to build in compliance with the International Building Code (IBC) to ensure safety and energy efficiency. It will influence everything from how steep your stairs can be to what types of joist hangers can be used to build your floor. The IBC favors industrial materials that have been tested to prove structural or insulative qualities. It doesn’t say anything about straw byproducts from Oregon’s wheat fields or clay from the Willamette. So why are a handful of folks able to build with natural materials in Portland?
 
To oversee sustainable construction, Portland has a team most cities don’t, called the Alternative Technology Advisory Committee. These volunteers review evidence that alternative materials can meet the intent of the code and have approved quite a few natural building applications.
 
If you want to build a permitted structure using natural materials, you can take an extra step and submit an appeal to the Committee.  They have approved certain natural building techniques when used in specific ways. For example, light straw clay has been approved if it is non-structural and properly vented. Cob and straw bales can be used as part of certain wall systems as well. We typically go through the appeal process before creating the final construction documents, to find out if the desired material will be allowed.
 
Communitecture has designed permitted straw bale and light straw clay buildings and can provide you with drawings and documentation to have your natural structure approved as well. We can do an initial code and zoning study to assess feasibility and carry your project all the way through permitting. If you have an unusual idea, we would love to talk.
 
Unusual ideas are exactly what make Portland a leader in sustainable development and we’re thrilled to be part of the progress.

Here's a very welcome breath of fresh air, especially In the face of so much gentrification that is going on in Portland! This remodel for Sellwood residents shows how you can adapt and reuse our precious historic houses so that they can accommodate more people while also providing more income to support the existing home.


In this case, the resident family loves the neighborhood and intends to continue to live in the home. They asked us to design a way for them to lift up the existing structure and then add a sizeable new living unit underneath. The new space is about four feet underground and four feet above ground, which lifts the existing two level house up just a few feet more, well short of the overall height limit of thirty five feet. 


Unlike the seemingly pervasive method of simply tearing down existing buildings so that new giant ones can be built, this approach achieves upgrades in energy efficient living places and adds density while retaining the continuity of our beloved historical urban environment.