Cleaning House : Environment: A top architect says we must build nontoxic homes for our own--and the planet’s--good.

It started with the best of intentions. In the housing boom after World War II, homes were air-conditioned for comfort, closing the windows in the process. After the energy crisis of the 1970s, houses were made energy-efficient, producing a new array of insulations, paints, sealants, caulks and adhesives to do the job.

American houses were becoming as snug as Noah’s ark.

They were also becoming polluted. Even poisonous. The new synthetic building products, dispensing a toxic soup of chemicals into airtight buildings, have created a new problem--the “sick building syndrome”--that can threaten the health of its occupants.

The prescription, said Paul Bierman-Lytle, a self-described environmental architect, is to go back to nature and natural building products.

“We are not very civilized in the way we use the planet,” said Bierman-Lytle, 38. “We are petroleum fiends when it comes to building materials. We have to start changing the way we build and the way we consume.”

The soft-spoken architect, who said he builds houses “with the planet in mind,” is acquiring a national reputation as a trailblazer.

At a time when sick buildings are becoming a national concern, he is one of a handful of architects designing “healthy” houses. His focus is indoor air quality.

His Masters Corp., headquartered in a concrete-block warehouse in New Canaan, Conn., builds custom houses with such features as nontoxic, low-toxic and natural building materials; energy-efficient heating and cooling; air filter systems designed to remove pollutants, and an overall computer management system that makes the traditional thermostat look prehistoric.

And, having spent the last few years scouting Europe for manufacturers of natural building products, he has assembled a comprehensive assortment under one roof. He recently opened Environmental Outfitters, a resource sales center that sells more than 2,000 products, including petrochemical-free paint, insulation from sea water minerals, untreated wood products and stains made with citrus peel, linseed oil and berries.

And Bierman-Lytle uses them in the homes he designs. “When you walk into these healthy houses, you feel very refreshed,” he said.

He sees them as prototypes for the future. Others in his field agree.

“He’s doing important work,” said Bob Berkebile, chairman of the American Institute of Architects’ new environmental committee. He has enlisted Bierman-Lytle’s aid on an ambitious environmental resource guide, the first step, he said, toward solving a giant problem.

“The Environmental Protection Agency research lab has identified 60,000 chemicals that we are exposed to all the time and don’t react to very favorably. We’re just now starting to look at the toxic soup we have created.

“Eventually, we’re going to have to re-think all the building materials and building systems we use. That’s what Paul is doing for very special clients,” Berkebile said.

Right now, Bierman-Lytle’s clients fall into two groups: Those who want--and can afford--to make an environmental statement (natural products can add as much as 35% to the construction costs of a new house), and those suffering from such an array of chemical sensitivities that one allergist has described them as the “canaries in the coal mine.”

But Bierman-Lytle sees a bright future for healthy houses, despite the obstacles of higher costs and an entrenched housing industry, where change occurs slowly.

“There is going to be a gigantic public demand for environmental standards in houses,” he said. “It’s already happening. A year ago, we were getting 25 to 30 telephone inquiries a week about healthy buildings. Now we’re getting around 150 calls a week, and a lot of media attention.”

Because a third of his calls are from Californians, he recently spent several days in Los Angeles speaking to groups of architects, developers and builders, with the idea of opening a West Coast branch here.

His message is that what you put into your home is not just a threat to your home but also to the environment. It is documented with a slide show, alternating charts and graphs with the elegant houses he has designed for clients, mostly in the New England area.

“The production rate of synthetic chemicals is truly awesome,” he told a brown-bag lunchtime audience of architects and planners at the Downtown Community Redevelopment Agency.

“There are 1,000 new products on the market every year. Most of them are petroleum-derived, and we have found that a lot of them produce indoor pollution,” he said. He flipped a slide onto the screen: a health check of a house. Like a chemist-detective, he said he looks for radon, biogenic particles, organic particles and vapors, water and environmental tobacco smoke.

On the table in front of him were scattered samples of the materials he uses: natural linoleum from Scotland, 100% cotton carpeting in soft pastels from Germany, cement and sea water roofing slate from Belgium, formaldehyde-free boards from Oregon.

They are just a few of the state-of-the-art products the architect has spent the last few years testing. “The ‘80s were pretty much experimental for us,” he said in an interview. “I think we’ll reap the rewards during the ‘90s.”

Bierman-Lytle, who grew up in New Mexico, has been an environmental pioneer since he arrived at Yale Architecture School in 1975 with the desire to build energy-efficient houses that didn’t look like engineering labs. “The solar houses of that period had a lot of panels on the roof and dripping, humid tanks inside,” he said. “They just didn’t take off.”

His maverick route to Yale included undergraduate work at innovative Florida Presbyterian College, where his studies included a four-month stint tracing the European campaign of the Emperor Charlemagne. “It was a great chance to see Europe,” he explained.

Earlier, as a teen-ager, he had spent a semester in Cuernavaca, Mexico, at futurist Ivan Illich’s Center of Intercultural Documentation, a think tank for visiting scholars where “we walked around these beautiful gardens and talked about life.”

He came away with a knowledge of adobe-built construction and an admiration for the Mexican buildings, which were “simple (and) elegantly built, with a good use of natural materials and an understanding of site and sun,” he said.

“I didn’t have the conventional portfolio when I applied to Yale,” he added. “But I knew that they look for people with different backgrounds.”

He immediately began designing houses that produced their own energy instead of draining it from the earth. Working with two other students, he got permission to depart from the regular program and build his first passive solar house.

His building, a towering New England farmhouse with an expansive glass front, silvered wood siding and small-paned windows, was featured in Architectural Digest as exemplifying how architects could marry solar technology with beautiful design. “That,” he said, “was exactly what we wanted people to think about our work.”

He left Yale with his Masters Corporation business already going, but it wasn’t until the mid ‘80s that he began to realize that his elegant solar houses were also toxic.

He is a builder as well as designer, and he was increasingly bothered by coughing and sneezing when he was finishing a floor or painting cabinets. Installing fiberglass made his eyes itch.

“In the building trade, this is considered part of the business, but we started to ask questions,” he said.

He also paid attention to a little-heralded 1984 report for the Department of Energy, which stated that indoor air pollution was produced, in part, by such building materials as carpeting, particle board and paints. That was “the first indication that we were working with toxic products,” he said.

During a six-week teaching stint in Germany in 1985, he met the “green” movement. “My students introduced me to manufacturers of paints and finishes that didn’t contain formaldehyde and solvents. They were producing products we didn’t have. It’s an alternative movement, tucked away in small places in Germany, Belgium and Scandinavia.”

The trip was pivotal for Bierman-Lytle. He imported the products, convincing clients that, despite higher costs, they were better. In addition to environmentally pure houses, he was building a reputation. “A safe house can look like anything--it can be Egyptian, it can be Colonial, it can be a farmhouse,” he said. “This differentiates it from the solar movement.”

His environmental litmus test is threefold:

Is the house a health hazard to the occupant, the producer or the installer? Is it a renewable resource? And is the waste biodegradable?”

Having established himself as an upscale builder, he hopes to apply the research to the houses in the moderate price range. Already, he has been doing some consulting work on large-scale projects.

His own house is a “typical New England Colonial.” He and his wife, a Montessori school director, have two children. When their daughter was born, Paul Lytle and Jane Bierman joined their names.

He is co-writing a book, “Home Safe Home,” and predicts that environmental health will be the cutting-edge issue of the ‘90s, pointing out that real estate transactions already include questions about radon and asbestos.

“Americans like building homes. We do it quickly on a large scale, but we are doing it badly in terms of health and energy efficiency.”

Just how gigantic the public appetite for healthier houses will be in the ‘90s is up for debate, but nobody denies that the “green building” movement is developing momentum in the counterculture of Southern California.

“Paul Bierman-Lytle is one of the pioneers in this wave of green building practices,” said Terry Kennedy of Venice, a longtime builder and environmental consultant who has just launched a monthly newsletter, “Green Building News.”

“We need to think globally: I am developing a data base of green products, green techniques and green people in the building world,” he said. Based on months of research on building issues, he predicts a wave of “resource-conservation practices.”

“There are little creative centers all over,” he said. “(Green) products have been out, and people have been thinking about this for a long time.”

And at Eco-Home, a Los Feliz demonstration home and resource center for ecological living in the city, director Julia Russell reports getting “more and more inquiries from people looking for architects with a background in ecological design and construction.”

“People seem increasingly concerned about the quality of their living space,” she said. “Not just aesthetically, but in terms of health.”

But the National Assn. of Home Builders, whose members turn out about a million single-family houses a year, isn’t predicting any environmental face-lift for the 11,000 products that go into a typical house.

For one reason, “healthy houses” are too expensive, said Donald F. Luebs, who, as technical director of the NAHB National Research Center, has an overview of the entire range of building technologies.

What Bierman-Lytle is doing, he said, is analogous to building a “super-safe house,” for special clients, but the cost would be prohibitive for most people.

“It’s true, we are using finite (building) resources, in the broadest sense,” he said. “If you say carpet, if you say kitchen flooring, siding on the house, everywhere you look there are plastics and forms of petrochemicals. In most cases, the natural materials that they copy are vastly more expensive nowadays.

“There’s no question that indoor air quality is a problem, and I think the concern with it will continue to grow. The whole science of the air quality issue is really low on the learning curve, as far as these chemicals go. We may have to do away with some.

“But you can’t take petrochemicals out of our lives--they are inherent in our standard of living. We are not on the breakthrough of any drastic changes. Things don’t change fast in the building industry.”

Causes of Indoor Pollution

What makes a sick building sick? That’s an enormous question, said Paul Bierman-Lytle.

“Homeowners are always asking us for simple solutions, but we don’t have any. There are 11,000 building products that go into a home, and the Environmental Protection Agency is just starting to study them for toxicity.”

The thousands of chemicals or biological agents that can cause indoor pollution can be identified in five major categories, he said.

* Biogenic particles: mold and bacteria.

* Combustion products: tobacco smoke, gas ranges, fumes from a furnace, fireplaces.

* Organic chemicals: benzene, formaldehyde.

* Naturally occurring health hazards: radon, metals such as lead and mercury.

* Fibrous materials, airborne particles: asbestos, fiberglass, pollen.