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The New Independent Home

     by Michael Potts
from chapter 14 :

Jon Stoumen on Secondary Performance

     We met Jon Stoumen in chapter 1, as O'Malley's stalwart advisor and spouse. Jon practices the arts and crafts of solar architecture in Healdsburg, along California's Russian River, where urban forest fires, floods, earthquakes, and storms determine which homes stand and which do not.
     When we look at the way a building goes through its normal response to its climate, regional environment as well as the way the residents live, their uses on a day to day, normal basis, we are evaluating the house's primary performance.
     We must never forget secondary performance, which is what we see when we look at the way buildings fail. Even in benign climates, buildings finally fall apart if left long enough (especially unmaintained). By looking at how they fail, we can learn to make better buildings. An example: when there's a big fire, study the houses that survive, to see what their builders did right. Monocropping is as much a problem with modern architecture as it is with agriculture: too many buildings of a certain genre get built without getting tested, like Maybeck's houses in Berkeley, with nice, pretty, combustible wood shingles. The ones in the hills all burned up in the Berkeley fire in the 1930s. Another example is the devastation that Hurricane Andrew did to minimal-code-standard buildings in Florida.
     Secondary performance is how a building responds to severe environmental stress. A building has to perform in its at-rest state, and also withstand encounters with severe environmental stress, much the way most organisms have to perform. If we look very carefully at successful regional buildings after one, two, three centuries, we can understand why some buildings are still standing when others have fallen. In many cases we cannot build them in exactly the same way as they were built before, so we knowingly substitute a modern response to the same stress. When we look at the old buildings in New Mexico, built with thick adobe walls, reinforced by interlocking vigas running all the way through to the outside and beyond, we see a simple, appropriate response to primary and secondary challenges. We who work in California are concerned that adobe structures aren't good in earthquakes because we have seen some collapse. But some old adobe structures survive many earthquakes while others fail; the difference may be in the quality of construction, the wall-to-opening ratio, for example. The old churches and buildings that have survived have very few, small openings. More modern adobe structures may have giant openings, thinner and taller walls relative to their thickness, and these are the ones that fail.
     This idea struck me outside a discount store in Marin. We had just been in Maine, where we had ridden kayaks on the ocean, and it was totally cool. O'Malley was inside getting some stuff, and there were two kayaks on the roof of the next car. It turned out the kayaks were owned by kayak instructors, so I asked them, what's a good kind of kayak to get? One instructor said, the bewildering thing about buying kayaks is, if you buy a kayak that's stable in the kind of water that you learn on, benign conditions, and you want to take that kayak in rough conditions, it won't perform well. And if you buy a kayak that will perform well in rough conditions, then it won't perform well for beginners in easy conditions.
     That started me thinking about those two kinds of performance. A house doesn't always exist in rough conditions, and it doesn't always exist in mellow conditions, so the trick is to make one that will exist in both conditions and will exhibit characteristics that will be cool all the time. One of the great things about the old indigenous architecture is, they didn't have access to a great number of materials and techniques to build with. Take an Eskimo kayak for example: You've got these people living on the top of the world -- super-, unbelievably cold conditions -- and they were able to build with few resources and a lot of knowledge, totally sophisticated, streamlined, lightweight, stronger-than-shit boats that they trusted their butts to, in the most severe conditions in the world all the time, a boat-building tradition passed down from generation to generation. Kayaks are almost an architecture. They have to perform, they have to be warm, dry, flexible, light.
     So the aim is to build a house that, like the kayak, has good performance characteristics. We want a house that can perform well in still water and also perform well in white water.
     Jon Stoumen suggests we build our homes "to perform well in still water as well as white water," and his advice makes sense, especially to independent homesteaders who mean to survive the coming changes. Whether the white water ahead is of our own making, or merely represents our planet's return to its characteristic instability, we must strive to be prepared. And then we must do the best we can to preserve the comfort and grace of our lives. In real, human-scale, personal terms, what should that mean to us?

 

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The New Independent Home


People and Houses that Harvest
the Sun, Wind, and Water
a book by Michael Potts
paper   *     8x10   *     408 pages
8 page color section + 200 illustrations:
b&w photos, graphs, charts, and diagrams
ISBN 1-890132-14-4   *     $30.00

this book at Amazon.com

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