Avenue Magazine Edmonton

Edmonton is on the forefront of alternative architecture — and we’re ready to embrace this new technology.

We know well the sting of winter gas bills more expensive than Eagles tickets, which must be why it’s so easy to find local builders keen on alternative methods. Just Google your chosen material with “Edmonton” and you’ll get a myriad of choices. We’re also a green-friendly bunch, ready and willing to “live off the grid” if it can be arranged cheaply in such a crappy climate.

You can use straw, steel, concrete, Styrofoam, clumps of sod, compressed earth blocks, used tires, scrap wood, underground hobbit holes, clay yurts, computer-controlled solar-powered geodesic domes, you name it. And while their proponents each claim to be the next big thing, sniping at each other like rival scientists in a stem cell debate, these alternative builders seem to agree that anything has to be better than what we have now — new houses that kill you on labour and cost a fortune in utilities.

Might as well build a house of straw, after all. Seriously. Building materials are just lying around in farmers’ fields across Alberta, creating a nuisance. If constructed properly, a straw-bale home will have well-insulated, virtually soundproof walls that can stand for a century or more, and repel winds far greater than can be blown by the big bad wolf, which is almost extinct in Alberta, anyway.

Paul Belanger of Living Design Systems has been building straw bale homes for 10 years. He says he can build you a simple, green-friendly straw-bale home for as little as $100 per square foot — slab on grade, no basement.

“My main goal is affordability and attaina-bility,” Belanger says. “It’s easy to take a huge budget and build a ‘green’ house. It’s much harder to design one to cost the same or less than conventional constructions — and still make a good living building them.”

Belanger says he has designed or built 36 straw-bale structures in Alberta, B.C. and Saskatchewan so far. Several examples exist in the Edmonton area, including a building used by the Salvation Army on 118th Street. The drawbacks include extra-thick walls that squeeze living space, and a poor tolerance for moisture that Belanger says can be avoided if it’s designed with regional climate in mind. You have to make sure you have a dry building site and a breathable exterior finish, but straw-bale building is one of several environmentally friendly methods that have been around long before “green” was a buzzword. There are straw houses in Nebraska that have been occupied, and bought and sold, for more than 100 years.

But perhaps a home of steel is more your style. From the international shipping industry that brings us all the plastic junk we buy from China, thousands of discarded sea containers pile up in ports every year. Each is basically a room-sized box that can be stacked, cut and put together in whichever way you like.

You can pick one up for as little as $4,000, including delivery. When you’re done paying the welders and crane operators, you have an indestructible steel skin with a very low insulation value, or R-value — just a fraction over zero. You’ll need to insulate it, do the electrical, plumbing, ductwork and interior finishing, and then spray on some fancy insulation coating to the outside so you don’t cook in the summer and freeze in the winter — and it can still be cheaper than a conventional structure.

Kees Prins of the award-winning Maltby Prins Architects plans to use 16 standard sea containers and other recycled materials to build a homeless shelter on 118th Avenue to be called the Champions  Centre. Construction on this artful, unusual structure could start as early as this fall.