garden, el niño edition

The massive El Niño event we're going through has produced enormous amounts of rain in Miami this winter. Normally this is our dry season, with lower humidity levels and very little  precipitation. The Winter 2015-16 season, however, has been very wet. Our cistern is full, which means all our drinking water needs are met, and our gardens are bursting with crops. The raised beds in front of our house are filled with greens...

preparing

The 2013 Atlantic hurricane season begins at midnight, so we'll spend some of the coming weekend checking our hurricane kit. We need to make sure the batteries and canned food are up to date, and that we've got plenty of bottled water.

staying dry

peafowl seem to like hiding from the rain on the porch

With classes cancelled at FIU and throughout South Florida today, it's a good time to talk about the house's performance during cyclones. Like every building in the region, tin box is designed to withstand very high winds and intense amounts of rain without sustaining any damage. The trailing side of Tropical Storm Isaac is passing through Miami now with an almost regular pattern of calm-storm-calm-storm, and it is giving us a chance to look at how the house fares. The results so far are good.

on staying dry

The rain has been falling fairly steadily for a few hours in Miami, which made for a good day to check the interior of tin box for leaks. So far, it looks reassuringly dry inside. In fact, there's no sign of water inside the house, which means the roof, walls, windows, doors and vents are all working as intended. The strategies we've taken to ensure weather-tightness should help us avoid the considerable costs of repairs related to leaky roofs. These include:

utilities and services

Earlier this week, our photovoltaic (solar-electric) installer connected the wires for the p/v panels through the holes we'd carefully drilled through the steel trim at the top of the upper roof. These wires will be concealed beneath, and protected by, the final piece of trim that gets installed as a cap over the top edges of the roof's standing seams. Once the cap trim is in place, the roof will be finished.

locavores

As the house gets closer to being habitable, we're thinking ahead to how fun it will be to garden in South Florida. We're particularly keen to grow food, and were curious about how to design the edible landscapes of planters, vines, bushes and trees. We've taken pains to preserve a great avocado tree, and we'll happily harvest the mangoes that fall in our yard from our neighbor's tree.

Our weekly farm share (also called Community-Supported Agriculture, or CSA) gives a good sense of what grows well here, and when. In addition to the usual temperate food crops (broccoli, zucchini, tomatoes, strawberries), we're getting used to tropical plants like the delicious betel leaf and surprisingly adaptable papaya. For the record, this photo shows two weekly shares (ours and a friend's), but it gives you an idea of what's in season in Miami in February.

update: last night's dinner featured a sautee of watermelon radishes (with their greens), with orange juice and soy sauce. Really awesome dish.

further progress

With the last exterior panels installed at the living and dining rooms, we have a stronger sense of the spatial qualities of that part of the house. We're particularly heartened by the amount of natural light that comes through the door openings (to the courtyard) and the windows (toward the park), and by the soft reflections of light off the concrete floor and galvanized roof decking and ductwork.

progress

The shell of the house is nearing completion. We needed to have several exterior wall panels remade, and they are being installed this week. The windows and doors should start going in Monday, and some bathroom fixture might start going in Tuesday.

In the meantime, here are some progress photos of the house. The view of the house from the park gives you a sense of how the color and scale of the building work with the vegetation and topography. This week's rain made the park especially lush (note the thick carpet of resurrection ferns on the limbs of the live oak to the right). We're eager to see the effect of planting the low roofs of the house with flowering plants and vines, though that part of the project will have to wait for at least a year.

We're also psyched about the transparency of the living/dining room. In this photo, you can see through that wing of the house, into the courtyard. And the courtyard is looking good, too...

color

A quick site visit this evening with friend of tin box, Peter Lang. It was an unusually overcast afternoon in Miami, but that gave way to a beautiful sunset, which gave us a chance to see the house's silver skin react to the rapidly changing crepuscular colors. When we decided on a silver metallic finish, we anticipated that it would respond elegantly to the changing light conditions. So far, so good.

toxicity and politics

New Jersey, 1972. photo: National Archives

A few months back we posted an appreciation of Richard Nixon's environmental record, which included signing the 1970 Clean Air Act. The National Archives just digitized a huge collection of images from the Documerica project (1971-72), which documented the state of our natural and built environments at the outset of this and other pioneering legislation (Clean Water Act, Endangered Species Act, and so on). It is amazing to see how badly polluted the country was forty years ago, and, conversely, how far we've come.

more wall panels

The insulated steel wall panels are going up at the garage and the front porch, and by the end of next week we should have most of the wall panels in place. We'll write about the installation process (and sing the praises of our installers) later. Right now, we wanted to share some photographs of the panels in different light conditions, to show how the color and texture change with the weather and time of day...

ductwork

Our mechanical contractor began installing ductwork this week. The segment in the living and dining rooms (pictured here) is the most prominent piece in the house, and it was the first to go up. It will remain exposed, along with the structure and the electrical conduit.

The ductwork has a layer of insulation between two walls of metal to keep the air as cool or hot as possible between the air handler and the register. This kind of ductwork is more expensive, but the insulation makes the system more energy efficient and prevents condensation building up on the ductwork, and the metal lining inside helps keep the air free of dust and mold.

The ductwork also responds beautifully to the changing light conditions inside the house:

urgency

An important new report this week gives new urgency to our efforts to slow the pace of climate change. Richard Muller, a physics professor at Berkeley whose critiques of climate science have earned considerable support among climate change deniers, released the results of a two-year study of surface temperature data  from the last two hundred years. His conclusions? The earth is warming, and the pace of warming is increasing at a disastrous pace. As Kevin Drum writes in Mother Jones, not only is the rate of warming accelerating, but Muller's findings are even more alarming than those of some of the other scientists whose methodologies he faulted.

decking

Our erector started installing the roof decking yesterday. These gorgeous corrugated sheets are High Shear B Deck (HSB-36), a structural roof decking that comes in 36" wide and 1.5" deep sheets. The decking is fastened to the z-purlins with TEK screws (which don't need a pre-drilled hole), and will act as a structural diaphragm under the insulated roof panels, which are also structural. Together, the decking and roof panels will deal with the combination of tensile, compressive and shear forces generated by hurricane force winds. They will also support the weight of the vegetated roof that we plan to add someday.

The B Deck will also make for a great ceiling, in combination with the z-purlins...

shade

The cheapest technology in the house is borrowing shade from existing trees. We deviated from the US Green Building Council's LEED standards when we included lots of glazing on walls that face east and west. LEED's concern is that the low sun in the morning and afternoon brings excessive heat into a building during the hot months. We recognized, however, that the existing trees in the park to the west would provide a lot of shade in the afternoon, while our east neighbor's trees would shade the house in the morning. The photo at left shows the living/dining room shaded by existing trees, even before we add the roof panels.

water, too much

Paul Manogue, Somerset, NJ, August 28, 2011

While writing about how to protect the house from mold, we started thinking about the eaves of our house, which, at two feet deep, are meant to keep water away from the walls in order to prevent mold growth on the outdoors surfaces of the building. Eave is one of those architectural terms that has broad metaphorical and legal implications. We still use “eavesdropping” to describe furtive acts of listening in, for example. And in legal terms, stillicidium – the word Vitruvius used to denote the edge of the roof which casts rain water away from the building below – is also a legal principle dating to ancient Rome that states a landowner can only build in such a way that his house (or other buildings) do not shed rain water on his neighbor’s property, thereby maintaining the utility and value of the neighbor’s land.

mold

Maybe it was Anthony Bourdain's lament for a life without stinky cheese, or maybe it's the sad thought of so many friends with flooded basements in the wake of Hurricane Irene, but we've been thinking about mold a lot these last few days. You might remember that the existing house on our site was filled with mold (and termites), and anyone visiting our temporary home passes a mold-covered buttress before reaching the front door (left). In short, we need to be vigilant in preventing mold growth at tin box.

Mold grows easily in South Florida. Our humid and warm atmosphere nurtures the stuff. Many buildings - like our house and a lot of buildings at FIU - provide a hospitable growing medium for mold by allowing rain water to run over their porous stucco surfaces, where it soaks into the material and promotes mold growth. This is especially acute on the north sides of buildings, out of direct sunlight.

surviving hurricanes

Carol M. Highsmith's America,
Library of Congress,
Prints and Photographs Division.

Hurricane Irene is slowly passing offshore, leaving us with rain and clouds, but nothing unusual for a summer in the sub-tropics. The storm may cause catastrophic damage farther north, however, and we are hoping our friends in the Carolinas, the mid-Atlantic and New England are safe over the next few days.

So how do you design buildings to survive winds in excess of 150mph and torrential rain?

awaiting Irene

This week was supposed to be busy at tin box. We were expecting a much-delayed delivery of light-gauge steel and fasteners, which we needed to install roof purlins (which are supposed to be corrected on site by the fabricator, who delivered them without the holes they need to be bolted in place). But then Irene came.

More accurately, Irene threatened to come at the end of this week. As the cyclone reached tropical storm strength over the weekend, the forecasts from the National Hurricane Center (pictured at left) predicted that the storm would reach hurricane strength close enough to Miami to threaten our new roof framing, so we've decided to delay installation of the roof purlins until next week.

Our erector believes the primary frame should be fine in its current state. We're going to keep an eye on the rainfall and drainage on the site, to see how well the ground handles intense rain events.

rain, continued

We've posted a bit on rain and lightning already, but today's thunderstorm is just too good to pass up. Here's twenty seconds of a Miami summer, amplified a bit by the remnants of Tropical Depression Emily. Within twenty minutes, the deluge was over and the skies were calm again. The major design question is how to deal with these sudden, short-lived downpours, both from a practical standpoint (how do you handle that much water in such a brief span of time) and from an aesthetic vantage.

Bonus footage: water pouring out of the drainage scuppers, and bubbling up out of the second floor balcony drains, at the Sunset Place Mall in South Miami.