permaculture

[mIEKAL aND <qazingulaza@gmail.com>]

(pics on the NYT site, good to see Roald getting a bit of attention..)

Building With Whole Trees

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/05/garden/05tree.html

ROALD GUNDERSEN, an architect who may revolutionize the building  
industry, shinnied up a slender white ash near his house here on a  
recent afternoon, hoisting himself higher and higher until the limber  
trunk began to bend slowly toward the forest floor.

"Look at Papa!" his life and business partner, Amelia Baxter, 31,  
called to their 3-year-old daughter, Estella, who was crouching in the  
leaves, reaching for a mushroom. Their son, Cameron, 9 months, was  
nestled in a sling across Ms. Baxter's chest.

Wild mushrooms and watercress are among the treasures of this 134-acre  
forest, but its greatest resource is its small-diameter trees —  
thousands like the one Mr. Gundersen, 49, was hugging like a monkey.

"Whooh!" he said, jumping to the ground and gingerly rubbing his back.  
"This isn't as easy as it used to be. But see how the tree holds the  
memory of the weight?"

The ash, no more than five inches thick, was still bent toward the  
ground. Mr. Gundersen will continue to work on it, bending and pruning  
it over the next few years in this forest which lies about 10 miles  
east of the Mississippi River and 150 miles northwest of Madison.

Loggers pass over such trees because they are too small to mill, but  
this forester-architect, who founded Gundersen Design in 1991 and  
built his first house here two years later, has made a career of  
working with them.

"Curves are stronger than straight lines," he explained. "A single  
arch supporting a roof can laterally brace the building in all  
directions."

The firm, recently renamed Whole Tree Architecture and Construction,  
is also owned by Ms. Baxter, a onetime urban farmer and community  
organizer with a knack for administration and fundraising. She also  
manages a community forest project modeled after a community-supported  
agriculture project, in which paying members harvest sustainable  
riches like mushrooms, firewood and watercress from these woods, and  
those who want to build a house can select from about 1,000 trees,  
inventoried according to species, size and shape, and located with  
global positioning system coordinates, a living inventory that was  
paid for with a $150,000 grant from the United States Department of  
Agriculture.

According to research by the Forest Products Laboratory in Madison,  
run by the USDA, a whole, unmilled tree can support 50 percent more  
weight than the largest piece of lumber milled from the same tree. So  
Mr. Gundersen uses small-diameter trees as rafters and framing in his  
airy structures, and big trees felled by wind, disease or insects as  
powerful columns and curving beams.

Taking small trees from a crowded stand in the forest is much like  
thinning carrots in a row: the remaining plants get more light, air  
and nutrients. Carrots grow longer and straighter; trees get bigger  
and healthier.

And when the trees are left whole, they sequester carbon. "For every  
ton of wood, a ton and a half of carbon dioxide is locked up," he  
said, whereas producing a ton of steel releases two to five tons of  
carbon. So the more whole wood is used in place of steel, the less  
carbon is pumped into the air.

These passive solar structures also need very little or no  
supplemental heat.

Tom Spaulding, the executive director of Angelic Organics Learning  
Center, near Rockford, Ill., northwest of Chicago, knows about this  
because he commissioned Mr. Gundersen to build a 1,600-square-foot  
training center in 2003. He said: "In the middle of winter, on a 20- 
below day, we're in shorts, with the windows and doors open. And we  
don't burn a bit of petroleum."

"It's eminently more frugal and sustainable than milling trees," he  
added. "These are weed trees, so when you take them out, you improve  
the forest stand and get a building out of it. You haven't stripped an  
entire hillside out west to build it, or used a lot of oil to  
transport the lumber."

Mr. Gundersen had a rough feeling for all of this 16 years ago, when  
he started building a simple A-frame house here for his first wife and  
their son, Ian, now 15. He wanted to encourage local farmers to use  
materials like wood and straw from their own farms to build low-cost,  
energy-efficient structures. So he used small aspens that were  
crowding out young oaks nearby.

"I would just carry them home and peel them," said Mr. Gundersen, who  
later realized he could peel them while they were standing, making  
them "a lot lighter to haul and not so dangerous to fell."

Mr. Gundersen, who built most of the house singlehandedly, also  
recognized the beauty of large trees downed by disease or wind, and  
used the peeled trunks, shorn of their central branches a few feet  
from the crook, as supporting columns in the house. "I thought they  
were beautiful, but I didn't think how strong they were," he said.

"In architecture, how materials come together and how they are  
connected is really the god in the details," he continued. "The  
connection is where things will fall apart," he said, adding that the  
crook of a tree "has been time-tested by environmental conditions for  
200 million years."

He refers to that first house — which cost $15,000 (for plumbing,  
electrical, septic and other basic amenities, as well as $4,000 in  
paid labor) and a year of his own labor — as his master's degree in  
architecture. Divorced in 1997, he now lives there with Ms. Baxter and  
their two children.

After finishing the A-frame, Mr. Gundersen built a 100-by-20-foot  
solar greenhouse next door with thick straw-bale walls on three sides,  
banked into the north slope. He used small-diameter, rot-resistant  
black locust trees for the timber framing.

A wall of double-paned glass, positioned to optimize the low-angle  
winter light, faces south. Growing beds angled slightly toward the sun  
are planted with rows of mustard greens, kale, chard, arugula,  
lettuces and herbs. Hanging trays of micro-greens and a fig and bay  
tree promise fresh food for the fall and winter.

But it is the Book End — the little house attached to the greenhouse,  
which is home to the firm's project manager and his wife — that  
quietly vibrates with the spirit of the forest.

"We used a lot of standing dead elm here," Mr. Gundersen said,  
pointing out the delicate trails, or galleries, left by the beetles  
that killed the tree. Peeled of their bark and satiny smooth, these  
trees have a presence that seems to draw one's arm around their trunks  
and invite a viewer to lean into them, to soak up strength from these  
powerful old souls.

In this quiet farming community, where people may not have a lot of  
money to spend, but do have plenty of wood and straw, word of the  
beauty and practicality of Mr. Gundersen's structures has spread.  
Solar greenhouses made of local materials can extend the growing  
season through winter, even in a place where temperatures can drop to  
30 or 40 below. In the last 18 years, Whole Trees has built 25 of them  
here.

It's part of a vision Mr. Gundersen developed after spending three  
years as a project architect on Biosphere 2, the three-acre glass- 
enclosed miniature world constructed near Tucson in the 1980s, which  
tried to replicate the earth's systems, but foundered on carbon  
dioxide, acidic seas, failed crops and internal intrigues. After that  
experience, he wanted to build something more basic to human needs.

Mr. Gundersen grew up in nearby LaCrosse, where his Norwegian great- 
grandfather, a doctor, founded a local institution, the Gundersen  
Clinic; he comes from a clan of doctors and tree lovers. "There are 23  
doctors in the family," he said, including his father and uncle and  
four great-uncles, but he seems to be wired more like his great- 
grandmother Helga, whose family still owns a tree farm in Norway. He  
and his grandmother would often picnic on this piece of wild land,  
where he remembers picking watercress and wildflowers and building  
tree forts.

Now, to be in his buildings is to be among the trees.

"It almost feels like we're in a forest, the trees have such a  
presence," said Marcia Halligan, a client who is a farmer and Reiki  
instructor, standing among the birch posts of her airy bedroom.

She and her partner, Steven Adams, who grows seed for organic seed  
companies, worked with Mr. Gundersen on a design that uses 22  
different kinds of wood, most of it from their own land outside  
Viroqua, southeast of Stoddard.

The economic downturn has put commissions for several large buildings  
for nonprofits and a 4,600-square-foot residence on hold, Mr.  
Gundersen and Ms. Baxter say, but the demand for small houses like  
theirs is up.

"It's remarkable how many people have called this last year asking for  
1,000-square-foot houses," Ms. Baxter said. "People are downsizing for  
their retirement homes, and even younger folks are thinking about  
energy costs, environmental awareness and simplicity."

Whole Trees can keep construction costs as low as $100 a square foot,  
not including site preparation, if the client is willing to shop for  
secondhand fixtures and the like.

As people begin to see forests as a resource, they may begin to take  
care of them rather than cutting them down to make room for cornfields  
or pastures. And the forests keep giving back.

"I've taken 20 trees per year off one acre, for 12 buildings," Mr.  
Gundersen said. "You can never tell that we've taken out that much  
wood."