Homestead mailing list

[tvoivozhd <tvoivozd AT infionline.net>]

This is a very serious problem---most new houses are so tightly wrapped, 
the inside air is poisonous.  You have to have an air-exchange system 
with an electrostatic precipitator to clean incoming fresh air and a 
heat-exchanger to warm it without having t0 expensively re-heat it.

While I would avoid building a multi-story house under most 
circumstances as being inherently dangerous to its occupants, there was 
a house an architecture student built when I was in college---cost him 
$4000 and was a thing of airy, well-lit beauty.  His budget was so 
limited, he had to buy a cheap lot no one else would even look at.  It 
was a south-facing cliff, only enough space at the top to park a car. 
The three-story house spilled down the cliff.  First effectively heated 
solar house I ever saw---a solar chimney down the Southeast corner of 
the building.  Heat would literally roar out of it at sunrise and had to 
be regulated.  Nick Pine at Villanova would have been delighted with the 
result.

        

*washingtonpost.com* <http://www.washingtonpost.com/>
*Sensitivity Workshop*
A Retreat in Rural Virginia Thrives on Owners' 'Healthy House' Standards

By Jeff Turrentine
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, January 20, 2005; Page H01

If the well-meaning souls at Carter+Burton Architecture weren't sure 
what Bobbie Lively-Diebold meant when she told them she was "extremely 
sensitive" to chemicals, vapors and smells, they learned one day when 
she and her husband came to look over some blueprints.

Architect Jim Burton thought he and his associates had prepared. "We 
aired out the blueprints three hours before she got there, and we had 
all the windows open," he recalls. "/We/ couldn't detect any smell."

All the same, within minutes of arriving, Lively-Diebold began to 
respond violently to fumes left over from the blueprinting process. Her 
speech began to slur. She grew confused. She tried to walk, but could 
only wobble.

Fresh air revived her. "But the whole episode showed us just how serious 
her condition was," says Burton. "We took a lot of precautions, and they 
still weren't enough."

Lively-Diebold and her husband, Bob Diebold, had commissioned 
Carter+Burton to build a three-level contemporary residence just outside 
of Front Royal, on a cliff overlooking the Shenandoah River. It would be 
a place where the couple -- he a former physicist, she a former employee 
of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) -- could enjoy retirement 
in a peaceful, natural setting. They imagined huge windows overlooking 
hillocks of pasture on one side of the house and dense woods on the 
other; decks off upstairs bedrooms, where they could listen to the rush 
of the water in early morning; extra rooms for visiting children and 
grandchildren.

But Lively-Diebold knew she couldn't enjoy such amenities if she was 
constantly battling sickness. So she and her husband asked Carter+Burton 
to build their dream home according to "healthy house" standards. The 
result, they hoped, would be a house in which innovative design, careful 
selection of materials and state-of-the-art technology safeguard against 
the presence of the substances that Lively-Diebold says her system 
cannot tolerate.

Many of the standards to which this house and others have been built can 
be found in "The Healthy House," a 1989 book by John Bower, now in its 
fourth updated edition. With his wife, Lynn, Bower founded the Healthy 
House Institute in 1992; between the books he writes and the resource 
center in Bloomington, Ind., he and his wife oversee /(//www.hhinst.com/ 
<http://www.hhinst.com>/)/, he has devoted himself to helping 
individuals find ways to rid their households of volatile organic 
compounds, or VOCs.

Healthy houses, Bower says, are not just for people like Bobbie 
Lively-Diebold. Many of us, he believes, suffer from indoor air 
pollution, without even realizing it. "Sniffles, sore throats, neck 
aches, all kinds of symptoms -- there are people who think that a lot of 
them are related to indoor air quality," he says. "The air we breathe is 
one of the primary ways we take the environment into our systems. The 
thinking with regard to sensitive people is that they're the canaries in 
the coal mines. It's time to do something about the problem once the 
canaries get sick."

Lively-Diebold, 68, traces the history of her disorder back to a single 
day in 1988, when she arrived at work in the EPA complex at Waterside 
Mall in Southwest Washington. New carpet had just been installed and was 
still in the early stages of "off-gassing," the term used to describe 
the release of chemical vapors from a material -- in this case, the glue 
binding the carpet's fibers to its backing.

Immediately, she says, she began to experience the problems that plague 
her to this day: disorientation, slurred speech, difficulty breathing 
and impaired mobility. Lively-Diebold believes that exposure to the 
off-gassing carpet and to other VOCs given off during the building's 
renovation irreparably affected her respiratory and neurological 
systems. She was among a group of 19 employees who filed suit against 
Waterside's owners and managers, citing permanent damage to their 
health. Of the original plaintiffs, five, including Lively-Diebold, were 
eventually awarded restitution totaling nearly $1 million dollars.

The ordeal, she claimed, had left her with debilitating symptoms known 
collectively as multiple chemical sensitivity syndrome, or MCS. 
Currently, the medical community classifies MCS as a "syndrome of 
unknown origin," like the more widely publicized Gulf War syndrome or 
chronic fatigue syndrome. The absence of a universally accepted 
definition of MCS, and the idiosyncratic nature of its symptoms, have 
made it controversial.

By now, Lively-Diebold is used to cynicism about her condition. It's one 
of the reasons she wanted to find "the type of architect who would 
listen to your input, not just tell you what you need to have." When the 
couple settled on a site and went shopping for architects, they were 
impressed by the way in which Carter+Burton used green principles to 
effect strikingly modern designs. "They had already done things that 
were energy-efficient and environmentally sensitive," says 
Lively-Diebold, "so that was a good start." Most important, she says, 
Burton and the firm's founding partner, Page Carter, didn't blanch upon 
hearing her list of requirements. "They seemed excited and open to the 
idea."

Even so, Burton recalls the "steep learning curve" faced by the 
architects, builder Stephen Whittington, interior designer Michelle 
Timberlake, and the contractors who had to abandon tried-and-true 
methods and routines. For starters, the entire site had to be designated 
a no-smoking area -- a tough sell among construction workers for whom 
coffee-and-cigarette breaks are sacred. All building materials had to be 
chosen from preapproved lists; finding certain items, such as a 
humidifier air filter that wouldn't emit mold-conducive warm air, proved 
difficult.

Of paramount importance was that off-gassing be kept to a minimum. 
Chemically inert or natural materials such as stone, concrete, stucco 
and wood were used whenever possible. For people with MCS, high-VOC 
varnishes, oils, glues and sealants are among a newly built house's most 
incorrigible offenders; Lively-Diebold's purview extended even to the 
oil-based release agents used to coat the concrete foundation. "I went 
with my husband to a job site to check my tolerance," she recalls. "I 
just walked around and smelled them."

When they prompted a flare-up, she and the building team settled on an 
unorthodox alternative: Wesson oil. "It worked just fine," she says. 
(Though for a while, she confesses, subcontractors jokingly referred to 
the building as "the salad house.")

In some cases, as with the stress-skin panels that cover the house, due 
diligence entailed all-night experiments, with Lively-Diebold 
volunteering as a guinea pig. "I slept with them right next to me," she 
explains. "If I had any problems, they went right out the door."

The house, now two years old, does not boast its virtuousness 
conspicuously. A visitor's initial impression is purely architectural: 
warm materials, an abundance of natural light, the balance of elegant 
forms and expansive volumes. Next come the design details: Noguchi 
hanging lanterns in the entrance hall, svelte Barcelona loungers in the 
living room, a Saarinen Tulip table and chairs in the breakfast nook.

The innovations that help make the infrastructure of this house 
"healthy" are in no way visible. VOC-free paint, once rare but now 
widely available, looks as rich as regular paint. The minimally treated, 
low-gassing marine-grade plywood from which the kitchen cabinets are 
made is indistinguishable from its standard-issue counterpart. Behind a 
plain-looking door on the lower level, filters, ventilators, vacuums and 
humidifiers vigilantly defend against airborne pathogens. This system so 
thoroughly controls the flow and exchange of air that the house receives 
a complete air transfusion every few hours.

"Separation, ventilation and filtration," says Burton. "It's not a 
healthy house if you don't have all three."

The delicate balance of separate systems, the need for careful 
monitoring and enlightened stewardship: If the healthy house invites 
comparisons to Earth's environment, it's no accident. Burton was a 
student of Samuel Mockbee, a larger-than-life figure who devoted himself 
to promoting sustainable, socially conscious architecture. The teacher's 
influence on the pupil is obvious when the topic turns to, say, 
hardwoods. For Burton, the health of the rain forest is directly linked 
to the health of the homeowner. Harvesting lumber from sustainably 
managed forests, he says, reduces ozone depletion, which in turn makes 
his client breathe easier.

For Bobbie Lively-Diebold, living in a healthy house has changed 
everything. The world outside her door -- with all its marauding 
chemicals, pollutants and VOCs -- still has the capacity to make her 
sick. "But my body is in a better position to tolerate things," she 
says. "This is like a detox center. A safe place."

© 2005 The Washington Post Company