New House Rules

The Museum of Modern Art’s (MOMA) exhibit about home prefabrication (Home Delivery: Fabricating the Modern Dwelling) is delightful, insightful and inspiring. Even so, it is also slightly depressing.

The sixth floor display is mostly a retrospective, which gives evidence to just how much creative energy has gone into an apparently age-old quest by architects, inventors and entrepreneurs to realize the elusive beautiful, affordable and easily-assembled factory built house. In film, models, original drawings, artifacts, advertisements and even a reassembled portion of an actual home, it is clear that that the compelling vision of marrying the benefits of factory production with the need for “better, cheaper, faster” homebuilding isn’t a new notion.

Kit homes were being shipped from Great Britain to Australia in the early 1800’s by The Manning Portable Cottage Company. They exported “dozens” of packaged homes to adventurous settlers who hoped to bring some civilized comfort with them to ease the difficulties of the wilderness. Thomas Edison took a crack at industrializing the construction process with a concrete house that started as a complete form of itself and then, through a hole in the roof, the wet concrete was poured, creating all at once the floors, walls, roof, porch columns, and ornamentation. Unlikely as it seems, about one hundred were built, making this venture a relative success story, even as it failed in relation to Edison’s hope of revolutionizing homebuilding throughout the country.

The most spectacular success/failure may have been the Lustron House, an all-steel concept that was launched with the benefit of massive government funding and great expectations. Twenty-five hundred homes were produced before the overly-invested company declared bankruptcy. One of the homes was set up in the MOMA display. As advertised, everything is steel, including cabinets and closets. It was an ambitious idea, but an awful place to live: incarceration comes to mind. In the history of prefabrication, 2,500 built projects is a big number, but the size of the investment failure ($40 million or so) was much bigger.

Most of the ideas and projects on display were just un-built ideas, single prototype realizations, or otherwise failures. Despite the efforts of renowned architects such as Walter Gropius, Frank Lloyd Wright, Buckminster Fuller, Marcel Breur and Le Corbusier, the ideal of prefabrication didn’t find a market. Despite numerous patents, systems innovations, and grand production possibilities, prefabrication has even yet to fulfill its promise.

In addition to the display, there are five full scale homes built in an adjacent vacant lot. They give ample demonstration that the dream is still alive; nothing about the prefabrication disappointments of the past seem to have dimmed the hopes of architects today. Charming, idiosyncratic, silly and occasionally wonderful things happen when designers set their sights on what is known as the “mass housing problem.”

On the first day of our visit, we went to the inside exhibit first, then toured the full scale homes on the lot. In this order, the sobering (and inspiring) historical perspective caused the contemporary model homes to feel unimpressive. Besides the materials and technology, I was groping to see the progress. On the next day, we went to the see the model homes first. This time, with the morning light, they looked fresher, better, more hopeful; a little neighborhood of grand notions, fully constructed. How bad could that be? When I went back to the exhibit hall, I didn’t linger, but there were some things I wanted to see again. Then I watched some of the film for a short while…and left. I wanted to believe, and therefore didn’t care to spend too much time in the company of evidence to the contrary.

I will say more about the five houses on display at Home Delivery in my next post, but in the meantime, if you possibly can, go. For those of us who care about what happens next with the homebuilding industry, MOMA has delivered. This is a special window in which the past, present and future can be seen all in one place. For a clear view, though, you kind of have to squint.

...to work on your hair, but be prepared for a fool on your roof.

One of our clients, whose new home is currently being assembled on site, is unusually qualified to critique and comment about our proposed construction details because he not only has personal experience as a builder, but has since spent many years as a university professor, teaching courses in building materials and construction technology. We are gratified that he and his wife have faith in us and we’re thrilled that, as a result, we’re also getting a very motivated professional consultant.

In any event, he wrote to me the other day about some concerns he had about the roofing details on his home being done correctly. His descriptions of his preferred solutions were clear and instructive and then he ended the message by saying that his real problem is with roofers. “I have had terrible experiences with roofers over the years,” he lamented.

I wrote back in sympathy and support. What I wrote back to him was this:

“I agree with your comment about roofers. I have the same attitude about foundation contractors: almost always both ignorant and ignorant of their ignorance. So what supports the house at the bottom and what protects it at the top are at the risk of bad attitudes, low skills and completely inadequate training. Most states require training, apprenticeship, certification and licensing for a person to become a barber or a hairdresser even though if they make a mistake, the head will self-correct the problem in days or weeks. But to roof a house, where any mistake can fester into ever-increasing damage for years, you generally need only a ladder, a hammer and little fear of heights.”

Now, I realize this overarching condemnation isn’t fair to those many subcontracting companies that do good work and have good knowledge about the materials and technology of their field, but I will stand by the (unsubstantiated) opinion that way too many in these trades are pretty clueless about the science that ought to be associated with their craft. Why is this so? Well, to make the point, whoever you are, however much you know about these trades, tomorrow you could do business as a roofer or a foundation contractor (or many other building trades).

Any approach to improving the quality of homes must include a way to improve the process, including a system in which proper education and training is an integrated and ongoing ingredient. One of the principal advantages of prefabrication is that our tradespeople are always here and we can always know that we are executing the right details, with the right material and equipment AND with the right training.

So far, though, we haven’t been prefabricating foundations or roofs, leaving those two critical trades to local subcontractors. If only they had as much training as a barber!

This has been an incredibly busy couple of weeks. Blog posts have been few, but buildings going up have been many. When this much work gets done in a short period of time, it’s not magic; it’s about coordination, planning, smart work, hard work, and really good people.

Unity House, OPEN_2, is up, and the exterior is completed, thanks to the efforts of Phil Henry, Paul Boa, Joey Szuch, Hans Porschitz, and Caleb French. The Chronicle of Higher Education and Residential Architect carried the story.


This week the interior finishes are underway and will be installed by Kevin Bittenbender, Paul Tuller, and Drew Kurimay. Last week, the woodworking team was very busy preparing the millwork, and gave a good demonstration of our flexibility and craftsmanship as they created some prototype finishes for an exciting, contemporary home that breaks new ground, both inside and out.


With the work teams dividing up the responsibility and with orchestration by Kevin Bittenbender, most of the work was accomplished very quickly. Scott Bosworth, Josh Conley, and Collin Clifford are building the interior doors, while Scott Frazier and Mike LeBlanc are doing entry doors. Joe Szuch and Dave Chase made the wainscot and wall finish panels. Paul Tuller, Randy Roberts, and Nick Kranowski ran the window trim and ceiling system materials. And it’s no surprise that Skip Singer is masterminding and building our innovative, removable wall.



Our This Old House project is completely enclosed, roof is going on, siding is being completed, plumbing and electrical systems are ready for inspection, and finish work is underway. It continues to be great fun to work with the TOH team!



Tom Silva, Norm Abram, and Rich Trethewey are the “real deal” professionally, while also juggling TV requirements; whereas we are building professionals, only, and are pretty clumsy about the demands of documenting the process for the show. But they are patient, thankfully.



We had a couple of good TV sequences when we attached the ceremonial evergreen bough on the ridge, after the last rafter was placed, and again when the cupola, copper roof and all was picked into place, literally topping off the home and completing the enclosure.



Stair design

Pete Favat (homeowner) wrote a wonderful blog post about the tree ceremony. He recites a story I told him about the death of my brother Stephen, who was also my original business partner. I’ll make you read Pete’s story, but I will say here that I will always do my best to carry the spirit of Stephen with me, especially in celebrations of our achievements, because that’s when I miss him the most.


Our on-site crew for the Weston project has been Jay Lepple, Mark Roentsch, Luke Marcum, Dennis Wright, Toby Wandzy, Duane Beiler, John McElroy, and Kevin Stowell. I also helped a little, but these guys did a mountain of work, in some very challenging circumstances. Our architect on this project is Chris Adams; the project manager is Tony Poanessa. Heroes, all.



Tuesday of last week, Norm Abram and I were filmed doing a tour of one of our homes on Squam Lake in New Hampshire. It was fun, but I’ll keep my day job. Norm is more than a consummate woodworking craftsman; he’s just a fine person and we're privileged for both reasons to work with him. Here’s a sneak peek at home we visited. The filmed tour will be a part of the first show in a sixteen-part series on This Old House, starting this fall.





Our team also completed the enclosure of the BrightBuilt Barn in Rockland, Maine. You can see sequences of photos that show the raising and assembly process, which was completed over the course of just a few days on the BrightBuilt Blog. Our team on BrightBuilt was Project Manager Lovell Parsons and crew members Jesse Gallagher, Seth Ashworth, and Daniel Wirth. It has been a pleasure to work with Kaplan Thompson Architects. We plan to follow them wherever they go next.

Meanwhile, Duane Beiler, Eric Selmer, and C. J. Brehio completed work on an addition for a home in Harvard, Massachusetts, which was engineered by Fire Tower Engineered Timber. It was demanding work, as it always is when new construction attempts to match up with old buildings. Connections and interfaces need to be very precise, but in a random, distorted, non-planer way.

We have yet another crew out working on a local project designed by the architectural firm Weller & Michal, engineered by Fire Tower Engineered Timber. Our collaboration with these firms has always produced excellent, remarkable buildings. Our crew on this one was Chops Polcari, Dan Rennoldson, Jesse Gallagher, and Guyton Ash.






While Norm Abram and I were doing the TOH filming last Tuesday, another crew was putting up a new steeple on a church in Brattleboro, Vermont. The original was demolished by lightning about this time last year. It was a very quick, but dramatic raising: one steeple, one crane pick. The photos from the local paper show the steeple, but not the remarkable framing underneath.






Here’s a CAD drawing of the timberframe.


Last, but not least, this past Saturday some of us were a part of a volunteer project to put up a timberframe for a local automobile repair company whose shop was swept away in the Alstead, New Hampshire, flood of 2005. The trees for most of the timberframe were donated by a local farm and timberframers from around the Northeast contributed labor for cutting and shaping the individual pieces. Our company donated salvage timbers and labor for one of the tall central wall section…and LOTS of people came out to help with the raising. Here’s a link to the Keene Sentinel story, NHPR coverage, and a couple of photos. Chris Carbone (Bensonwood engineer) designed the timberframe and provided information to all those who donated their work, and Mark Roentsch masterfully orchestrated a smooth and safe raising day.

Onward!

At a party over the July 4th weekend, I had a conversation with one of our clients. Not unlike probably every other holiday gathering in the U.S. this year, one of the topics we talked about was the high cost of fuel. While all of his neighbors and friends are panicking about heating their homes next winter, my client (and friend) said he had no worries. It was gratifying to hear his enthusiasm for his home’s energy performance. “You and I were smart,” he said, “to build a house in response to the energy crises. It just works! On the few occasions when the house gets chilly, I just use the woodstove. Even in the coldest weather, I rely only on the sun and a little bit of wood.”

The energy crisis my client was referring to was the one that happened in 1979-1980, not the one we are experiencing now. We built his house in 1981. It’s interesting how thrifty and wise we get when energy costs are high. It’s also interesting how silly and wasteful we can be when the cost is low. We built many of our most energy-efficient homes in the ‘70s and ‘80s. The energy crises of 1973 and 1979 made us (including the government, through subsidies and tax incentives), extremely creative and very willing to make better energy performance a higher priority. After that, oil costs fell back again and houses quickly grew in size, insulation shrank in importance, and some great energy-conserving methodologies were soon forgotten.

I can tell you without embarrassment that our energy strategies in 1981 weren’t very complicated. Step #1: Go to site, find sun; face it. Put more glass there. Step #2: Add and improve insulation to thermal envelope…and then a bit more. Step #3: Design a compact and open floor plan with public areas south, functional things (stairs, baths, laundry, entry, etc.) north, and bedrooms up. Step #4: Don’t deviate.

Back then, I was our company’s principal designer. Knowing my amateur limits, I was conservative and habitual. The running joke around the office was that you could go to Tedd with any crazy home design ideas you might want, but you’d likely come away with a story-and-a-half cape. Today, we have a team of good architects who create livelier architecture, lots of engineering support to detail the various systems, and a whole lot of new information and technologies. But much of what we do today to create energy conserving buildings, still leans on following the basic steps, learned many years ago. Eighty percent of achieving energy stingy homes is as simple as turning your face to the sun, your back to the north wind, and putting on a good coat. None of us should need a set of instructions for that!

We are doing a series of remarkable projects right now, each a demonstration of cutting-edge, energy-conserving design and technologies. All of them start with the basics. Unity House and Brightbuilt Barn have R-40 walls and roof; the Weston house (featured in the upcoming fall series on PBS', This Old House) is R-35; all three face south with logically-oriented floor plans. Having done that, Unity and Britebuilt are striving for net-zero and LEED platinum, while the Weston project will be a more sensible alternative to the gargantuan 6,000 to 10,000 square foot energy guzzlers in its neighborhood. Additionally, all of these highly efficient homes will have photovoltaic arrays, thermal hot water, and some sophisticated heating, cooling, and ventilation systems. The last twenty percent is difficult and expensive; the rest ought to be common sense.

I’m proud to say we knew it and applied it in 1981. Then again, so did every other civilization that has lived in cold climates, up until cheap fossil fuel made us stupid. In an already precarious world, this gives us something else to watch out for: fossil fools.

If you have followed my posts, you have seen more than a few references to the auto industry, mostly to give evidence as to the level of efficiency and quality missing in homebuilding. My aspirations for homebuilding are wedded to the effective technology you can see under the hood of your car, to the absence of defects in the production of cars, and to the incredible efficiency that causes so much to be purchased for so little. If you compare all the dependable rolling technology you get for $15,000 when you buy a new Toyota Corolla (including chassis, engine, transmission, heat, air conditioning, plumbing, wiring, sound system, comfort seating, upholstery, perfect paint finish, power windows carpeting, air bags, warranty and more) with the same amount of money spent on the construction of a new home, you will get the idea. For the same money, you could get one small, inert bedroom, with inadequate insulation, thin drywall, cheap carpeting, one hand-crank window, no sound system and no furniture. The kind of production efficiency and quality assurance used to manufacture cars is not a proprietary secret. In most industries, it is now just the ante into the game of business. Conventional homebuilders think they are playing a different game.

It is notable, then, that The Wall Street Journal reported yesterday about the reinvigoration of Toyota Home, a division of the company that is now the world’s largest carmaker. Yes, they also build homes and have been doing so—very much under the radar, it would seem—since 1975. If “The Toyota Way” is being brought to the production of homes, expect something very good and getting constantly better: expect the future of homebuilding.

Toyota sets the standard for continuous product improvement, elimination of waste and for balancing customer satisfaction with employee satisfaction. Thousands of businesses, including ours, are adherents to LEAN principles, which have largely been modeled and led by Toyota. Ironically, the quality leadership might not have come from Japan were it not for an American, W. Edwards Deming. He was a statistician and quality control expert who worked with American industry during WWII, but was forgotten afterwards. He was invited to Japan around 1950 to advise their industry leaders about how to build quality into business and manufacturing processes. What he told them sparked an incredible turnaround. There is no doubt that Deming was the catalyst for what is now legendary Japanese quality, and the Deming Prize has been the most prestigious award for Japanese corporations since 1950. If only we had listened…

I now see this history repeating itself. There is precious little information on the Toyota web site about Toyota Home. In fact, there is only one page, with no links. However, there is this clue about what they are doing: “…Toyota’s house making is based on the ‘Skeleton & Infill’ approach.” These are words right out of the mouth of John Habraken, another big thinker whose ideas have been largely ignored in many parts of the world, but not Japan, where he is well known and highly respected. Habraken has preached the theoretical and physical separation of structure and infill for decades. The reference on the Toyota site isn’t a coincidence; it comes from either a Habraken lecture or one of his books. Toyota listened to Deming and therefore led the world in manufacturing quality; they are now listening to Habraken and, in the same manner, may be positioned to use his ideas to transform homebuilding. If we would only listen…

I recognize Habraken’s words because I know them. I discovered Habraken in the early 1990’s and have been an advocate of his “Open Building” concepts since. I was captivated by his book, Supports, tracked him down, and subsequently spent some time with him when he was living in Cambridge, MA, later visited him in Holland and even managed to persuade him to give a full day seminar at our company. Our Open-Built® system is greatly derived from Habraken’s thinking. I’ll devote a post about Habraken in the near future, but for now, you can link to a short bio on Wikipedia. As far as I know, we are the only company in North America that uses the philosophy of Open Building as a basis for our design and construction systems. I now know we, at Bensonwood, have a pretty good companion company in Japan.

One other thing struck me about The Wall Street Journal article. The author ponders whether Toyota can sustain the homebuilding operation because its sales are “so small”— at around 5,000 units a year from three production facilities. They have a goal of producing 7,000 units in the near future. That’s “so small?” I am aware of no companies in North America producing anything like that!

Whether or not Toyota can sustain its homebuilding operations, the answer here is clear. Not to mix metaphors, but if design/build companies and the businesses that supply them fail to see the “value” train leaving the station, their conventionally built homes—unable to compete—will be going the way of the Edsel.

This post is for all those who keep asking us how much the Unity House costs and can’t believe we don’t have a clearer answer.

Unity House is also called OPEN_2. It is the second project of our OPEN Prototype Initiative, which is a partnership between MIT’s Open Source Building Alliance (OSBA) and Bensonwood Homes. Our naming of the collaborative venture using the word, “prototype,” was purposeful. Here’s the definition of prototype from the American Heritage Dictionary:

An original, full-scale, and usually working model of a new product or new version of an existing product

Unity House fits both aspects of this definition. Working on it has turned us into an experimental design studio and a building systems laboratory. As we become satisfied with the design concepts and the performance of the building envelope and systems, it is our intention to scale up production processes in order to create the construction elements in a more efficient manner. From the Small Business Encyclopedia, this is called a “Pre-Production Prototype.”

This type of prototype is for all practical purposes the final version of the product. It should be just like the finished product in every way, from how it is manufactured to its appearance, packaging, and instructions. This final-stage prototype is typically expensive to produce—and far more expensive to make than the actual unit cost once the product is in full production—but the added cost is often well worth it.

I added the italics. Prototypes are expensive.

Here are a few of the construction elements we’ve developed or improved specifically for Unity House:

• R-40 exterior wall, with a hybrid insulation approach
• Rain screen siding systems
• Window pan flashing and sealing system for thickened wall
• Roof panels and protected membrane system for flat roof
• Custom steel rack for PV (photo voltaic) array
• Folding interior walls for rapid partitioning and removal (15 minutes)
• Modular interior wall system for quick installation and reconfiguration using simple tools (1/2 day)
• Modular suspended ceiling system, creating mechanical chase
• Wainscot system for wiring access, using unique materials

We also worked extensively on mechanical system engineering and design, building code compliance issues, and LEED research and documentation requirements.

If prototypes are inherently expensive, this one has been especially expensive because so much new ground is being broken. We are not just prototyping the building; we are also prototyping nearly every ingredient of the structure and finish. It’s been fun, exciting, and yes, costly. But as the definition above suggests, we expect the added costs will be well worth it. We’ll bring the innovations and ideas to all of our projects. We’ll make better buildings and be a better company because of these investments.

So, to be honest, we still don’t know what Unity House costs will be. We are ten days into the site assembly, with at least 50% of the work yet to be done. When it’s done, we’ll know, but that information won’t be made public. The investment in the prototype will be borne by Bensonwood, Unity College, OSBA, and a few corporate participants, all of whom will be involved when we do a post-construction financial review. For anyone else, asking what Unity House costs is not a fair question, nor is it relevant to any kind of comparison.

On the other hand, the good, fair, and right question is, how much will it cost when it goes into production? We plan to answer that question soon. We will be offering versions of Unity House to the general public, and we’ll therefore have to put a price tag on it. I’m as eager as anyone else to find out what that will be.

The SUV was born from cheap fuel, a lust for things large and powerful, and big profits. It died from the high cost of fuel, a need for things small and efficient, and ultimately, low sales.

It was widely reported this week that consumers very quickly changed their minds about the features they seek in an automobile.

The three Detroit automakers were outsold for the first time ever by their Asian rivals in May, and a sedan was the top-selling vehicle in the United States for the first time in 16 years.

"Clearly, for people who are shopping for a new car today, the only thing that matters is its fuel economy,” said Ron Pinelli, the president of Autodata. “The big vehicle that they once loved is now a source of pain for them when they fill up at the pump."

From this consumer shift, the industry is starting to immediately and dramatically respond. To meet customer demand that is increasingly dominated by concern about fuel efficiency, not surprisingly, GM announced imminent plans to close four pickup and SUV plants in North America and expand output at two of their car plants.

The astounding thing is that the end of the SUV/pickup dominance appears to have happened in a single month.

Jesse Toprak, senior director of industry analysis at Edmunds.com, said everyone was scrambling to keep up with one of the most rapid sea changes ever for the auto industry.

"The shift was so swift that it caught everybody by surprise, including Toyota,” Mr. Toprak said. “Dealers we’ve talked to said they could have sold twice as many Priuses easily, basically resulting in a record month."

We’ve also heard in the last few days that the average cost of gasoline is at a new high and is climbing. Putting these two momentous news stories together, I gather we now know the price of common sense: it’s about $4 per gallon.

What happened so suddenly to the automobile industry is no doubt about to happen to homebuilding. The energy gobbling McMansions are our SUVs and every overly large, energy-wasting production home built is evidence that consumers haven’t cared enough because, until now, the cost of heating and cooling homes has been too cheap.

Now that consumers have learned the price of common sense, what can they do? Clearly, they are buying Priuses and other hybrids as fast as they are made, and they have the industry scrambling to remake itself in the image of their newfound desire.

But there is no Prius for living widely available to consumers, because there is no consolidated national industry homebuilder or manufacturer to develop one. This is one of the reasons why we are stepping into the breach with the OPEN Prototype Initiative. While we aren’t one of the giant builders and our manufacturing capacity is limited, we know that, in partnership with MIT’s Open Source Building Alliance, we are in a unique position to develop the ideas, standards, processes, and products that will enable the homebuilding industry to give American homeowners what they now know they desperately need: a high-performance home that doesn’t use up our finite fossil fuel resource.

Unity House, our second OPEN Prototype project, is now rising on its site in Unity, Maine. Last week, our crew spent five days assembling the building shell. In the next five days, we’ll be completing the building exterior. We have a webcam up so you can check our progress. This is an extraordinary building that could easily be reconfigured both on the interior and exterior to meet many different needs and architectural expectations. It is repeatable, adaptable, and will get more and more affordable. With fifteen more working days to go, watch us build our idea of a Prius for living.

The sustainable house, isn’t sustainable, if it isn’t both affordable and widely available.

One of my brothers is a grade school reading teacher in Texas. Having read my post about sustainability, he issued the “school teacher’s challenge,” which would have us building him a custom designed, high-performance, sustainable home that he could afford on his modest salary.

I’d like nothing more than to do that, and not just for my brother. But to be able to build high-performance homes at a price range that would allow the average income family to buy one, nearly everything about the way homes are built will have to be changed. We can’t create high quality, affordable homes when each one is made one-at-at-time, on individual building sites, directly from raw materials. Architect Kent Larson, my colleague and partner in the OPEN Prototype Initiative, has pointed out, that current homebuilding methods are the equivalent of building cars, one-at-a-time, in the driveway of each consumer. If cars were made that way, it is easy to speculate that they would be 25-50 times more expensive and about half as reliable. To make really good homes available to Main Street America, we’ll need a new mindset and a new system.

We launched the OPEN Prototype Initiative specifically to work toward the development of a new approach to building. Through this effort, we're trying to broadly connect with the homebuilding industry, to promote a set of standards and principles that would result in the development of components and systems that could be mass produced at a scale that would ensure both quality improvement and price reduction.

The Unity House project is a prototype of this idea. One of the core concepts is to change the building site from a place of inefficient manufacturing to a place of efficient assembly. The shift is simple in theory: bundles of raw commodity materials are replaced with preconstructed elements; unprocessed wire, pipe, connectors, elbows, and valves are replaced with manifolds, harnesses, and “plug-and-play” systems; linear on-site construction is replaced with parallel off-site preconstruction; pick-up-truck construction exposed to weather is replaced with state-of-the-art Lean manufacturing.

For Unity House, we distilled the many thousands of parts and pieces down to about fifty preconstructed elements. We are using modules for the mechanical-intensive areas, panels for walls, floors and roof sections for the living areas, and modular systems for interior partitions and finishes. It’s a multi-pronged approach, to give us many different ways to achieve the project requirements. The modules and panels are already in production. You can see progress photos on the OPEN Prototype Initiative web site.

The obstacles to the “school teacher’s challenge” are many, but if I squint real hard, it’s possible to visualize how it happens. If manufacturers and suppliers of building products could agree on some basic dimensioning standards, materials could be supplied with added value, and in a more complete form. Virtual libraries and catalogs would make everything available to designers, engineers, and homeowners, making it possible for truly custom homes to be quickly assembled in design, the same way they would ultimately be built. Based on Open Building concepts, electrical, plumbing, and HVAC systems would be accessible, allowing them to be complete systems and facilitating quick plug-in connections for assembly, change, and repair.

Basically, the high-performance affordable home is just a shift of consciousness away; no new technology or radical innovations are required. In addition, adopting a few general standards, interfaces, and principles would unify a fragmented industry and create vast new areas of innovation, creative competition, and whole new sectors of economic potential.

There will be losers when the “school teacher’s challenge” is won, but the winners—including homeowners, now and in the future—are long overdue and desperately in need of more sustainable places to live their lives.

Rule #3. Save your world


It’s actually a simple thing to define wealth and progress more maturely, more humanely, and with more sustainable ambitions. It just needs to happen in the hearts and lives of people like you and me, one at a time.

Almost forty years ago, I heard a speech by the great English economist E.F. Schumacher in which he said something that has been my mantra and beacon ever since. I’ll pass it on exactly as I wrote it down. “The most powerful and useful thing any individual or organization can do, is to create a visible model of the ideal world they envision.” His point was that it is often useless to struggle and fight against the big world problems. It’s typically frustrating, ineffective, and depressing. On the other hand, it’s much easier, much more positive, and much more rewarding, to work toward your ideal of how the world should be – by simply creating it where you are.

Schumacher was echoing the words of Gandhi’s: “Be the change you want to see in the world,” but he was also specifically talking about creating tangible evidence for others to see, allowing your visible model to inspire others in a potentially endless cycle of positive change. Schumacher’s take on the concept was to not only “be the change,” but also to be deliberate about ensuring that others see it and learn from it. Every good model of a better world, large or small, has the potential to become a movement. This simple idea is the definition of the term, “seeds of change” and it is something that any person, group, or community can do, right now.

Inspired by the Schumacher/Gandhi challenge, my wife, Christine, and I have spent our years together trying to build good, visible models of the world as we’d like it to be for everyone.

First, in our home life: we have tried to make this our number one priority and a place where love and patience are boundless. We have two amazing daughters and 39 years of marriage to show for it. In addition, we have only used the sun and wood to heat our home for the past 36 years.

Second, in our business, we have tried to make it a place where everyone has the opportunity to reach their full potential, and where responsibility, authority and money are fairly distributed. Our view of a healthy business is one in which everyone can apply Tedd’s Rules in their own way. We have 80 associates, many of whom have been with us for over 15, 20 and 25 years to show for it. Also, our facilities have been built primarily from recycled materials, and we use our wood waste as our heating fuel.

Thirdly, we have the houses we build. We believe homes greatly matter in the lives of people and communities. This Winston Churchill quote is carved into a beam you see as you enter our building: “We shape our buildings; thereafter, they shape us.” Our company mission statement therefore doesn’t mention buildings: it reads, “Through process and product, to improve the quality of lives.”

We now are trying, audaciously as usual, to shape the future of homebuilding. Our OPEN Prototype Initiative, in partnership with MIT, is an attempt to make a visible model of the sustainable American home. In our vision, this home will be capable of lasting 500 years, require zero energy for heat and power, and will be affordable. It may take many years for this vision to be fully realized, but once again, there is no plan B. I’m happy and proud to say that our most recent effort in creating that model is also a partnership with Unity College, and it will rise right across the campus in the next month or so. Our vision and yours are now destined to be entwined, for many centuries.

So, I guess this speech could have been much shorter: Tedd’s rules are:
Be happy, buck convention, save your world.

There is no doubt that the world is in distress and that these are difficult times, but I believe that we will not only endure, we’ll prevail. In the deepest part of us, there is an inner truth that fires a spirit capable of compassion, sacrifice, and an inherent longing for sustainability.

Somewhere within us, we know what all religious teachings have been trying to tell us for centuries: that this life is ephemeral and transient, and that success and failure, as popularly defined, are a lie. It is the mission of our team—as I like to think of you and myself—for each of us to find meaning with our hearts, and our minds, and our hands, and our souls. The work of our lives is simply to bring out all that is within us, and doing that will not only save us – it will save the world.

Rule #2: Buck convention.

Don’t deny your youthful naiveté; it may be a blessing. Innocent idealism trumps cynical realism. In a world that has gone so wrong, a certain amount of ignorance can be a powerful tool. You have no trouble thinking outside the box when you’re not in it. In this world, there’s an overabundance of the rational, reasonable and realistic and not enough big, hairy audacious, let’s-stretch-ourselves belief in the possible. So, challenge conventional wisdom; much of it has proven to be both unwise and unsustainable.

Trust your instincts and then trust yourself to learn about the constraints and barriers in real time. If you are humble, resilient, perseverant and adaptable, you’ll end up where you should be – not with someone else’s ideals and visions, and not where you were told to stop.

Conventional wisdom tends to build up big, thick defensive walls to ward off the evidence that it might be wrong, incomplete, or inadequate. Habit and history are powerful forces, but they also often create arbitrary mental boundaries and constrain possibility. Over time, habit becomes belief, belief becomes cultural law, and questioning it becomes heresy.

Sometimes—in fact, very often—the ideas, processes, and systems we take for granted, are out of date or just plain wrong. Henry Ford said that if he had listened to conventional wisdom, he would have worked on faster horses. If our founding fathers had listened to conventional wisdom, we might still be living under English rule, and we certainly wouldn’t have tried the grand American experiment we call democracy.

Soon after I went off on my own in carpentry and building, I started seeking a better way to build because I’d become dissatisfied with what is known as stick construction. Ironically, it is also called conventional building. As an alternative, I eventually decided to embark on a mission to revive the craft of timberframe building in North America. From a rational perspective, the idea was nuts. Although timberframing had been the dominant form of wood building for several thousand years, it had been completely dead for the previous four generations; there was nobody to learn from and the only available tools were antiques. Furthermore, I didn’t even know how to do it.

So, there were some significant obstacles, but I had some things going for me to improve my odds for success:

• youthful naiveté
• blind ignorance
• unwarranted optimism
• dumb perseverance
• no Plan B

Today, I know how to timberframe. I’ve written four books about it and there are now around four hundred companies throughout North America that specialize in this ancient, but now completely modern building method.

So, what big, thick walls of conventional wisdom stand in your way? There are many and there is much at stake. For tens of thousands of years of human development, we struggled to protect ourselves from nature, but now it is nature that needs to be protected from us.

To build a sustainable world for humans, we’ll first need sustainable beliefs and aspirations. We need the power of innocence; we need a new vision from those who haven’t yet been boiled in the stew of prevailing illusions and disconnections. Those who remain unshackled to accepted economic and societal assumptions are unlikely to need being told that:

• Prosperity is not just about money and stuff
• Our purpose here on earth is not to shop and consume
• Progress is not inherently defined by growth
• Productivity does not trump health
• The desires of present lives are not more important than the needs of future lives

That leads to the final rule.

Last Saturday, I gave the commencement address at Unity College in Maine. I was also given an honorary doctorate, which is likely to make many who know me well chuckle, with the exception of my oldest daughter, Emily, who is now deep in the throes of writing her dissertation for a real doctorate.

The speech could have been better and it certainly wasn’t terribly original, but it was an accurate reflection of a few things I feel strongly about, which I called Tedd’s Rules. I’m going to post the written version of the speech over next few days.

I’m deeply honored and very humbled about being asked to speak on this milestone day in your lives. I’ll admit I was surprised to get the invitation. You see, when you strip me back to my essence, wiping away some of my biographical spit and polish, I’m really still at heart a carpenter, which was my career choice at your age, and carpenters aren’t typically asked to give commencement speeches.

Well, it’s pretty easy for me to guess what you’re thinking right now: “Who IS this geezer? I hope he doesn’t talk too long.” I realize sitting there patiently could be hard. I’m now literally the only thing left standing between your years of hard work and your diploma, so I’ll try to be sensitive to that.

I do have some thoughts for this day, but this is not a pulpit and I’m in no position to preach. I offer these words with humility, or as my Dad used to say at the end of making a persuasive argument: “Of course, I could be wrong.”

As Unity College graduates, my preconceived notion here is that I am talking with you as new teammates, as Unity’s environmental focus and mission for sustainability likely lands many of us on the same team. Old as I look, I have a lot of working years left, and I very much believe that in that time—let’s call it twenty-five years—we can make this a much better, more sustainable world for our family and friends, for our communities, for our country, for this planet, and, of course, for ourselves.

To keep this simple and short(er), I have just three pieces of advice to give you—none original—but taken together they still amount to this veteran’s pointers to his new teammates. I’ll call them Tedd’s rules.

Rule #1. Be happy.

Love what you do. I know this sounds trite and obvious, but all too few follow this rule. I know many people who have spent their entire lives being absolutely miserable in their work. I’m sure you do too. When you see it go on year after year, decade after decade, it’s enough to make you cry. Even financial security doesn’t compensate for this bad choice.

Sustainability begins in you. It is critical that you find work that satisfies you in that very deepest part of your soul. You can’t be useful and effective if the thing you do every day is at cross-purposes with your heart.

Don’t even spurn this advice for a good cause, unless it’s only a short-term mission. If you try to work for a cause or an effort that doesn’t grab the spirit and substance of you, then it’s more likely that you’ll end up as another one of its victims instead of a part of the solution. So, do not submit your time on earth to anything other than a full discovery of your true calling.

Mastering anything takes a long time. It’s true of art, music, writing, law and medicine. It’s also true of forestry, farming, mechanics, and my profession, carpentry and building. Have patience (including you, parents). However long it takes, whatever it takes, find something to do that you never have to force yourself out of bed for. From then on, there will be few limitations to what you can achieve.

Remember also, that your graduation today doesn’t determine your path; it only increases your freedom to be very selective about it and your ability to master it.

When I was in school, I had ambitions of going into journalism or politics or law. I wasn’t really sure which avenue to pursue because I wasn’t really committed to any of them, but they were on the list of accepted professions to be pursued by college students, so that’s what I thought I should do.

As luck would have it, I ended up spending some concentrated time doing carpentry when I came to New England. I knew I loved building things, but always assumed that carpentry was beneath me somehow. But in this period, I met a very special master carpenter who was the most skilled building craftsman I had ever met and also the most passionate, even though he was already past retirement age. One day, upon hearing that I was an English major, he gave me a five minute recitation, by memory, of his favorite Yeats poem. It blew me away and taught me that you don’t have to give up one thing to become another, you can take it all with you.

I also learned from this man and others that the dignity of the work comes mainly from having the right attitude. They taught me that carpentry isn’t just a job of banging nails in wood, raising walls and laying floors; but it’s rather a much higher mission, having to do with improving the quality of peoples’ lives for generations and generations into the future.

When I understood its deeper dimensions, and when I came to finally understand just how challenging and incredibly difficult it is to truly master the craft of building, I was hooked for life. I have now been a builder for over thirty-five years and I have just as much energy and commitment for it today as I did when I was twenty five and I’m not at all eager to stop because there’s so much more to learn and do.

There are a few interesting outcomes to Rule #1 and you’ll learn more of these when you get there, but I’ll give you a peek.

-When you work for the love of it, you don’t work for money. It becomes an outcome, not the primary goal. My wife and I spent many of our early years with very little money and a few recent years with more than adequate money. I prefer the latter to the former, but though I remember the years of living in a one-room cabin, simpler meals and half-filling the gas tank, I don’t recall ever wanting to do anything else. The hard times and easy times honestly aren’t that different when you find your calling.

-When you work for the love of it, you come to realize that comfort is overrated. If you’ve ever kayaked down a river, been out on snowshoes (or a snowmobile) on a sub-zero moonlit night, or reached the summit after a long mountain climb, then you know that there are several levels of satisfaction that rise way above simply being comfortable. The finest things in life, in fact, usually have attached to them some amount of serious stress, pain and hard work. Every mother knows about this basic truth. You already have a sense for that also, or you wouldn’t be graduating today. I’ve experienced this feeling many times over the years as I’ve worked long days and weeks with my associates in the company breaking through barrier after barrier with our buildings, each time achieving things previously impossible. These accomplishments are sheer, unfettered joy, and it’s easy to get addicted to that.

-When you work for the love of it, you will find, in Abraham Lincoln’s words “the better angels of your nature.” I don’t know what would have become of me if I’d chosen a different path in life, but I do know that this one has demanded me to try harder to rise above my petty and selfish tendencies, if only because I have learned (unfortunately, too many times) that the small side of me always makes things worse.

Rule #1 is so important that I will also offer it as the #1 reason for this commencement speech. If you ever feel outside pressure to take the wrong path, tell them this old guy you heard talk kind of scared you about that. I’ll be glad to take the blame.

It is said that family businesses classically go through a rise and decline cycle of succession, memorably termed, “Thunder, Blunder, and Plunder.” Thunder, the company’s founding generation, typically sets the standard for energy, courage, leadership, and innovation. Blunder is the generation befuddled by their inherited responsibility and lacking the courage or vision to live up to it. And Plunder is the generation, with no grounding, that takes advantage of all that is left to them for purely personal gain. If they don’t manage to kill the enterprise, the next generation—just to survive—has to muster the character to cycle back to a Thunder level of leadership.

In the last century or so, homebuilding in America has gone through an analogous pattern of rise and decline. The Thunder era is evident in buildings where trade mastery, construction durability, and architectural integrity were evidently a common standard. While the Blunder era still built some wonderful homes, a need for speed began to supersede the requirement for longevity and building trade mastery. In that era, the influence of some very good builders slowly gave way to other interests and market forces. And Plunder? We have lived with that era during the last half of the 20th century through today. Until the current recession, plundering the housing marketplace had become the very raison d’etre for much of the industry. There’s nothing wrong with profiting from building; builders have been doing that for centuries, but the distinguishing characteristic of plundering is that good standards of workmanship and construction quality become the specific obstacles to be strategically undermined in pursuit of other objectives, such as good quarterly reports. Quality building requires skill, takes time, and costs money – all anathema to those bent exclusively on paying less and getting more.

In larger cities, you can often see Thunder, Blunder, and Plunder played out in concentric circles around the older town center. In Colorado Springs, where I grew up, the Thunder era of building was roughly from 1875 through the 1920s. The old parts of the city have excellent, varied architecture and rich displays of building craftsmanship. Even the old working class neighborhoods were simply smaller house and lot versions of the upper class neighborhoods. They still reflected the variety of typical, early 20th century architectural styles, built with good materials and apparent care. This era was stalled by the Great Depression and ended with WWII. Outside of that old Thunder zone, you can see what was going on in the Blunder years. I don’t know what actually happened, but it appears it might have unfolded this way: the designers and developers did their best to strip the houses down to the bare essence of functionality, but good carpenters and builders (probably many of whom had worked on homes from the previous era) couldn’t help but maintain at least the fundamental aspects of their accustomed building standards. Here, bad design and some cheesy developments were legitimized and upgraded by some pretty good builders. Apparently, though, not enough skilled tradesmen were left to stem the backsliding when the real plundering began, between 1960 and 1970, as the Colorado Springs metropolitan area grew 64%, from 144,000 to 236,000. It has gone unabated since, with the population now rising to about 600,000. Therefore, in the case of Colorado Springs, the Plunder ring is the big sprawling suburbia that now houses most of the population, the Blunder ring defines a thin boundary area including the old core, and the Thunder area is now quite small in comparison. Of course, there are exceptions in each zone, but the highest concentration of well-designed, well-built homes can be found at the Thunder builders’ core, and the very worst homes, along with most of the crime-ridden slum neighborhoods, are out at the Plunder builders’ fringes. Nearly every growing city in America has a similar story to tell.

I’ll admit to being an optimist, but I believe the Plunder era of homebuilding is coming to an end. The sub-prime disaster was greed’s perfect storm, fueled by the converging influences of blind and fast money, butt-ugly developments, and really bad builders. It was a cacophony of shills propping up a ruse. And now that the economic tide has gone out – to paraphrase Warren Buffet’s wise remark – we can now see quite clearly that all the players in those bad business deals were swimming naked.

With the truth revealed, there will be an opportunity to help establish new mindsets and new standards, as we eventually emerge from this recession. Could it be the beginning of the next cycle, and the beginning of a new Thunder era?

I think it’s possible.

If you ever have the opportunity to visit the International Builders Show, you’d be amazed. The last show I attended had over 1,900 exhibitors in one million square feet of floor space. Walking fast, it’s hard to cover all that territory in two or three days. It’s a huge extravaganza overflowing with new product developments, technologies and miraculous claims. Tempting you to come hither with freebies, dancing girls and headphone-bedecked hucksters, booth after booth screams that a whole new world of possibility is on display. They can’t seem to avoid using grand, nation-changing, continent-shifting terms to describe things that you and I might think are, well, just not all that exciting. Can a new way to drive screws or another profile for vinyl siding be truly “revolutionary?” I don’t think so. Even the products I liked, such as environmentally-friendly sheathing, high-quality insulations and open-web joists began to disappoint against the excessive backdrop of fanfare and hyperbole. Of course, it may have been my fault for expecting too much. I was there in search of something that might be really revolutionary and so wanted to believe the hype I was hearing. Instead, I went away with a bag full of product information that I haven’t looked at since.

My disappointment stemmed from the disconnect between the supposedly cool new products and the torpid inertia of the same old building process. The constraints imposed by the methodologies and skills of typical builders and their subcontractors loom over inventors, researchers and product engineers like an old, ossified tyrant. The tyrant’s rules are clear: “Houses are built one piece at a time by mostly semi-skilled or unskilled labor. That’s an immutable fact. Therefore, don’t propose anything that would disrupt their process, cause them to think or learn something new. And especially, don’t even think of bringing an innovation that would have an impact on more than one subcontractor because that would grind the whole operation to a halt.”

As a result, nearly all the innovations for home construction are one-for-one replacements of other materials or products, and even then it can take decades for the innovation (often not an improvement) to find common use. Whatever the innovation, its potential value will be limited by the fact that it is typically only a material or a part that will be thrown into the same process, to be cut and installed by the same people in the same habitual way. Because of this, it is usually unlikely that a new innovation can save time or money unless, of course, it’s just cheaper, which usually means it’s also worse.

Over the years, there’s actually been quite a bit of hand-wringing (for example, see this Rand report.) about the lack of innovation in housing, but the rules of the tyrant haven’t been overcome. It’s widely acknowledged that other industries have developed and improved their processes and products much more rigorously. It has been said that if automobiles had developed at the same pace as computers, you could travel at over 1,000 miles per hour and get over 500 miles per gallon. If that is true, it could also be said that if homebuilding had developed at the same pace as cars, a house would be built in a week at half its current cost, and contain so few defects, require so little maintenance, and offer so much comfort and technology, that leaving it would be a drag. So, the incredible pace of innovation with computers gives us a peek at tomorrow, automobile technology lives up to our expectations for today, and the slow progress of improvements in home construction is an accurate view of yesterday.

Still, I have no respect for the rules of the tyrant and believe, instead, that new house rules will eventually prevail.

It is gutsy to say the plain truth when its implications might upset the status quo actions and beliefs of your audience. Paul Deffenbaugh, the Editorial Director of Professional Builder magazine, recently wrote a courageous editorial to his readers--the mainstream builders, architects, and product manufacturers of America’s homebuilding industry. His point is based on evidence that the American lifestyle is proving to be unsustainable when scaled up to include current global marginalized populations, now emerging. He then made the obvious leap that if our lifestyle is unsustainable, then one of the primary pillars of our way of life, the typical American home, is also unsustainable and needs to be reconsidered.

Deffenbaugh’s challenge to his readers is that we can either be eventually forced to change because of becoming increasingly irrelevant, or we can choose to change and become part of the solution. I applaud Deffenbaugh for his prescience, but mostly for his optimism. Nothing from the pattern of behavior of the conventional building industry over the last 75 years suggests that they would listen willingly to such a message. I hope I’m wrong.

Here’s part of Deffenbaugh’s explanation and his appeal:

Because the truth is simple. We can't sustain this lifestyle; we must change. In an editorial in The New York Times Jan. 2, Jared Diamond, who wrote the brilliant book Guns, Germs and Steel, notes that developed countries consume resources at a rate 32 times greater than developing countries. China has a consumption rate about 11 times less than ours. But China is working hard to catch up. So is India. If both were to achieve our rates, the world's consumption of resources would triple…. Diamond points out that if the entire world consumed at our rate, it would be equivalent to having a population of 72 billion people. We sure can't sustain that.

This means we have to change how we build houses. We can debate about how long it will take for serious adverse effects force us to change. Or we can change now.

We have the technology and resources to develop land and build houses that are far more sustainable than what we build now. That know-how has been in place for decades and is implemented more each day. Our failure to make this transition is symptomatic of an industry that is slow to change and that often has change forced on it by outside causes.

What if we all decided to stop using so many resources and started building homes that were sustainable?

Deffenbaugh is saying to the homebuilding industry that we can either be the beneficiary or the victim of an inescapable future. Moreover, making sustainable homes is more about changing our mindset than about invention. By adapting methods and technology from other industries, we indeed have within our grasp the means to build higher quality, more durable homes today. There are many significant model building projects going on throughout North America, demonstrating that we can build attractive homes to occupy smaller physical footprints, consume far fewer resources, and require far less energy in use. As evidence, reports about LEED platinum and net-zero homes are becoming ever more frequent. It will be a better world when such high-performance homes become commonplace.

Two such pilot projects are an outcome of our OPEN Prototype Initiative (OPI). The first project, the Crotched House (OPEN_1) was completed in the fall of 2006. A short video summarizes the story about this two unit residence for Crotched Mountain Rehabilitation Center. It challenged us immensely due to the intense mechanical requirements, but it also helped us to make giant strides forward in our on-going efforts to develop better ways to build.

We are now taking those lessons and innovations forward to our next OPI residence, Unity House (OPEN_2), which will be the President’s residence for Unity College in Unity, Maine. I’ll be giving occasional updates about Unity House as we’ll be beginning shop fabrication soon and preparing for site assembly in early summer. When it rises, I believe Unity House will be nothing less than a demonstration of the future of homebuilding.

It will also be another demonstration that Paul Deffenbaugh’s dream of sustainability is possible right now.

This full-page advertisement has been appearing in building trade magazines recently. Though I’m sure it is intended to generate enthusiasm for Weyerhaeuser’s lumber innovations, I found it a better illustration of some of the homebuilding industry problems.

First, I’m enthusiastic about the concept of the I-Level family of engineered wood products. The prices need to come down, but there’s no reason to think that won’t happen eventually with more industry acceptance and good all-American competition.

I don't think this advertisement is a reflection of Weyerhaeuser’s view of the ideal building process. My guess is that their marketing team isn’t communicating well with their R&D department.

With the above noted, this advertisement sucks. While attempting to tout some future oriented building products, it inadvertently (I'll assume it wasn't purposeful.) gives credence to the backward way of building. The depicted scene might not be unusual for a typical construction project, but it’s nothing to be proud of. And it certainly is not the future. I’ll list the problems I see:

1. The lumber in the foreground is dumped on the ground carelessly. It is poor practice to treat high quality lumber this way (not stickered or stacked)--even temporarily--and the fact that these pieces are lying there means they’ll have to be handled several more times before becoming part of the building’s structure.
2. The lumber stacked inside isn’t organized, which undoubtedly will lead to some shuffling and restacking as the right pieces are found for the next construction process.
3. The lumber piled at the edge of the floor framing creates a safety hazard for those working below.
4. The two pieces of lumber projecting from the lumber pile on the floor, in addition to those in the foreground, suggests that this whole site might look like scattered pick-up-sticks instead of an organized construction area.
5. The pile of raw material on the right will undoubted have to be cut one-at-a-time on the site, with hand-held tools. I happen to know that Weyerhaeuser has better ideas about how to do things more efficiently and this isn’t it.
6. While it’s risky to criticize engineering from a photo, I sure don’t like the look of the concentrated point load from the floor system located over what is apparently a garage door opening. If the floor framing is 12 in. deep, the garage door header looks to be 8 in. deep, and inadequate. I’m probably not seeing the whole picture, but I wouldn’t have used that unfortunate framing configuration to advertise my smart structural solutions.

I could go on (Why is that wall on the right not sheathed?), but my point is that this advertisement is a pretty good summation of what I think is wrong with the residential building industry: while the suppliers and manufacturers are working overtime to create better products, they are supplying a poorly organized, inefficient, and defective-prone building process. There may be solutions in the materials, but there are built-in problems in the process.