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.
“We put it together like a little Lego house,” Prins says. “Indeed, there are some delightful examples of container homes in other countries. It’s a quick solution for low-cost housing.”
Insulated concrete form homes (ICF) is another popular new system. You basically build your house out of hollow blocks of insulated Styrofoam, pour in the concrete, let it set and then just leave the forms on the outside. Waste wood is eliminated.
Darren Graff of Dabrro Homes has been building these things in Edmonton for five years. He says you get an airtight, well-insulated home with half the heating bills of a normal one — and “it will stand for centuries.” The disadvantage (aside from being hard to renovate the exterior walls) is a price that’s seven to eight per cent higher than with conventional construction.
Profit remains to be seen for builders of a new net-zero duplex that went up in Riverdale last year. The suites sold for the break-even sum of about $690,000 each — a little high for the current market, even with such nice views. But then there’s the appeal of having no gas line and near-zero electricity bills (the place draws from the grid when it’s dark and feeds the grid for energy-credit when it’s sunny). Designer Peter Amerongen says it’s part of an ongoing research project; University of Alberta students from the mechanical engineering faculty will monitor the performance of the house via Internet for two years, and the data will be used to guide the design of other net-zero houses.
Everything was painstakingly computer-modelled. There is nothing exotic or experimental about the stick-frame materials and methods; the innovation is “in the way they were put together,” Amerongen says.
The giant roof of photovoltaic panels necessary to generate an estimated 6,600 kilowatt hours per year makes the building look like a temple to the “Great Green Gods.”
“We’re not expecting a bunch of monks who wear parkas and turn down the thermostat,” Amerongen says. “These homes are made for normal families of four with normal energy needs — even if they run the dishwasher and the dryer and make a lot of microwave popcorn.”
While he got his start building log cabins, Amerongen disdains some of more archaic methods, and believes the net-zero method is the way to go. Straw-bale man Belanger counters that the Riverdale project “uses expensive techniques and all the expensive, energy-saving add-ons. It makes the project cost-prohibitive and the construction has a high ecological footprint.”
So who’s right? It’s hard to find an expert on alternative architecture in Edmonton who doesn’t have a vested interest in one of the methods. You have to go all the way to the Azrieli School of Architecture and Urbanism at Carlton University in Ottawa for an impartial observer. Prof. Yvan Cazabon is the associate director of undergraduates and an expert in building methods and materials. He doesn’t have anything negative to say about any of the alternative building methods, and just seems happy that people are thinking outside the box. In fact, he says there’s nothing wrong with established building practices. “Wood is a very good building material, and it is renewable.” But he says there is room for improvement. You can, for instance, “eliminate a lot of transportation costs by using materials available locally, which also helps the local economy.”
In other words, build with straw in Alberta, masonry in Mexico and don’t be afraid to use “net-zero” as a marketing term. The only way going green is going to work is if builders can make money on it, Cazabon says. That’s the central meaning of the curious word “sustainable,” which makes all other definitions moot if no one can afford to make them happen.
If choices in alternative materials make your head spin, or if your bank is unwilling to finance an experimental construction, you can always look into alternative ways of saving labour. With straw, you could invite 10 strong friends over for an old-fashioned bale-stacking party. Learning to weld might be helpful in working with containers. Modular housing is all the rage in some places, although those places tend to be ugly. And there are machines that can mix and form blocks for “rammed earth” construction, which is efficient, renewable and sustainable, but costs an arm and a leg in labour.
Self-made real estate developer Ben Bertrand, 25, got fed up with labour costs and has invented a machine to build houses automatically. “We’re taking 70 per cent of the labour out of it,” he says of his Geometric Construction System.
He asks us to imagine a 20-foot computer printer that, instead of paper, spits out a finished wall, floor or roof panel, complete with all the necessary utility lines, such as plumbing, electrical and ventilation, threaded through it.
The machine is barely off the drawing board. Bertrand’s company, Innovequity Inc., is currently building a prototype designed for manufactured homes construction. “If this machine makes housing 20 per cent cheaper, the people will be able to spend that money on other things,” Bertrand says.
The costs of eco-friendly add-ons can really add up. A solar panel system can run you $20,000. When you add up the complicated factors in wind power, you’re in the same ballpark.
A typical geothermal system costs around $35,000 (much less if you have two acres to play with). Critics of such micro-generation may find it foolish to spend thousands to save pennies, but “the more people consume green alternatives, the more they become affordable,” Cazabon says. “We are consumers, and it’s con-sumption that’s going to make the green stuff work — without being too cynical about it.”
Clearly all these clever people need to come together to form the ultimate solution — and make a fortune.
A local company called Carbon Busters is trying. It’s all set to build an entire zero-carbon community south of Beaumont. The village, called the Willows, will boast homes that are ecologically sustainable, wind-powered, clay-wood hybrid constructions that use recycled grey water and efficient appliances — the whole green works. It will have a town square, less-intrusive roads and more green space.
Carbon Busters is now taking $1,100 deposits on units that start around $179,000 (detached houses from $340,000). And utility bills? Slim to none is the intent.
“I have a personal stake in this,” says Carbon Busters’ general manager, Shanthu Mano. “I have lived off the grid for 18 years.”
This is the future. One hundred years from now — in their geothermal, solar-powered straw-bale homes that generate enough energy for a hot tub, microwave popcorn and the electric Hummer in the heated garage — our great-grandchildren will look at us and wonder, “What the hell were they thinking?”
