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."