Off The Grid

Holy Turf War | “I see myself as a sort of evangelical artificial turf man,” says Venice architect Glen Irani. “I do it because my mission is to eradicate decorative lawns from the face of the Earth.”

Though Irani laughs when he says this, he makes it clear that he considers the millions of carefully tended lawns around the Southland an environmental disaster in the making.

“Millions of tons of fertilizer are used on decorative lawns every day ... a lot of which ends up in our oceans and water supply,” says Irani, 40, who worked for John Lautner, Skidmore, Owings & Merrill and Richard Meier & Partners before starting Glen Irani Architects in 1995. He also cites the incredible amount of arable land given over to lawns, not to mention that household machinery--especially oil-burning two-stroke lawn mowers--is responsible for 25% of the air pollution in Los Angeles.

When Irani and his wife, artist Edith Beaucage, decided in 2000 to design and build a 3,000-square-foot house on the Venice canals, they agreed that 500 square feet of front garden space and 300 square feet of balcony space would be covered with artificial turf. Irani discovered in his research that the turf had evolved considerably since it was introduced in the ‘60s. For one thing, advances in resin technology prevent fading. And unlike the prickly, rash-inducing plastic of years ago, the new generation of artificial turf is as soft and forgiving as thick shag carpet.

Irani explains that if properly installed by a professional using a bed of sand, rubber pellets or both, the turf will be about 2 inches thick. “Generally, sports fields will choose the rubber, but to be consistent environmentally, we chose the sand.”

During the three years it took to design, build and move into their house, Irani became increasingly fired up in his quest to replace America’s lawns with artificial turf. He now is a rep for a turf company, Crystal Products.

“Last year we sold $150,000 of the turf,” he says proudly of the faux grass mat he sells for $8 a square foot. “And the biggest was an elementary school playing field. That was a score.”

Sol Food | Eleanor Shimeall, 82, has spent nearly a quarter of a century cooking in a cardboard box ... and swears by it.

While her husband Clark, 83, taught at the University of the Pacific in Stockton, Eleanor was an active member of the League of Women Voters. Her experiences with the harsh realities for women in Guatemala caused her to reassess her use of energy and raw materials.

“One of the things that really struck me was how much time and effort is spent by women in villages gathering fuel and water to feed their families,” she says, “not to mention the environmental impact of deforestation for that fuel.”

Eleanor began experimenting with a solar oven, a diabolically simple energy-saving device. In its simplest form, it’s a cardboard box within a larger cardboard box. Wadded newspaper is placed between the two for insulation. A piece of glass is put on top of the box openings and a tin-foil reflector is fastened to one side of the box. The reflector is tilted depending upon the sun’s location to increase the amount of rays hitting the glass.

“The internal temperature gets up to about 250,” says Eleanor, who moved with Clark to Borrego Springs in San Diego County in 1996. “It’s the same principle as leaving a VW out in the sun with the windows rolled up.”

Of course, the downside of a slow-cook oven is that nothing cooks quickly or gets crisp. Nevertheless, Eleanor more than makes up for this by baking bread and cooking turkeys, chicken and roasts. Although he’s the grateful recipient of his wife’s cooking, Clark says his repertoire is somewhat limited. “I just do nachos.”

San Fernando Valley Earthship | Fifteen years ago Scott Bartchy, 68, a professor at UCLA, and his wife, Nancy Breuer, 57, a school curriculum writer, were living in a Hollywood condo and dreaming of a life more attuned to nature and more environmentally responsible. One day, Bartchy came across an article about Michael Reynolds, the architect responsible for creating the Earthship.

Anyone who has driven near Taos, N.M., can hardly avoid noticing the development north of town where Earthship pioneers have built cave-like structures made of dirt-filled tires that have a plethora of windows and skylights. The structures are, in fact, an environmentalist’s dream: They’re built largely of earth and recycled materials, stay cool in the summer and warm in the winter and use very few natural resources.

“I left the magazine for Nancy at breakfast wondering what she would say,” says Bartchy. “When I got home from work that night, she said, ‘This is so cool!’ ”

The couple started looking for property in 1996 and finally located two acres at the far west end of the San Fernando Valley. They enlisted Reynolds’ help in the design of their house and set about creating Ventura County’s first Earthship.

That’s when they smacked into the bureaucratic wall.

To recount the several years they spent fighting building codes and inspectors would take a book (one building inspector who questioned their use of the sun for heat told Bartchy, “We do not regard the sun as a reliable source of energy”), so they modified the Earthship design. The soil-filled tires were replaced with concrete walls. Nevertheless, they were able to incorporate a number of systems that eliminated the use of fossil fuels and helped them conserve resources: North and east walls, buried below grade, absorb the earth’s ambient temperature to resist heat loss; 120 linear feet of floor-to-ceiling windows provide passive solar heating; 10 skylights with honeycombed blinds block the sun’s heat as well as retain it within the house; double-paned windows prevent heat loss; Energy Star appliances are used; drought-resistant plants were chosen for the garden and 13 planters improve interior air quality.

“We had someone come visit a few days ago during one of the hottest days of the year. It was 25 degrees cooler in the house than outside. He said something about our air conditioner,” laughs Bartchy. “I had to inform him that we didn’t own an air conditioner.”