strawbale, cob and bamboo. He also spends much of his time involved in global projects like NextAid, Village Renaissance and Builders Without Borders teaching local villagers to build their own housing with local natural materials in hopes of reversing the global housing shortage.
Yogitimes: How did you arrive at being a sustainable architect?
Joe Kennedy: I was interested in architecture from the time I was a child. In college at Berkeley, my thesis advisor was a Persian architect who brought traditional earth building from Persia to America. I really immersed myself in earth building and since the early 90’s I’ve been engaged in this work full time. I spent quite a number of years living in far-flung parts of the world doing experimental architecture trying to revive some of the old techniques and develop some new ones. In 1995, another big turning point was the Natural Building Convergence. It was a gathering of a number of us who had been working in this field for quite some time, but didn’t really know each other. There were people doing cob building and other people doing adobe houses and straw bale and still more doing tire houses. When we all got together it was like a giant family reunion. We realized that we just wanted to share all these ideas together. That is when the Natural Building Movement was born which I’ve been very much a part of. It’s a very fruitful and exciting time right now. We’re moving out of the initial pioneering stage for some of these ideas and entering a new phase of hopefully wider adoption by the general public.
YT: Do you find that’s actually happening?
JK: Certainly in some areas like Northern California, Oregon, New Mexico and Arizona which have been the hot bed of this activity. Strawbale construction is pretty much a mainstream building technique. It doesn’t really have any issues and it’s code approved. There are cob buildings that have been approved and hybrid buildings are going up all over. Sustainable architecture has the biggest growth curve of anything in the building industry right now. In fact, the biggest problem is the lack of skilled practitioners. There are not many people who’ve gone through the self-imposed training like I have. And those of us who have are finding ourselves very, very busy. People who visit these buildings and respond to them have such an incredible recognition of how people crave living in natural materials.
YT: Why would you say that is?
JK: I think there’s a deep psychological responsiveness to natural materials as opposed to artificial. It’s almost subconscious. There’s a healing quality to natural building materials as opposed to unhealthy impacts of many new buildings. I’m sure you’ve smelt that new rug smell. That’s all of the adhesives and materials that are off gassing into the space. This is very toxic to us. Some people are very sensitive to it and can’t live in such houses, so their only choice is to live in a natural house. The air quality is improved because oftentimes you’re using earth plasters as opposed to artificial plasters, which can help absorb toxins.
YT: Is natural building cost-effective for the average builder?
JK: The realistic answer is that it depends. There has been a lot of misleading press out there saying that if you build your house with straw bales, it’s automatically going to make your house cheaper. That’s not so. In fact, it could cost more. However, if you build simply and there is a lot of owner-builder work (put) into a house, you can build a house cheaper than one that is contractor built. The important thing is that you get more value out of the house. These types of houses are often designed to last longer because they are built better and the energy efficiency aspects of the house will lead it to save money over time. There might be an initial greater investment.
YT: Do you see a trend of more people learning how to use these materials or teaching themselves to build?
JK: A few programs have come up, one at the New College of California Santa Rosa where I’ve been teaching that take on students and introduce them to the new ideas. Conventional contractors are starting to come on board and they are beginning to learn about these ideas through various workshops and integrating them into their practices. We get a lot of people who are owner-builders who take a workshop and they’ll just go out and do it. Since there are only a few of us that are “experts” in this, a lot of people are teaching themselves. There are some books on the subject and the internet is a great resource as well.
YT: Tell us about your work with NextAid and your other global projects.
JK: My main project is in South Africa where I helped start a teacher training center in a small town outside of Johannesburg about 12 years ago now. We were doing natural building and integrating perma-culture landscape approaches, village scale design, local enterprise and using local skills and resources to achieve all this at a very low cost. Quite an ambitious set of criteria and the place is still up and running. It has been the site for many of the main sustainability courses in Southern Africa and played an important role in spreading the word throughout South Africa and other parts of Africa.
Most recently I’ve been working with another group who are creating a child support center for children who’ve been impacted by HIV/AIDS in a small rural town. We’re going there in July to start building the center with locally available materials.
My work in South Africa, I believe is very important because in some ways South Africa is really a microcosm for the rest of the world and anything that we find success with there can effectively be replicated and used elsewhere. My main interest right now is finding patterns that can be adjusted to the cultural realities. This will lead to a process that develops needed housing and also empowers local people by developing skills. In addition, uses local materials as much as possible to diminish the dependence of outside sources.
Also, Builders Without Borders is a non-profit group of builders and architects that I helped to start about 5 years ago. It has been involved in a number of different projects in Mexico doing strawbale construction, (as well as in) Israel and on Native American reservations. Increasingly we’re seeing our role with BWOB is educational. The need is so great that the only way we’re going to solve the housing crisis is by teaching people how to house themselves. Most people everywhere have done that throughout time. It’s only now that we’ve gotten into a place that we are relying on experts. In some ways it’s a return to an old way of doing things, but acknowledging our current day and age and our current desires.
YT: It’s what we used to do because we had no other choice.
JK: Right. And I think we’re coming to a place when we may have to again. Right now in the US, using sustainable architecture is very much a choice made by a fairly select number of people that have the money and intelligence to move in this direction. However, with what’s likely to be the depletion of oil resources that we depend on in our lifetimes we’re going to have to get a lot more local. A lot of these materials we depend on in our construction are just not going to be available, so we’re going to have to go back to how things were done before. But in a new way and hopefully one that’s better than what we’ve had in the past, so that what might seem to be a tragedy can turn into something really wonderful for our planet.
YT: Do you see that happening in our lifetimes?
JK: Oh, definitely, I’m 42 now and I see it shifting radically in the next 10-15 years. My goal is to be prepared for that time. That’s when I think we’re really going to be needed. If gasoline is fifty dollars per gallon, we’re not going to be shipping marble from Italy. We’ll be finding whatever is at hand to build or redo our houses. I’m preparing myself for that inevitability which I imagine will happen within my working lifetime. It can be a scary thought; as we’re watching the news, we see peak oil prices and oil depletion really becoming more and more of a reality. It affects everything we do, but especially our building traits which use up to 40% of our energy and material resources. I don’t mean to sound doom and gloom but it’s going to be a reality our children will face and I’d rather be putting my energies toward finding solutions for that inevitability than doing the same old thing that’s just not going to be appropriate anymore.
To help, you can make donations at NextAid.org orcontact Joe Kennedy at jkennedy@newcollege.edu
|
|
