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.

Post by Mark Lakeman
 
To Begin With:
It seems that tiny homes and tiny home villages are all the rage these days. From individuals to communities, people all over North America are talking about smaller, simpler, more ecological and community-oriented modes of living. They’re not just talking, they are building, attracted to affordable ways to lower their cost of living, while also refusing to work thirty years just to pay for a place to sleep and store stuff. They have numerous motivations, including to simplify their lives while off loading accumulated mountains of stuff, have less debt, and to increase their quality of life by having more free time. Not so much a rejection of the classic “American Dream” as an updated vision for living, this broad movement is gaining ground because it is relevant to the pressures, demands, and realities of modern life. Perhaps more than anything else, though, the overall movement appears to driven by an aesthetic search for meaning, beauty, and liberty.
 
Wait though, because the movement to reduce and simplify is even broader than just tiny home enthusiasts. It actually includes a much wider spectrum of scales of experimentation, design, innovation, and real building projects. All of the scales are driven by similar motivations. For the purposes of this brief article, I will describe some of the options that have emerged, including Shared living, modest homes, humble homes, tiny homes, then getting down to teeny, and then finally eeantsy-beeantsy. Then there are the villages, clusters of these scaled-down palaces where people create entire landscapes of mutual benefits and shared cultures. Here we go!

​Shared Living: Re-inhabiting The Normal
It’s powerful and important to point out that, since before the 1960’s economic pressures and obvious benefits have moved people to combine their incomes and share their living environments. Whether in the popular form of individuals sharing space and costs in previously single family homes, or in the emergence of rural and urban ecovillages, decades ago many people found that they could simplify and reduce costs while improving their quality of life by living with people with whom they found common ground. Such arrangements could occur at almost any scale, from an ordinary home to a mansion. These kinds of local models have certainly emerged organically in a universal way, from city to city, in response to similar pressures that characterize modern life. These pressures include devaluation of the dollar, which erodes individual buying power, which in turn drives up the cost of living even as more and more people increase the overall demand on limited resources. So, sharing has emerged as a natural strategy in reaction to modern economic dynamics. However, there have clearly been enormous benefits in the rediscovery of the benefits of community living. I can personally attest to this story, because I have lived in shared “community houses” since 1976. In fact, as a child living among dozens of young artists, my life was immeasurably enriched and my formative creative life was given quite the leg up because I was surrounded by inspiration.

​Modest Homes: 800 to 1200 square feet
Then there are “Modest Homes”. How to define these, when in the last few decades the average sized new American home has grown from around 900 to somewhere over 2000 square feet? For today, let’s say Modest can range from between 800 square feet (The upper limits of an Accessory Dwelling Unit or ADU) to 1,200 square feet. This scale of home has become an intentional choice by many families and individuals, partly motivated by cost factors, partly by a strong disdain for the grossness of scale that has become common, and mostly by a desire for modesty, personal balance, aesthetics, and a desire to not consume too much. In our architecture studio, the homes that we design in this scale range are happening mostly as part of urban-infill cohousing projects. People who want to inhabit this scale, usually young families and midlife couples, also want the benefits of shared living with neighbors that they can collaborate with in terms of shared community and land stewardship. Usually working with Orange Splot LLC, these very popular and influential cohousing projects include Sabin Green, Peninsula Park, Woolsey Corner, and also Cully Grove where we consulted. The individual homes within these varied projects range from 500 to 1500 square feet.

​Humble homes: The ADU
Until the advent of the Tiny Home, the most frequently invoked alternative, simple-living idea in the common urban vocabulary was the Accessory Dwelling Unit, or ADU. Also known as a Secondary Dwelling Unit (SDU) or “Granny Flat”, in Portland where we do most of our design work, the ADU is usually designed and built from about 400 square feet up to the legal limit of 800 square feet. However, they can also be as small as you might like. The key distinction that qualifies an additional structure on your site as an ADU is that it is considered a distinct, new address and has its’ own separate kitchen. It can have as many bedrooms, bathrooms, and other features as you like, as long as it fits within the size limit and is the second home on a lot. The scale of these projects used to be based upon a scale ratio so that no new ADU could be larger than 1/3 the square foot area of the existing primary home, which would be required to already exist on a given site. No more though, as that limitation has been removed, and any new ADU can be as large as 800 square feet outright. One last bit- ADU’s can be built as separate structures, or they can be located within an existing house, carved out of a basement or a converted second floor. They can also simply be attached to an existing house. There’s a great deal of flex in the way you can approach the design.

​Also Humble: Accessory Buildings
Among all of the possible tools in the urban infill and voluntary simplification toolbox, accessory buildings offer some of the most flexibility. Though this kind of building cannot officially house “habitable” sleeping areas, it should be mentioned here because the activities that can be included are certainly complimentary to sleeping and living. Uses that can be accommodated include home offices, creative or production spaces, play rooms, certified kitchens, workshops, and other functions. These small buildings can be taller (20 feet high) than an ADU, and also up to 800 square feet in size.

Tiny Homes: On or Off Wheels!
Perhaps the most famous version of the tiny home idea is the one on wheels. Much has been written about them, and they are extremely popular. Tiny homes on wheels are not quite like mobile homes. They are usually not aerodynamic, designed to drive around from place to place. Much more sturdy and well-built, tiny homes on wheels are more homey, energy efficient, and meant to stay somewhere for a long while. On the other hand, the built-in mobility allows someone to easily move if they want to. There are lots of upsides to mobility, but there are also limits that include planning and building codes. For instance, most cities will not permit a mobile structure to be slept in as a ‘habitable structure” unless they are located in a zone that allows a trailer park. If they are to be legally habitable they will also need to meet structural and energy codes. These are easy enough to meet, but they usually require a permanent location that costs money. The up-to-code design will cost more money too, as will the land, and then we begin to move away from what motivated the desire for a tiny home to begin with. However, this situation will not last, because as demand increases it becomes more likely that the planning and building code challenges will be resolved. 
 
While this very attractive mobile version can face difficulties, the permanent version is well underway. Many people don’t realize that cities can already have codes that will allow versions of a tiny home to be built. For instance, in Portland, Oregon we have a provision that allows for “detached bedrooms”. These are classified as additions to your existing home, as if you’ve simply added a new bedroom. But they can be separate, as small as can be, have one or more bedrooms, and feature a bathroom. If you’re a little creative you can also shift the sink outside of the bathroom to create a quasi-kitchenette. You can potentially have several of these on your site, as long as all your structures and hardscape fits within your total lot coverage limitation. It’s also true that , using the detached bedroom code, you are able to build a habitable ADU-scale building without triggering “tax reevaluation” based on current value assessments. The main functional difference is that this ADU-like version can’t include a complete kitchen with a range, but it can include a functional kitchenette with a sink, hotplate, refrigerator, dishwasher, and other common appliances.

​Also Tiny: Accessory Structures
These popular structures do not require permits, and have historically been limited to 120 square feet, as is still true in most other cities. However, in Portland the size limit has been raised to 200 square feet, and a typical residential site is able to have as many as three such structures as long as they don’t help to exceed the overall square foot limit for structures and impermeable hardscape. Though not technically “habitable”, these little buildings usually take the form of small studios, saunas, sheds, or storage units. However, this scale has also proven to be an ideal size for ecological experimentation, often used for natural and recycled building demonstration projects. They are also sometimes used for guests when absolutely necessary. That these don’t require permits has made this “type” a more accessible way to build functional, multi-use places.

​Teeny Indeed !
Very simply, “Teeny Homes” are smaller than tiny homes. Teeny seems to begin when you go below 85 square feet. C’mon, now that’s just teeny. There’s pretty much just enough room for one space inside, a do-everything room for sleeping, studying, eating lunch, meditating, or having a guest over. There are a few of them around though, and they are sometimes confused with doll houses or kids playhouses. They are real though, and if they are built to the energy and structural code then people can live in them (legally!), and they are more cozy than anything that is larger in scale. Such projects can also be built without permits, but then they are not technically “habitable”. However they are built, they are the most intimate spatial experience that you can have, the kind of place that gives you sweetest memories like nothing else before in your life.

Eeantsy-Beantsy Homes
Yes, these exist. You may ask yourself “but, but, but how is this even possible?” You may say “no, only in Hong Kong could this be happening, with those sleeping tubes I saw in National Geographic!”, but you’d be wrong. They are around in every town. These are for people who are really clear minded, don’t buy into consumerism, and love to be in nature and get plenty of exercise. They tend to rely on bikes and public transport, and may share a distant relation in Henry David Thoreau. These small structures are big enough to house a bed, cabinets and shelves, some lighting and a guest. They are also small enough to be self-heated by one’s own body, or by simply aiming the windows towards the sun. COZY !!!
 
Yet…ultimately, HOW SMALL CAN WE GO? When I was asked recently whether tiny homes, and villages of tiny homes may be THE answer to affordable housing or even to homelessness, my answer was “yes for sure, for this moment!” Personally, I am absolutely enamored by the idea of simplifying and reducing as an expression of better priorities and personal liberation. But I also answered “no, not in the long term”, because I see these initiatives as only a partial solution in the present time. As building smaller does indeed do all that we want it to do, at the same time we can already see that the powerful pressures driving gentrification and the overall cost of living are systemic and relentless. Unless we can successfully address and resolve the unbearable contradiction of our society’s voracious appetite for “growth” within our Earth’s finite biosphere, nothing we can invent will ultimately prove sustainable. In response to ongoing economic pressure as the cost of land and living only increases, the pressure to reduce in scale will clearly never end. So I’m asking you, the reader to consider the question of “how small can we go?” Can we get shorter, or thinner, or halve our personal scale every few years in response to the cost of living, as we keep making our places smaller, teenier, or even microscopic? How small can we go, and how much are we willing to give up as we try?
 
For now, let’s take the steps that are in front of us, learn as we go, and then see what our next steps will be. This is a powerful movement, one that brings more to everyone through sharing, simplifying, and reducing our individual and combined impact. I’m betting that as building and planning codes adjust in response, so will bureaus and leaders, developers and bankers, and very likely everyone else.

Want to learn more about building small? You may be interested in the upcoming 2015 Build Small Live Large Summit on Friday November 6, 2015. It will be held at the PSU Smith Center. The summit will cover topics like ADUs, cluster cottages and small house communities, space-efficient design strategies, and much more. You can register here.

From Concept to Creation: A Community Message Board
By Tammy Straw-Dunn

Initiated by a small group of neighbors, this community message board was brought to fruition through donations & volunteered time, collaborating with The City Repair Project & the Portland Bureau of Transportation. The design, includes exciting features like living roof, re-purposed hardware, and artistic mosaic work at the foundations, created by neighbors of all ages.
 
The South Burlingame neighborhood is a mix of residents who have lived here since they grew up in the neighborhood in the 1950s, including active senior walkers & gardeners, empty nesters, renting students, and many young, new families. The residents are excited to meet and participate in activities with their neighbors and were looking for better ways to share their interests and hear about planned activities than word-of-mouth or scattered email list serves. 
 
The planning, construction, and continued use of this message board all represent a wonderful and engaging way to foster community… that is easy for any neighborhood to replicate!
 
Here is a fun, pictoral How-To of our process!

​Concrete Foundations
Build form work & structure; pour concrete; remove forms once set.

Mosaic Artwork
Collect, break, & sort tile pieces; mortar design to backer board; mortar designed panels to pair of concrete foundations; grout & sponge-rinse completed tile work.

Living Roof & Sign Board
Mill salvaged wood to build sign board; stain wood surfaces; build roof with waterproof membrane, root barrier, flashing, & drainage openings at lower fascia; line roof bed with moisture blanket & filter fabric;  spread river rocks at lower edge for drainage & roll filter fabric beneath to hold in place; fill roof box with soil mixture; plant with sedum in autumn.  

What’s the “most despised” buzzword in the building industry, according to one survey? Green.

Little wonder, since the word can mean so many different things to different people. Before the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) launched the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) rating system in 2000, there was little consensus in this country about what constitutes a “green building.” A decade and a half later, some three billion square feet of construction have been certified under the system, and, according to estimates, LEED has cut annual carbon emissions by nearly ten million tons.

Still, some feel LEED doesn’t go far enough, a conviction that led to the 2006 formation of the Living Building Challenge (LBC), which many hold up as architecture’s most ambitious sustainability standard. If LEED serves the middle of the green bell curve, LBC targets the leading edge, an admittedly small segment of the market. What about the lagging end—the least common denominator of green construction? Even the most generous estimates suggest that only half of all new construction is being certified as “green,” and LEED’s entire volume to date represents only about one percent of the total building stock (275 billion square feet in 2010). To speed up the pace and expand the volume of certification, the construction industry urgently needs a quick, easy, affordable way to go green.

Enter Jerry Yudelson. At the beginning of the year, Yudelson, widely known as an authority on sustainable design, was named president of the Green Building Initiative (GBI). The organization runs Green Globes, an alternative to LEED that came to the U.S. in 2004-2005. In January, he announced that the goal was to address the underserved largest portions of the market with a system that is “better, faster, cheaper” than LEED.

Founded by Ward Hubbell, a former PR executive in the timber industry, Green Globes reportedly was set up as a shelter for wood products that don’t readily comply to LEED, which the American Forest and Paper Association has said “disadvantages our companies,” while “Green Globes is much more wood-friendly.” In recent years, the chemical and plastics industries have jumped on the bandwagon, because the latest versions of LEED discourage the use of certain “chemicals of concern,” specifically those found in products such as polyvinyl chloride (PVC)—the so-called “poison plastic” that the EPA, NIH, Department of Health and Human Services, and the World Health Organization all suggest can cause significant health problems. Greenpeace calls PVC “one of the most toxic substances saturating our planet and its inhabitants,” and it has been banned by various organizations, such as Kaiser Permanente.

While the LBC does prohibit PVC, LEED in fact does not; a single optional credit rewards disclosure of chemical ingredients, and specifiers are left to draw their own conclusions. Nevertheless, vinyl lobbyists take a classic slippery-slope position by treating even modest measures as threats.

Reportedly, over two thirds of GBI’s members and nearly half its board represent the timber, chemicals, and plastics industries—industries seemingly spooked by more rigorous standards for human and ecological health. Evidence shows that they’re not just backing Green Globes—they’re actively trying to undermine LEED, and there’s a lot of dirty money at play. From 2007 to 2013, the annual lobbying budget of the American Chemistry Council (ACC), a GBI member, grew by more than five times, and during that period this single organization invested a total of $62 million in influence-peddling.

Image: ArchDaily.com; Sources: US Green Building Council, International Living Future Institute, Green Building Initiative

It’s working: In 2012, a group of Congressmen, many of whom have received significant political contributions from the chemical industry and the ACC itself, urged the General Services Administration (GSA), which manages much of the federal government’s construction, to drop LEED: “We are deeply concerned that the LEED rating system is becoming a tool to punish chemical companies and plastics makers and spread misinformation.” They claimed that vinyl products “are universally considered the most durable, sustainable, and energy efficient by the construction industry” and that their restriction would “severely harm manufacturing in this country.”

Arguing that LEED (or the LBC, for that matter) seeks to “punish” chemical and plastics makers by discouraging the use of potentially harmful substances is like saying that energy efficiency is intended to punish fossil-fuel companies. Nevertheless, last fall the GSA, whose annual buildings budget can be in the tens of billions, endorsed Green Globes for the first time. Additionally, over the past year or two, multiple states, including Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, and Ohio, have adopted legislation banning LEED in publicly funded buildings.

Given all of this, I was surprised this week when the USGBC and ACC announced that the two organizations would be working together “to improve LEED”: “USGBC and ACC share the goal of advancing sustainability in the built environment,” USGBC President and CEO Rick Fedrizzi wrote in a press release, adding that both entities “will work together to take advantage of our collective strength and experience.” Time will tell exactly what this means. Will the chemical industry embrace smarter solutions? Will LEED become more accommodating to status-quo chemistry? Or is this just the USGBC’s politically astute way to give the ACC a more formal avenue for discussion, in order to defuse anti-LEED lobbying?

In the meantime, Green Globes continues to try to get more market share, and the GBI remains dominated by the timber and chemical industries. So when Yudelson took over in January, I got excited, since I have known and admired him for years. Could he turn Green Globes around?

Immediately upon joining, he announced that he views GBI’s role as that of a “‘friendly competitor,’ rather than a nemesis” to the USGBC: “I don’t really see us getting engaged in anti-LEED activity as an organization.” Privately, he maintains the same position: “GBI is not a lobbying organization,” he assured a group of my peers and me in July. “We do not coordinate with any groups that might lobby for or against other green building rating systems, nor do we participate in such political discussions.”

Yet, in late January—two weeks after Yudelson’s initial claim that his organization planned to stay above the fray—GBI board member Allen Blakey, a vice president with the Vinyl Institute, testified before the Ohio state legislature in support of a proposed ban on LEED, calling its new material standards a “discriminatory and disparaging treatment of vinyl.” This isn’t “friendly” competition. GBI is a charitable organization whose tax-exempt status is contingent on protecting the public good, not private interests, and at least one of its directors appears to be toeing a very fine line between the two.

Chart from BuildingGreen, LEED vs. Green Globes: The Definitive Analysis (2014)

Since taking his new role, Yudelson’s positions seem to have changed in favor of private interests, as well. Last year, before joining GBI, he told a reporter, “We know that a lot of these substances [in materials] have long-term effects [on health].” Since taking his new post, however, he declares, “I haven’t seen persuasive data on the health outcomes of common building materials.” This April, Yudelson called vinyl “benign in use,” possibly contradicting a 2009 report he co-authored (“Inside Going Green”): “PVC is inexpensive and routinely used, but it presents serious fire smoke hazards. Even before it ignites, it releases deadly gases such as hydrogen chloride….Dioxin, the world’s most potent carcinogen, is released when PVC burns.” Since most buildings don’t catch fire, is the phrase “benign in use” Yudelson’s way of sidestepping the “serious hazards” he once attributed to vinyl? Regardless, the EPA, however, classifies vinyl chloride as a carcinogen and maintains that exposure can occur in everyday uses.

Even if the facts about PVC and other materials weren’t “persuasive,” as Yudelson claimed this year, scientists and sustainability leaders long have subscribed to the precautionary principle, which holds that “when an activity raises threats of harm to human health or the environment, precautionary measures should be taken even if some cause and effect relationships are not fully established scientifically.” Yudelson himself advocated for this approach in an interview last year: “[W]e may be creating long-term unhealthy environments even while we’re doing all of these green upgrades. The overarching principle is that we ought to err on the side of caution.”

Yudelson contends that Green Globes is “basically identical” to LEED. Last year, the Portland Tribune considered the merits of the two systems and concluded, “LEED is a more rigorous, broad-based, credible system that delivers more environmental benefits.” This June, the independent consultancy and publisher BuildingGreen released a 90-page “definitive analysis” and found that, in some cases—but only some—Green Globes can be “faster and cheaper” than LEED, as Yudelson insists. But “better”? No. The report specifically calls attention to Green Globes’ weaknesses around the health impact of materials.

In late May, a handful of green building experts and I met with Yudelson to discuss his plans for GBI. We specifically asked him about the board’s composition, anti-LEED lobbying, the health impact of materials, and other important subjects. While the conversation was pleasant, on these topics I found him to be evasive, but he said he would get back to us “within a couple of months.” On June 9, we followed up with a letter, signed by the sustainability leaders of thirty prominent architecture firms, imploring Yudelson to discourage lobbying and campaigning against LEED by stating publicly that GBI does not condone such activities: “We are deeply concerned that a continued campaign against LEED hurts the green building industry as a whole,” we wrote. “The real campaign should be one where all viable green building systems fight shoulder to shoulder to beat back the negative impacts of the built environment.”

Later that month, on June 25, Yudelson sent an email blast to hundreds of industry insiders, criticizing the BuildingGreen report: “Grow[ing] the overall green building market…should be our mutual goal, not engaging in attacks on the merits of one rating tool vs. another.”  On July 12, Yudelson finally replied to our letter from June 9: “I don’t think it’s my role or GBI’s to rise to the defense of a competitive product.” He also asked why we haven’t discouraged “relentless and unfair” attacks on GBI by other organizations (not knowing that some of us actually have spoken to others about raising the level of debate).

In response to this week’s USGBC/ACC press release, Yudelson emailed the group that met in May: “I hope [this will] cause your group to reassess where GBI is coming from in our preference that materials credits (and choices) be based on sound science and proven risk-assessment methods.” Again, this appears to be quite a different attitude from his past recommendations to embrace the precautionary principle.

Six years ago, in The Green Building Revolution (2008), Yudelson defined a “green building” as “a high-performance property that considers and reduces its impact on the environment and human health” [emphasis added]. The building industry urgently needs new solutions that drive wider adoption of green practices, but no sustainability standard can be considered credible today if it does not reflect the latest thinking about the health impact of materials.

Lance Hosey, FAIA, LEED AP, is Chief Sustainability Officer with the global design leader RTKL. His latest book, The Shape of Green: Aesthetics, Ecology, and Design (2012), has been Amazon’s #1 bestseller for sustainable design. Follow him on Twitter: @lancehosey

Citation: Hosey, Lance. "The Green Building Wars" 17 Sep 2014. ArchDaily. Accessed 22 Oct 2014. <http://www.archdaily.com/?p=549176>

Original post from Hammer & Hand's Field Notes blog
September 4, 2014 by Sam Hagerman

This paper, published as part of the 9th Annual North American Passive House Conference, shares the evolution of Hammer & Hand’s wood-framed Passive House envelopes in the Pacific Northwest. Drawing on six projects built in Portland and Seattle over the past four years, I will examine how each of five wall assemblies approached performance, cost, land-use, and durability. The case studies will also chart Hammer & Hand’s move toward developing details that are more familiar to the building community and easy to assemble, moving from unique to common practice. They include:

1. Courtland Place Passive House – a fun carpenter’s puzzle with minimal budget
2. Glasswood Commercial PH Retrofit – Passive House retrofit of a commercial building
3. Karuna House – a high design, high performance showcase
4. Maple Leaf Passive House and Puget Passive House – move more toward standard practice
5. Pumpkin Ridge Passive House – “Let’s do all cellulose!
   

THE FIVE WALL ASSEMBLIES

1. Courtland Place – a carpenter’s puzzle with minimal budget

Project Priorities: This personal project of Hammer & Hand’s Dan Whitmore focused on achieving Passive House with a small budget, using readily available materials and the strengths of the building team to realize complex carpentry details.

Courtland Place wall assembly:

Wall Structure: This house sits atop an insulated slab-on-grade, with the wall cantilevered out to meet the exterior edge of the perimeter EPS and minimize thermal bridging at the foundation wall intersection. Dan used a wall truss whose interior cord bears the structural load and shear of the building. Like a Larsen truss, the exterior cord carries the façade of the building and establishes the insulation cavity.

Air Barrier: The shear panels (OSB) at the inside face of the wall truss form the whole building air barrier, with panel junctions sealed with tape and sealants. (Note: placing the air barrier in this exposed location left it prone to damage from occupants. Though it saved on construction cost, Dan does not recommend the strategy to others.)

Moisture Management: Bulk water is addressed at the cladding with a true ventilated rain screen and WRB over a highly permeable Homasote exterior sheathing. While diffusion can go in either direction, the wall is mostly vapor open to the exterior.

Insulation: 14” deep, dense-packed fiberglass, completed in one pass.

Adaptability: This wall assembly is easily adapted to meet the specific performance requirements of any given project. Alter the dimension of the gusset spanning one cord to the next to change depth of insulation.

Cost: As this project enjoyed very low costs for skilled labor (Dan’s sweat equity as a personal project) it biased toward labor-intensive solutions over moderate- to high-cost materials in order to meet its budgetary targets. For our typical client, this would not have been an appropriate balance.

Land Use: While this wall is fairly thick, choosing dense packed fiberglass over cellulose helped reduce wall thickness by 2 inches. In the end the wall has a moderate impact on the footprint of the building.


2. Glasswood – Passive House retrofit of commercial building

Project Priorities: As a retrofit of a 100-year-old commercial structure this project, like Courtland Place above, was unique for us. Our goals were to reuse and reinforce the existing structure and achieve Passive House certification on a tight lot (and therefore with minimal added material outboard of the original wall face).

Glasswood wall assembly:

Wall Structure: We added shear panels to the exterior and a secondary interior framed wall for additional insulation. To meet fire code we installed DensGlass exterior gypsum sheathing over the layer of rigid exterior insulation.

Air Barrier: The secondary sheathing layer on the interior face of existing wall, taped at all panel edges, serves as the air barrier.

Moisture Management: Exterior Hardie siding handles bulk water with a ¾” ventilated rainscreen cavity. Per Building Science Corporation recommendations, we used Douglas Fir furring strips in lieu of pressure treated lumber in order to minimize environmental impact and construction cost. The WRB is a combination of the Prosoco R-Guard system at punched openings, integrated into a VaporShield membrane installed over the DensGlass. This wall will mostly dry to the interior, though it is open to the exterior through the thinner layer of EPS and ventilated rain screen cavity. Interior moisture conditions are monitored through the ventilation system to ensure that vapor is not driven into the assembly from interior spaces.

Insulation: 2” of EPS exterior insulation, with 7” of dense packed cellulose in the two wall cavities.

Cost: Because this was part of a full building retrofit that involved bringing an historic building up to commercial code, the added expense of reaching Passive House was nominal.

Land Use: Due to the tight site, the 2” of EPS exterior to the existing wall, and 7” of cellulose inside the wall, made Passive House performance possible without increasing building footprint appreciably.


3. Karuna House – a high design, high performance showcase

Project Priorities: Making a beautiful and complex design perform as a Passive House.

Karuna wall assembly:

Wall Structure: A standard 2×6 stick framed wall is integrated into a larger steel structural skeleton. Due to the structural requirements of the exterior stucco cladding, the engineer required a z-joist detail to transfer the load across the 6 inches of exterior polyiso insulation. This z-joist assembly carries through to areas where the house is clad in cedar, as well.

Air Barrier: Exterior sheathing is coated in Prosoco R-Guard system to create the home’s air barrier.

Moisture Management: Bulk water is handled by a combination of cedar and stucco claddings with rain screen cavities. The WRB is provided by the foil-faced exterior insulation, taped at all seams. The Prosoco system provides a secondary layer of bulk water protection of the structure. Drying capacity is to the interior.

Insulation: 6 inches foil-faced polyiso wraps the building. 5.5 inches of dense packed cellulose forms the thermal layer inside the 2×6 wall cavity.

Cost: This was not a budget driven project, though the Passive House “intervention” had to be cost-effective. In the end, making the home perform as a Passive House cost less than 2% of the project budget.

Land Use:  Footprint of the house was not a concern. That said, wall thickness is just moderate.


4. Maple Leaf and Puget – move more toward standard practice

Project(s) Priorities: To use standard materials and established trade practices in building cost-effective Passive House wall systems.

Maple Leaf wall assembly:

Puget wall assembly:

Wall Structure: For both projects, we used a 2×8 stud wall in order to establish a thicker wall cavity without the additional labor involved with a double-stud wall application.

Air Barrier: Structural sheathing, sealed at panel edges, forms the home’s air barrier. Due to field experience, we moved to Prosoco liquid applied sealant in lieu of tape.

Moisture Management: In both homes’ wall systems we installed fiber cement siding over a 3/4” ventilated rainscreen cavity. A membrane establishes the WRB over the rigid exterior insulation. At the exterior sheathing layer a secondary WRB protects the structure. In Puget Passive House we established this secondary WRB using Prosoco R-Guard. Due to lower exposure and budget constraints, we used ZIP Sheathing with its integrated WRB to establish the secondary WRB at Maple Leaf Passive House. The exterior rigid insulation (paper-faced polyiso) has a vapor open covering, so vapor can move out to the ventilated rainscreen cavity or to the interior of the building.

Insulation: Paper-faced polyiso exterior insulation wraps each building (3” at Puget and 4” at Maple Leaf). 7.25” dense packed fiberglass insulation forms an additional thermal layer inside the stud wall cavity.

Cost: The additional cost of exterior insulation, and the lengthy fasteners therefore needed for the siding assembly, was moderate. Time to build the assembly, and therefore labor cost, closely tracks standard construction.

Land Use: With the higher performing R-value of the exterior polyiso, these assemblies have shaved a few valuable inches off wall thickness and building footprint, an important “win” in their urban settings.


5. Pumpkin Ridge – “Let’s do all cellulose!”

Project Priority: For the wall at Pumpkin Ridge Passive House we set out to do a low-embodied energy insulation package, partly to offset the GWP impact of the EPS required in the foundation (necessary to handle sloped site conditions). We were also committed to keep costs low enough that client utility bill savings could pay for any added mortgage service due to those high performance building costs.

Pumpkin Ridge wall assembly:

Wall Structure: We used standard 2×6 wall framing with a Larsen truss system using I-joists. The outer exterior sheathing layer uses Agepan fiberboard.

Air Barrier: The air barrier was easily established at the sheathing layer with liquid applied membrane at seams.

Moisture Management: Bulk water is managed with exterior cedar cladding over a 3/4” ventilated rainscreen cavity. The WRB is provided by the wax impregnated Agepan sheathing. As a cellulose-based, open diffusion wall, vapor can readily leave the assembly in either direction.

Insulation: With a total of 15” of blown-in cellulose in the 9.5” Larsen truss cavity and the 5.5” interior stud bay, the building boasts a very robust, low-embodied energy thermal envelope.

Cost: The ease of installing the I-joist and Agepan combination (and lower labor cost) mitigated the potential complexity of the Larsen truss application and the material costs of the I-joist and Agepan.

Land Use: Land use was not an issue due to the large site, which allowed for a thick wall.


SUMMARY OF WALL ASSEMBLIES BY APPROACH
Air Barrier

1. Sheet goods with tape: Glasswood, Courtland Place
2. Sheet goods, plywood or OSB with liquid applied membrane at seams: Pumpkin Ridge, Maple Leaf
3. Liquid applied membrane applied as continuous layer: Karuna, Puget

Moisture Management – Bulk

1. Liquid applied membrane applied as continuous layer: Karuna, Puget
2. Liquid applied membrane at punched openings with integrated membrane WRB: Glasswood, Courtland Place
3. Treated sheet good (Agepan) with liquid applied membrane at punched openings: Pumpkin Ridge

Insulation

1. Cellulose cavity fill with exterior foam: Glasswood, Karuna
2. Dense fiberglass with exterior foam: Puget, Maple Leaf
3. Larsen Truss with cellulose: Pumpkin Ridge
4. Wall truss with dense blown fiberglass: Courtland Place

CONCLUSION
In reflecting on our approach to these six projects and five wall assemblies over the past four years, the primary driver of design and construction decisions continues to be client preference and site constraints. If the client prefers a building with the lowest embodied energy possible, then stick-framed, exterior Larsen truss with TJI, Agepan, and blown-in cellulose insulation is a fantastic solution. If, however, the project sits on a compact site and is bumping up against zoning restrictions, then the higher performing, and therefore thinner, exterior insulation options (like polyiso) become a better choice. Additionally, as the industry moves toward monolithic exterior rigid insulation in general, it’s a simple process to just thicken up that exterior layer a bit. Both Maple Leaf Passive House and Puget Passive House are good examples of this kind of approach.

As featured via The Permaculture Research Institute, including all photos and text.
Posted May 13, 2014 by Marcin Gerwin & filed under Building, Society, Village Development.

Marcin Gerwin: It happens quite often that when a new building is completed many people see it as unpleasant or even hostile, while at the same time the architects claim that it is a great work of art. This difference in opinion is quite striking. Why do you think it happens?

Mark Lakeman: It’s a question that every community is asking. It’s a conundrum. People have historically perceived architects as being cultural advocates — they trusted them — so it’s traumatizing for communities to feel betrayed. People even ask what is the role of the architect; why there seems to be such a divorce between our expectation of the architect, and the actual reality that the architect has become a commercial maker of building designs. I think that the answer is contextual — it’s a historical issue. You will find the answer to this divorce in the series of disruptions of history, to design and community. For instance you have a historical continuity for a long period of time and then it’s disrupted and power is reconcentrated into an elite class. In that context, the idea that the society designs itself has been aggressively obscured, and it has apparently been lost.

On the other hand, I think we should cultivate a broader understanding of the role of design in society. That’s what I intend to do for the rest of my life. I want everyone to not merely understand design, and therefore value designers, but rather I want them all to be designers in their own lives, so that we strengthen democracy. We don’t want people to be voters, we want them to be problem-solvers. The benefit that I also personally see in people broadly understanding design, is that my own office is flooded with work because people appreciate it, and me as well.

MG: I have a feeling that some architects believe this education should mean convincing people that the modernist buildings are fantastic. They believe people don’t value them only because they are ignorant. It seems to me, however, that the problem is not with people lacking education, but with the modernist architecture itself. The principles upon which it is based are mistaken.

ML: The essential philosophy that is taught to students of architecture is quite a frustrating thing. As someone who builds things, I work with people, I use my hands — like today there is a work party in my community where we are building things. I know how to build because of that. Most architects only understand buildings abstractly. They are taught incomplete theories, they draw pictures, but they usually don’t actually engage in the process of building or maintaining the things that they design. So this void of understanding is a problem, and it also plays out in other expressions of disconnection. You also notice that design students almost never draw pictures of people in their projects. They put them in at the last minute maybe to give a sense of human scale to the presentation drawing. I think that’s fascinating because in all cases we are designing environments that people live in, but architects tend instead to think perfunctorily, merely in terms of basic commercial functions. They don’t really think about people, don’t think of their actual experience. How strange, because the great identity that underpins the whole culture of design and architecture is that it is the Mother Of All Arts, made to uplift the human being.

Industrial modernism on the other hand is focused on objects — architects now want to create beautiful things to look at, and it is a huge unfortunate oversimplification but it applies. The models that they’ve been given include Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier or in some ways even Frank Lloyd Wright, and all were considered great artists who would tend to design things but not places. In contrast, that’s why this term placemaking has arisen. It’s because architects have nearly utterly failed to provide a sense of place. We’ve learned at best that the architect is a facilitator of cultural engagement and at worst just merely a designer of objects.

MG: What would be beneficial for the community then? What should be the priorities for the architects?

ML: I gave two presentations about this subject at Harvard last month. And I was asked there the same question — what do we do now? How in the world do we reorient our entire educational curriculum? But unfortunately we cannot wait for the architecture schools to generate an entirely new wave of designers that suddenly will take the reins of the profession. Nor will we change the hearts of developers all at once. It’s a long term project. But what we can do right away is to get off the couch where we live and start to design in our own realities. That’s what we’ve been doing so successfully especially on the West coast of the USA. We’ve gotten people to come out of their house and look at their neighborhood. We’ve convinced them that they have their own power. It’s an illusion that someone else can tell you that you are powerless. And we’ve asked some really good questions like: “Are you satisfied to just pay a ticket to someone else’s reality, to always be merely a consumer? Or will you in your own lifetime become a cultural generator? Because this is all the time you have. Will you create your own reality or not?”

For us in the USA it is an easy question because we can just stand in the neighborhood grid, have people look around and ask : “Where is your public square? Don’t your ancestors come from a village where there was a place where people learned how to sing and create all forms of culture?” You could point out to them that they have no village square anywhere where they live, but you don’t have to tell them what’s missing, you just ask them: “What would you like to see?” And people say: “Well, gosh, it would be nice to have a place to sit around here. There is nowhere to sit. There is no playground, and without that our children have to cross the busy streets”. Then people say: “How about a place for information? How about a place where we can have food together?” Pretty soon they put the entire village square back together, because it just comes out of their sense of need.

MG: What are the reactions that you meet with?

ML: The architects are upset. They say: “My God, what are you doing? It’s nice that you have children involved, OK, so there is no vandalism anymore. Maybe that’s good, but it looks terrible. Curves? Color? Metaphor? Are you serious?” But the architects are people too. Before they went into architecture school they were fully capable of creating beauty. But once they went through architecture school they were made to be utterly serious and they were intensely criticized. They were constricted, contained and reduced to eventually become self-serious elitists. Afterwards, they are so fundamentally worried about what everyone thinks of them that they design boxes that are gray, brown or black and have no connections to the needs of other people. They wanted to do so much more with their creative lives before they arrived in school, but their teachers were confused as well.

So what we are doing in Portland, and all over the country now, is that people are taking matters into their own hands. They are saying: “We seem to be able to do a better job”. Because when people don’t go to the architecture school they are still able to look at where they are and fuse their sense of history and local stories and address their needs like slowing traffic, engaging youth, getting people to get outside and walk, building neighborhood identity and pride. They can fuse it into a metaphor that is functional, symbolical and physical and create it. All architects used to be able to do this, but now they are contained within a set of precedence of what they think is possible. That’s what design education has done to them. Everybody else is more facile at being able to utilize their creativity then the architect commonly. I hate to say this, but it’s true, and I can say this as a second generation architect — I’ve watched this, I grew up in it, I was taught about it as a child and now I see it in my profession everywhere.

MG: Many architects claim that modern buildings cannot resemble buildings of the past. In a consequence they design boxes out of glass and concrete in the places with historical architecture. What are your thoughts about this?

ML: There is a mantra that is pervasive in the design culture: it is to make something of its time. To make something that expresses the technology of the time. It’s actually an intense, conscious emphasis on celebrating the current state of technology, because technology is taken to be the highest expression of who we are. I wish that people would gather in their communities and entertain the question — is this really the highest value that should direct how our habitat is created? Is the state of technology what we worship? Does the architecture of our places need to express what some chemist or engineer has created? We have a philosophical emphasis on technology and there can often be a near total disregard for the essence of community.

What is new and what is old can speak to each other in terms of scale, texture and practical considerations that make it so that the buildings we live in are easy to maintain. These things need to be designed in a practical way. At the same time there is a huge gap between the things that are old and are somewhat symbolic and the things that are new and which have abandoned symbolism. But if you listen to architects, they talk about their work symbolically, that it must express the technology of their time. Then the building is a technological statement and is expressing some philosophy like deconstructivism, postmodernism or modernism. The building is supposed to be a symbolic statement, but the people are going: “What? I don’t understand how you made this building”. And people look at the old style and say: “Hey, that’s comprehensible. There is a logic and there is a story of the people I should be able to read in how it was created. We can see that it was crafted by human beings, but this other stuff?” The architect is not helping society to know the story. The language that architects use can often be incomprehensible, even to themselves.

From the community point of view, the community never authorized the profession of architecture to abandon symbols and metaphors that were meaningful to the community. In commerce they say that the customer is always right. In the case of culture-making the community is the customer. I hate to even think in these terms but the people who are creating the products — the architects and developers — are absolutely arrogant about these issues. You know what Frank Lloyd Wright said? He said: “Madam, you will take what we give you”. This is another thing that they teach in architecture schools everywhere. The architect is the expert. They must always be “educating” other people. That’s taught to students coming out of school like: “You’re just a student, but you’ll come out into the reality. Start designing things and you will know more than everybody around you including 85 year old grandmothers. You’ll know more than them, so you’ll have to educate them”.

MG: So what you are saying is that it should be the other way around — architects should consult the community first. They should ask what are the values of people, what are their aesthetic preferences, so that the final outcome will be satisfying for them.

ML: Absolutely.

MG: But then architects might argue that ordinary people have a bad taste, so it would be better if the experts impose the aesthetics. I actually once heard applause after someone said that the style of architecture must be imposed. Do you think it’s possible to overcome this?

ML: There must be architects who are already struggling with this question. They should be part of the conversation. There must be people who are trying to bridge this gap already and their experience and their ideas should come forth. But it’s the community ultimately that needs to make it happen. Their voice, their insistence and activism has to become the strongest force in this whole equation.

The architects are not going to change voluntarily, nor will the developers who are driving this. The architects are so often just doing what they are told by developers. And developers have lots of money and they are isolated by it. They are isolated from the communities that they are exploiting. This is the biggest problem. Right now they are the driving force and their primary motive is simply to have more money or more stuff. And the more isolated they are the more stuff they think they need, because the main thing that they talk about with their developer friends is how much more stuff they will soon have. It’s like a bunch of simpletons are driving the destruction of our society. So the community needs to speak loudly. If the only people who are making proposals and doing designs are developers and architects, it’s just going to stay this way. Ultimately the people need to drive what is happening.

MG: What should be the role of architect then?

ML: The main thing is for the architect to engage deeply with the community in a conversation to elicit their intelligence. If the architect doesn’t do this, it’s such a foolishness, it’s such a lost opportunity, because the community is the mind, the heart and the memory of that place. The community is holding this gigantic repository of intelligence that the architect should tap into and support.

The architect should come in a humble way and say: “How can I support the life that is happening here?” This is the only way to be sustainable. If the architect is only coming in saying: “I want to create a monument to myself!”, then the monument that he or she creates will remind everyone of how much they don’t like that architect. That’s what usually happens. If they want to be remembered and have stories told about them, let it be a story of how they were a hero in the community by facilitating their vision. This is the thing that the architect can help with.

A lot of the time communities are just sitting there and they are not engaged, because they don’t have a creative facilitator. So, they don’t even know what their vision is, even though they all have the parts of that vision. The architect can actually come in and help them to crystallize a vision so they can say: “Aha! That is who we are”. That’s the role the architect can play. This is the way for the architect to find an entirely different depth of satisfaction, meaning and connection in their community.

~~~~~

Mark Lakeman is an architect and Permaculture designer. He is a co-founder of City Repair and a principal of Communitecture. He lives in Portland, USA.

This is an extended version of the interview which first appeared in Dziennik Opinii in Poland.

By Mark Lakeman
Published in Communities Magazine, Summer 2014 issue

In the first year of our design collaboration, we were already looking at world peace. Families were out walking in their own community, tending gardens bursting with food and flowers, gathering in the streets, and no cars were driving anywhere. The ink had just dried, and though it was only a lovely drawing, it was what our ordinary, grid-based neighborhood had imagined as their shared destiny with everyone else in the world.

We had taken half a day to dialogue, share a meal and spend some time to explore longest-range possibilities. It was all so simple, but then all we did was talk about the life that we were already living in our own Portland, Oregon neighborhood. The question had really become, “How do we inspire people everywhere else?” At the end of our half-day workshop called “What Would World Peace Look Like?” someone had said: “The revolution we seek is one where people will act with what they have, where they are, right now!” Another person said: “And everyone everywhere can do this!” Then we all went outside, as if into our own drawing.

For our young design-activist group, known from the start as communitecture (community + architecture), growing up in the cradle of design-activism that is Portland, Oregon, it had become ridiculous not to intend to create a better world. We were already standing upon the work of giants, in some cases our own parents. With urban growth boundaries protecting perimeter farmland all around Portland, the spectacular new public square energizing our city, multi-modal transit expanding across the region, vast wildlife sanctuaries established to provide open space for all species, and citizen power at a zenith, we had to ask ourselves, “What more is possible, and how can we inspire more to happen in the world?” We began to answer our own questions, the more we worked with communities across the city, and the answers began to multiply.

The first year of our activity was indeed ridiculous and joyously successful. We had no fear and we couldn’t stop ourselves. Though we didn’t yet have a name, we were well underway with a strategic knowledge of indigenous village design principles, modern development practices, planning codes, and regulations. With this knowledge, we designed and built a spectacular series of gathering place interventions that broke and changed laws left and right.

Our first community Tea House project, installed without permission in a neighborhood zone, brought thousands of people together in the summer of 1996. Then we empowered our neighborhood to transform a street intersection into a public square, and made it legal for everyone else in the city to do it too. After that, we created an ephemeral community gathering place that went across the city, facilitating relational networks everywhere until on June 21st, World Peace Day of 1997, when we created a human linkage of people holding hands around our city. Lots of people wanted to know what we called ourselves.

When we finally chose two names, we used them to describe two modes of action in our group. One was City Repair, the place-making activators who in a few years would create a nonprofit organizational structure for itself. The other name was communitecture, which even more quickly became an economically self-supporting model of collaborative design activation.

Though the two parts of one activist culture have remained involved and mutually supportive over the years since, communitecture has gone on to support larger-scale initiatives and projects that cover a much wider spectrum of communities and ideas. Many diverse communities have been attracted to work with us because we use design as a means to build community.

Our creative public advocacy for important principles and goals that communities identify with include challenging existing civic structures that have historically ensured inequity and the absence of gathering places where people live. So, for instance, by supporting the emergence of new collaborative places that provide forums for gathering and sharing ideas, we work successfully to narrow the terrible gap between what we know and how we live. In fact, each project really ends up speaking such important sustainable values in social and physical forms, and then more communities become inspired by example.

The kinds of projects that we are fortunate to help create can include radical buildings made entirely of natural and recycled materials. Most of these are urban, and they are always ideas that spring from people who are creating a setting for some new form of community. For instance, The ReBuilding Center, an 80,000 square foot facility that makes recycled materials available for low cost, is a project of and for the community of people who work in it. Each person who works there has power in their shared-power culture, they all earn a living wage, and each person has full health and dental benefits, as do their families. As design-activists, our interests shouldn’t stop with the shape of a building. It should matter most to us that people are empowered where they live and work, and that they are able to shape their own future while they benefit from what they do with their time.

Other kinds of projects that communities bring us to help with include many scales of urban infill-based cohousing models that so far range from four to 16 living units in scale, each of them informed by an enthusiasm for urban permaculture, natural building, urban agriculture, and community self-reliance principles. Because we are also deeply committed to historical preservation and revitalization, we also work to modify and update existing buildings with new roles and spaces, more open and accessible public places, as well as updated energy systems. 

Our main driving choice, though, is to work with people who want to be involved in designing and also building their own community places. In this way these places become a reflection of their living culture. Our recent work with the CAPACES Leadership Institute, a youth leadership development project founded by Cesar Chavez, has resulted in an exuberant building made by that community that is now the most energy efficient and artistically expressive office building in the US.

The way that we work is first to see that as citizens our task is to be part of a shared cultural fabric with other people, businesses, nonprofits and institutions. We must not merely be a business looking out for our own interest; in fact it’s vital that we act from a place of seeing that we are already a connected ecology. Another huge responsibility we see that we share is to restore and strengthen ecological feedback loops in our local community ecology. So communitecture intends local restorative effects as an outcome. This means cleaning up brownfield sites, developing stronger communication networks and relationships, engaging youth in projects, and creating urban agriculture networks. 

If we are asked to help with a project, it’s not merely a job for us; it must also be a long term commitment to our community with the expectation that at the culmination of a process we will all have more friends than before. So, when we help facilitate design dialogues for local cohousing communities, we are in it to help create the kinds of places that we also want to inhabit, for the communities that we intend will surround our own lives. 

In terms of our business model, it is a creative hybrid that grew out of loving our work and trusting each other. When it came time to develop official systems for payroll and accounting, we kept it simple, based on trust. As the most experienced member of the team, I was happy to be the one to who registered our name and established business accounts. At that time, our team was young and mobile, and since I was most stable, the ownership roles were established as my responsibility, to hold the systems in place while other people could come and go. 

So what has emerged today is a trust-based model where the present team makes choices together, collaboratively runs itself, maintains a very strong and attractive ethic of community service, and pays itself. In fact, though the official ownership is held in my name, the team decides what I am paid. Since we are a kind of benefactor-co-op, a great depends upon my sharing of power, and the value of this aspect of our model can’t be overstated. The fact that I utterly believe in and rely on my team, and they see that I trust them, is what transcends our legal configuration. Perhaps it is a transitional form of some sort. 

With this kind of trust-based approach and cultural mission, it’s possible that we could use almost any kind of official structure and still thrive.  This attitude helps us stand for what we are committed to, and because of this our larger community has always embraced us with positive story-telling and advocacy for our services, donated space, recycled computer systems, all needed materials for our desks and office environment, and quite a lot more. 

We do not like to compete against other designers for jobs, largely because it harms our intention to build common cause across the larger community. We do almost no marketing because our work has the result that many people spread positive stories of our work on our behalf. When other active people, political figures, owner-builders, homeless people, and other firms are affected by our ideas and initiatives, then we are supported by the culture that we support. Also, very importantly we reserve the right to be creative initiators in our community. 

While most architects are passive, waiting for someone to pay them to use their creativity, we will often creatively engage a situation whether we are paid or not. Therefore we can also initiate strategic projects that are socially based, politically charged, ecological, celebratory, with all manner of innovations, and continue to be off the leash creative agents for a better world. This ethic is expressed in our active design support for numerous homeless village initiatives up and down the Pacific Coast. In these kinds of projects there is never a cost for design support, which creates more goodwill in the world than can be known.

It’s also important to acknowledge that our cooperative ethics and goals can come into conflict with long standing competitive structures and behaviors. The conflicts can come in various forms, both internal and external. Internally, since architecture training is usually set in a competitive context, it can be challenging for interns to learn how to collaborate without needing to have their own way, just as it can be difficult for a mentor not to be dominant. Building confidence can be a challenge in any situation, but people find it much easier to help each other, as they develop strong communication skills in a cooperative environment. 

What we end up designing reflects our strong emphasis on a shared decision-making process. The kind of singular mentality that results in normally masculine aesthetics (common in the mainstream threads of our profession) doesn’t really get to happen in our work. Our aesthetics of inclusivity and wider emotional expression sometimes become a target for people who expect the more square forms and grayer colors of the architecture of commodity. Others may find it a problem that we overtly celebrate the interconnection of humanity with nature, which can be expressed in terms of living walls or roofs, vines growing above windows in order to shade windows, and edibles all around the site. 

What can you do about such polarities except to try to learn together? In fact, our commitment to cooperate does sit strangely for a profession that has been deeply educated to compete against itself. 

Our attitude towards our community is essentially this: we interact with our city as if we are villagers that share the same place. The initiatives that we support can come from anywhere in the community. As villagers our responsibility is to give each community and their ideas the support and momentum that they deserve. With all that we give to our community, our relationship with our community only deepens. In fact, as we continue to see our community as a living ecology, and as we heal broken feedback loops, we build upon the stories of sharing and constructive action. Over and over, we see the power of story bringing benefit back around to us when we release our grip on the “return” on our efforts. Some have called this being “in alignment with the economy of the universe,” the way that nature showers us with gifts. 

With all of the personal and community-scale benefits that we have witnessed, with communities in Portland stabilizing, and the increasing levels of excitement and creativity all around us, it does feel as if we are in alignment with great principals and a more worthy form of economy. Something wonderful has already been happening for a long time, and now we can design in accord with it while our way of living and livelihood become the same.

Creative Mornings at ZIBA | May 16th, 2014

Delivered as part of a monthly speaker series for the Portland design community, Mark Lakeman presents a broad overview on the power of design to transform communities and address issues of all scales.  Creative Mornings is part of a global network of morning-based design-focused gatherings.  The event was held at the amazing headquarters of ZIBA, one of the preeminent design firms in Portland.