ecobuild & ‘celebration week’ presentation

ecobuild was pretty disappointing on the whole. plenty of ground source heat pumps, biomass burners, green roofs, timber frame, wealthy wankers who like the sound of their own voices on discussion panels (discussing how green their large london-based victorian terraces are now they have spent a small fortune on getting in a consultant to transform them and ranting about how ‘ if i am cold at home i don’t turn up the heating, i just instruct my tailor to make me a heavier tweed suit for wearing around the house’!) and not much else… large companies putting a greenwash over existing – not very green – products and systems. no exciting innovation.

i spoke to a few people about ground source heat pumps for my project, and biomass solutions. i have a much better understanding of what is involved, and how much plant/service space is required. it was suggested that a central system would be most efficient, for a row of say, 10 houses this would involve a single large pipe network just under the surface of the hillside, a plant room roughly 20m3, a wood processing area for coppiced wood from site and wood fuel storage space near the burners. then you have a small tank in each house that regulates the water between the underfloor heating and the hot water supply. a small amount of extra electrical heating may be needed in each house in addition to this to ensure the water is taken up to 60degrees avoiding the risk of legionnaires disease from warm water sitting in pipes.

i am a little dissapointed that i don’t seem to be able to justify wood burning stoves in each house, as i love them, but so much heat is lost up chimneys and flues that they just are not very efficient compared to the communal system. i may ignore this anyway…. as the fuel would be grown on-site, and i think that is pretty good.

i also spoke to some helpful companies that supply sustainable insulation and triple glazed windows with K glass and timber frames.

the ‘celebration week’ presentation was also a bit disappointing. i presented along with 7 others in the unit, and we represented our group’s work and then spoke for a min on our own work, with a little longer for the 2 masters students. we explained to the panel that we were presenting an brief overview of what we had done, and that they shouldn’t think that the shiny surface had no underlying substance. but they were not overly convinced, and asked quite basic questions about relation to site and scale in relation to housing typological precedents, as they could not see the connections for themselves. not to say that they didn’t like the work, but i think that it was so far away from the other work that they had just seen from the india unit, where they had been working in slums with women’s cooperatives weaving stuff, that the panel just didn’t seem to be able to get their heads into our space to have a lively, useful discussion. i was also feeling a little nervous and and anxious not to be the only one to talk, so didn’t speak up as much as jonas (as he told me afterwards) was hoping i would, and kicked myself afterwards as i thought of all the great answers i could have given…. hindsight eh.

plans needed to get back on track

plans stressed over, and then thought about and made…. wrote down all urgent worries, unsolved problems and questions asked of me in last thursdays presentation pin-up. putting aside flippant responses to construction questions involving supplying all of my houses with their own chainsaw…. i have resolved a few little issues to a point where i am reasonably satisfied. it is the bigger questions that loom dark, scary, and so-far well avoided. things that seemed like i had a grip on before christmas need, and deserve rethinking in relation to my material system and site.

starting to make my ‘chunking’ model has thrown quite a few big questions up that need the most urgent attention, such as what is the gradient of my slope, and how do the units i have designed stack together, sit into the hillside, and create a happy configuration for the spatial arrangement of a family house and work space that also cleverly help to increase the stability of the deforested slope. hmmm.

stack of cards with issues and questions written on are arranged on the table in the pub. the left hand side of the table is a scale of importance, bottom left = less important, top left = most important. then across the bottom is left = easy, to right = difficult. the cards are placed in the appropriate possitions on the graph and checked against each other, then numbered starting from the top left across to bottom right to make an ordered pile of jobs. and a plan, of sorts.

the list reads as follows :

1 how steep will the hill be?

2 how do the houses interlock now?

3 how deep do i cut into the hillside? – what happens behind the units?

4 i need to record my process, but i want to push onwards.

5 send info to carsten for u-values – draw a section

6 how will the foundations work? – houses or units to be interlocked with the foundations

7 how do i bring it back to the root house idea?

8 what does a willow root do, and how will it grow in chinese climate?

9 how do i draw/sketch out my overall vision?

10 making a house – how do the rooms fit together? rule/reason for configuration?(using my studies from before christmas) how many units per house? all houses the same?

11 how do i make the ‘root’ foundations exciting??

12 what type of soil am i building on?

13 how do you enter the houses – where is the front door? paths/infrastructure? flow?

14 IDS report – what are the legal considerations of the building? how might it be funded? what kind of contracts might you use?

15 where do the services/heating go?

16 how will i format my blog?

this is a sketch of the steel frrame that would be partially hidden within the stacked logs to support whilst stacking and for ease of support/ securing back to the hillside.

i have worked out from looking at photos of my site that the gradient i need to work to is 34 degrees, or 3:2. and i have been reading up on what the implications of building on this steep gradient might be in a fantastic book – ‘Design for Mountain Communities – A Landscape and Architectural Guide’ by Sherry Dorward, 1990, Van Nostrand Reinhold.

first meeting with Toby the engineer

suggestions and discussions for foundation system to work as landslide mitigation and support for the housing structures.

a combination of systems is suggested, including timber piling (vertical), geothermal pipes (horizontal and/or vertical) and anchored tension cables using something like the ‘platypus’ system of ground anchors (diagonal and horizontal).

Platipus® Stealth Anchors are lightweight corrosion resistant anchors that do not disturb the soil during installation. The anchors are hand or power driven from ground level using conventional portable equipment. Due to the shape of the anchor and the offset attachment point of the wire tendon, when a load is applied, the anchor will rotate in the ground by up to 90° and load-lock. As the load exerted on the soil by the anchor system increases, a body of soil above the anchor is compressed and provides resistance to any further anchor movement. Platipus® Stealth Anchors are available in a variety of sizes and metals.

How it works : There are three important elements to a ground source heat pump:

1. The ground loop
   This is comprised of lengths of pipe buried in the ground, either in a borehole or a horizontal trench. The pipe is usually a closed circuit and is filled with a mixture of water and antifreeze, which is pumped around the pipe absorbing heat from the ground.The ground loop can be:
   • Vertical, for use in boreholes
   • Horizontal, for use in trenches
   • Spiral, coil or ’slinky’, also for use in trenches
2. A heat pump
   In the same way that your fridge uses refrigerant to extract heat from the inside, keeping your food cool, a ground source heat pump extracts heat from the ground, and uses it to heat your home. A ground source heat pump has three main parts:
   • The evaporator, (e.g. the squiggly thing in the cold part of your fridge) absorbs the heat using the liquid in the ground loop;
   • The compressor, (this is what makes the noise in a fridge) moves the refrigerant round the heat pump and compresses the gaseous refrigerant to the temperature needed for the heat distribution circuit;
   • The condenser, (the hot part at the back of your fridge) gives up heat to a hot water tank which feeds the distribution system.
3. Heat distribution system
   This consists of under floor heating or radiators for space heating and in some cases water storage for hot water supply.

timber piling.

progress and frustration

progress with form and material configurations (the ‘chunking’ ) seems to be coming allong ok, just need to master microstation a bit more, so that i can actually extract some of the drawings i have made in there and start to compile some nice pages to explain it all!!

frustration comes from the lack of response from my root and timber building experts who i have been emailing since receiving initial really positive responses at the beginning of january… sent out another round of emails today, and keeping fingers crossed, as well as refining my questions a little.

i visited the architecture space at the V&A for the first time the other day and was a bit disappointed, but the exhibition that i really went for was rather cool – handmade crafts. ‘Out of the Ordinary : Spectacular Crafts’. huge, black, shiny, beautiful pivoting doors open onto the exhibition, and the display divider blocks are made from white, cast, plaster-coated blocks, a bit like Rachel Whiteried’s house. some really beautiful work celebrating handmade craft – although the work which i most enjoyed was laser etched into the middle of solid blocks of crystal glass. weather recordings of cloud mousture in different formations – very beautiful – by Annie Cattrell – who also made 3x normal size glass lungs, and a sort of hairy cut paper. Anne Wilson’s woven and knotted black cotton and pins are lovely in places, but en-mass, a bit lacking cohesion. Susan Collis’s work is very subtle and very cool – embroidered paint splats on dust sheets, mother of pearl inlaid paint rings on a table, and diamond headed screws in the wall.   nice.

jelly

i have a slightly crazy sounding idea to test some of my root foundation ideas, by setting them into a slab of jelly held onto a slope, and pulling them out, downwards to see what a gravity type force might do in a landslide, and what shape/type/configuration of foundation might hold best…. mmmm we will see, but i have acquired an industrial amount of cheap strawberry jelly and i am ready to go!

project brief : focusing in : rootage

- landslide mitigation – increasing hillside soil stability by designing foundations both inspired by, and using, tree root systems

- stacked structure – building mass constructed from stacked timber, providing insulation, structure and flexibility of design as well as being a sustainable material that over time can be produced on site for occupant up-keep and repairs

- the mountain vernacular – timber upper using commonly found interlocking joints, timber combined with stone for the foundation (plus the trees)

- shared thermal mass – the interlocking forms of the houses/workspaces mean that thermal mass of the stacked timber walls is shared, reducing heating/cooling energy consumption and overall construction materials

- on-site biomass fuel production – the trees that will be grown on site to aid the stability of the foundations can be coppiced and used as biomass fuel to heat the houses

- new possibilities – the houses can be built in areas that previously were too much at risk of landslide due to a combination of gradient and de-forestation, but where they are needed to provide sustainable live/work accomodation for crafts people, those in the growing tourism industry, or for those who can work remotely and wish to enjoy the mountain environment away from the pollution and crowding of the east coast

yunnan : background

An Introduction to Yunnan Province

Yunnan province enjoys fame as the kingdom of mountains, the hometown of rivers, and is a treasure bowl of plant genes. There are more than 18,000 species of higher plants (including 2,500 ornamental, 6,100 herbs, and over 60 spiceberries), 1,700 types of vertebrates and more than 10,000 kinds of insects. Han people and about another 26 minorities, including Yi, Bai, Zhuang, Miao, Dai, and Hui with a population of 4.3 million, live in Yunnan.

Geographic location and landscapes
Situated in China’s southwestern border region, the province is contiguous with Guangxi and Guizhou provinces to the east; towering mountains in the northwest adjoin the border of Tibet; to the north is the most populous Sichuan province; to its south, southwest and west parts are Vietnam, Laos, and Burma, respectively. The territory is 394,000 sq. km. The geographical features in the province are diverse and spectacular. The terrain slopes sharp down from the northwest to the southwest. The highest point of this highland reaches the 6,740 m Kagebo Peak in the snowy Meili Mt. on the Yunnan-Tibet border, while the lowest point is 76.4 m along the Sino-Vietnam border. The Nujiang River (called the Mekong in Laos and Vietnam) and the Jinshajiang River (the upper reaches of the Yangtze River) flow under snow-capped peaks where the Zhujiang River and Red River are also originated from. The major landforms in Yunnan are mountains (84%), highlands (10%), small basins and valleys (6%). Vegetative cover is up to 40%, and the area with soil erosion and water loss is about 14,000 sq. km, accounting for 37% of total land in the province.

Climate
Yunnan people are often proud of their unique, pleasant, subtropical monsoon climate without hot summers or harsh winters. Due to peculiar geographical environment, complex landforms and sharp falls and rises in elevation, diversified climatic conditions result. Temperatures vary with the ascent of terrain. In general, there are only small differences in temperature between months. Clear differences in precipitation exist between dry and rainy seasons. The precipitation is between 800 to 1,300 mm in most areas with 85% falling from May to October.

Soil-types and fertilizers
The soil parent materials are mainly debris from mountains, argillite, quartz， acidic rocks， limestone， purple rock， and lake sediments. The main soil types in the province are red soil, paddy soil, purple soil, and laterite. Over 70% of cultivated land is medium to low in productivity (with limitations due to slope, water-shortage, or poor fertility). Red soils developed from basalt are deficient in potassium (K) and phosphorus (P) with the exception of some suburb soils that are showing signs of P accumulation. Most crops have nutrient disorders.

In 2000, fertilizers consumption was 1.12 million t of nutrients. After great efforts made through research, demonstration and education on balanced fertilization, the majority of the farmers have started to understand the concept. With improvement in farmers fertilizer practice, the improved fertilizer use ratio (N: P2O5: K2O) is now recommended at 1: 0.47:0.41.

Crops and cropping rotation
The main crops in province are paddy rice, corn, wheat, barley, beans (broadbean, pea, and soybean), potato, vegetables, tobacco, sugarcane, tea, rubber, flowers, pineapple, banana, mango, coffee, and buckwheat. The cropping rotations are paddy rice-broadbean, paddy rice-wheat, corn/tobacco-wheat, and corn/tobacco-bean.

from : http://www.ipni.net/ppiweb/swchina.nsf/$webindex/CB3CBCC04F1B93B448256CED0043D54A?opendocument&navigator=profile

hand-in for ECB over and portfolio feedback positive : roots a go go

well my Energy Comfort and Buildings is in, done, dusted and signed for.

not the spectacular masterpiece i was aiming for, probably just the basics, but there will always be more that you would like to add, but ran out of time… and if i get it back, then i have a list of the pages i would like to add over the summer.

was a real relief to get ECB done so i can concentrate fully on the unit work, but i was hoping that it would have been possible to integrate the module with my project more – i will have to do it later anyway, so it would have been good to make it more relevant now.

here is the next point of study and development, in prep for a chat with the structural engineer, who is coming on monday (if the football doesn’t get in his way). i need to work out how the foundation will work to stabilise the hillside – and although i do need to remember that this is not an engineering course, it is pretty central to how the rest of the design will progress, as it will drastically affect the way that i connect the top (timber) and bottom (stone) parts of the building together. and the overall form of the building will be affected by the type of foundation used, for example, the pattern of placement of mini-piles or timber piles will determine wall alignments, or placed further away could act like tent pegs for guy-ropes. if i go for a honey-combed foundation directly under, this will raise the building and bring the trees in closer to grow under the main structure, or a system of buried ‘combs’ that connect back through the building at different levels. aaah decisions decisions. i really need to speak to the root expert guys again, and find out more about how foundations on hillsides work – also would be good to talk to the swiss practice that built the forest pavilion constructed from stacked timber…. lots to do.