Quake-Safe Home to Benefit From Recycling : The custom design is based on a similar house that survived a hurricane.
Julie Shular wants to build a different kind of home in Ventura County. It won’t look particularly unusual when it’s built on her lot on Houston Road above Pacific Coast Highway. “It will be contemporary-country style,” she explained, “and I’m looking for compliance with the normal building codes.” But she intends it to be the most environmentally friendly and earthquake-safe residence modern architecture can think up.
It will have none of the usual heating or air-conditioning equipment, relying instead on passive solar construction and natural ventilation. The structure itself will resemble a standard, upscale poured-concrete residence except that it will be made of sprayed concrete over recycled steel wire mesh filled with recycled polystyrene. No structural use of that diminishing resource--wood.
The grounds will be minus the usual sprinkler system but will have a drought-tolerant xeriscape of native plants. Indeed, the grounds themselves will be part of the structure, because berms of earth will mask some of the house from view. “It will look like it belongs there on that land--not a box on the property,” Shular said.
As owner-contractor, she has already won the approval of the county Planning Commission. And last week she and her architect Paul Bierman-Lytle submitted the final plans for the $400,000 project to the county Building and Safety Department for approval.
“We submitted documentation (about safety performance) we expect will become commonplace,” Bierman-Lytle said. “These buildings are already going up in New England, Florida, Georgia--even Idaho.”
Not all such “green” buildings are expensive. Some of the Habitat for Humanity building projects that former President Jimmy Carter worked on use the same prefabricated elements specified for this Ventura County project.
While Bierman-Lytle awaits the outcome of the application, he is off to the East Coast to prepare a big event to be held at the United Nations devoted to green building techniques.
The whole building trade seems to be developing a green tinge. Only 12 months ago, at an American Institute of Architect’s convention, hardly anyone was exhibiting materials made from recycled material or fittings that were energy-saving or nontoxic and natural. This year, according to architects I interviewed at the recent gathering at the Los Angeles Convention Center, one out of four exhibitors were hawking such goods.
I also attended seminars there that described green building projects under way in Seattle; Annapolis, Md.; Tucson; Austin, Tex., and Sarasota, Fla.
It was a Florida house that provided our local green builder, Shular, with the idea for a building method she suggested to her architect. “I saw a picture in the paper of this house standing--intact--in the ruins after the (Homestead) Florida hurricane,” she said.
She checked it out and discovered that four similarly built structures located in San Bernardino County had gone through a 6.7 aftershock of Landers earthquake in 1992. “Nothing moved inside,” she said.
The buildings, used as science labs by Southern California Edison, were built with recycled material panels manufactured by Insteel Construction Systems of Brunswick, Ga. That was how the Carter-affiliated group had heard about the panels and used them in Dade County, Fla. Every one of the 15 homes they built there survived--while 80,000 others were leveled.
Environmental building, it turns out, isn’t just a matter of energy and resource conservation. It can also be a matter of survival.
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* FYI: For new information on environmentally safe and sound building materials and services, call Pat Lally of the American Institute of Architects at 800-365-ARCH.
