Ecological Building Network - The Art and Science of Building Well

For the last 10 years Ecological Building Network (EBNet) has been developing and publishing earthen building standards to help create affordable, appropriate, earthquake-safe housing. These earthen homes can be built as part of a planned community, or in response to natural disasters. In either case, earthen homes use readily available materials and local labor to build safe housing quickly and cheaply. Now EBNet has been asked to adapt those standards for safe housing in Haiti, before the rainy season. 

People often argue about fly ash, and why we should or shouldn’t use it in concrete and other building products. (More about what fly ash actually is follows below.) It’s a bit of a hot topic in green building, and made for a lively but truncated group discussion at the recent Build Well 2010 Symposium near San Francisco. For that alone it makes a worthy topic with which to launch this Build Well Forum. As it turns out, it is also worth discussing because the issue is emblematic of two important, overarching green building issues that don’t get enough attention:

There aren't many people who've worked as long and hard in green building as Alex Wilson, and we are all the beneficiaries of his efforts: the BuildingGreen suite of web products, and Environmental Building News magazine, are absolutely the best places to learn about products and issues in green building from a well-informed, impartial source. Alex came across some startling new information recently about foam insulations; have a look:

> Read "Avoiding the Global Warming Impact of Insulation" on Buildinggreen.com.

Did you ever pause to watch a flock of blackbirds in flight? Their lovely swirling and shifting is endlessly fresh and new, a presentation that no human artist could ever match.  Mathematicians figured out that they manage this by each bird following three simple rules of flight:

1. avoid crowding neighbors
2. steer towards average heading of neighbors, and
3. steer towards average position of neighbors

That’s it.  Out of such simplicity—a bunch of birds following extremely simple rules—we get beauty, delight, and, for the birds, biological functionality.