Art Fallout 2013

On Saturday, October 5, we’re participating in Art Fallout 2013, an annual cultural event in Fort Lauderdale. We’ll present our ongoing thinking about the sustainable management of water resources in a talk, “Precipitating a Solution,” at Glavovic Studio. (If you’re not familiar with Margi Glavovic Nothard’s work, do yourself a favor and check out the remarkable housing, urban landscapes and cultural facilities she’s built.) We’ll be on a panel with John Sandell, a multifaceted architect who teaches at Florida Atlantic University. We’re going to talk about our experiences with tin box, and extrapolate outward to consider how cities and regions can approach water and waste more sustainably.

dumpster gone

We had the dumpster hauled away for the last time yesterday. In theory, our prefabricated steel frame and exterior panels reduced the amount of waste produced on site dramatically, though we honestly don't have any numbers to compare. Our disposal costs include having the refuse sorted into different recyclable materials. Besides sending the usual materials - steel, wood and cardboard - for recycling, the company also sends concrete to be crushed into gravel for road construction. We haven't yet received the final account of our waste disposal. When we do, we'll post the results.

buried

Last week's septic tank and drainage field excavations also gave us a chance to bury electrical power and data lines running to the house from the nearest utility pole. These conduits need to be buried 30" below the surface to protect them from inadvertent damage, whereas (strangely) the main water supply line only needs to be 12" below grade. The water line, which was laid weeks ago, is the white PVC pipe hanging in the air in this photo. It will be packed in clean (rock-free) fill to protect it from punctures after the electrical conduits are backfilled.

Why four conduits? Two are for power lines, one is for a telephone line and the fourth is for cable/internet service. Most likely, we won't use the telephone line, but it will be good to have the conduit in place, just in case. What else is buried outside tin box?

ornithology

Tropical Park isn't a sublime landscape on the scale of New York's Central Park, nor is it a vast constructed wilderness built to contrast against an overly dense metropolis. It is a collection of highly programmed play spaces (baseball, soccer, tennis, boating) interspersed with picnic pavilions and barbeque grills. There's also an equestrian facility. The park is well used, which means it produces a lot of refuse. And in South Florida, trash means vultures.

The huge vulture population in Tropical Park illustrates how even after trash has been thrown "away" it continues to transform our ecology. Nourishing dump buzzards is probably not what William McDonough and Michael Braungart meant when they wrote Cradle to Cradle.

Below, iPhone video of vultures circling over the football field at Tropical Park. Better than flying toasters...

what you don’t see

Notice the conspicuous absence of a dumpster.

One big advantage to prefabrication is that it significantly reduces construction waste. The primary structure is nearly complete, and so far the crew has only had to dispose of a few tiny pieces of scrap steel. The foundation and slab were poured with a minimum of waste (most of the wood forms were taken away to be reused) and the utilities were roughed in with only a couple of cardboard boxes worth of scrap pipe needing to be carted away.

one thing the Italians don’t do right

I don’t understand the Italian obsession with receipts. You get a receipt for everything here. Every time you buy a coffee, boom, out comes the receipt. Banana? Receipt. Focaccia? Receipt. All those little slips of paper add up. It seems like an easy opportunity to shrink the national ecological footprint.

the highways and cars/were sacrificed for agriculture

Back on the train, this time on the frecciabianca from Genoa back to Rome, and a chance to jot down some thoughts from my brief trip to Genoa. First thought: get back to Genoa. Genoa is an amazing city, and well worth the time of any thoughtful traveler. The city’s extraordinary beauty springs, in part, from its extraordinary topography, and the relationships between its urbanism and  architecture offer excellent examples of urban design from the Renaissance, the late nineteenth century, the Novecento and Rationalist movements of the early twentieth century, and the Brutalism of the late twentieth century. Genoa is a key node in the history of globalization based on maritime trade and transcultural exchange.

And the food is great.

A site visit with plumbers

Last week our green plumber, Ross Terrano attended an international meeting of Green Plumbers in Palm Beach. On Saturday, he brought Ronald Lunt of Green Plumbers Australia and Jon Cruz from Green Plumbers USA, Sacramento California, two of the attendees down to our site so they could see his work and the other technologies and strategies we are using here. We had a very interesting meeting, sharing our perspectives, sources and experience. Australia's history with drought, including the last one beginning in 2003, the worst on record has greatly influenced the mindset on water usage there. People have become very thrifty. The design of our Caroma toilets responded to the resulting water restrictions. But Australians go beyond that, Ronald told us that often people will take the wash water directly out of the washer to water trees on their property. Even with the recent flooding and easing of the drought conditions, citizens want to keep the water restrictions in place and continue their thrifty habits since drought is part of the environmental cycle there. This led us to a more general discussion on drought, floods and other natural disasters and the need to produce a large quantity of housing quickly, efficiently and economically. Certainly, we added to that the opportunity and responsibility to also make them sustainable and environmentally friendly. Ecosteel would be an appropriate building system since it can be quickly designed and delivered prefabricated to the site. Jon and Ronald suggested an insulation product from Hemp Technologies that would also be of great use. Its a carbon dioxide collector, a natural desiccant as it expands and contracts according to the humidity, mold resistant and is an ultra efficient and economical material to grow and process.

unintended irony

Miami has some quirky habits. One is parking on the lawn (or at least the strip of grass between street and sidewalk referred to as "parkway" on site surveys). Another is dumping big piles of trash and yard waste along the side of the road.

Our house used to have a big trash pile in front of it, but the neighbors have stopped using our lot as a dumping ground since we started construction. And to a large extent the construction has minimized the amount of dog poop accumulating in front of the house. But these ever-present dumping piles raise a good question: how much stuff do we throw away?

Is it necessary to generate so much refuse in the course of everyday life? What techniques can we use to stop bringing stuff into our homes just so we can dump it out front a few hours later? What does it say about our regard for public space that we don't hesitate to dump trash out on the street?

update: tin box just recorded its 2,500th page view. Thanks for your input so far. Let us know what topics you'd like us to cover in future posts.