July 2009 - David Mark Brown

In Building, Passivity May be the Best Action

July 24, 2009 by David Mark Brown

passivstandard Salt Lake City is going passive. Joe and Rebecca are teaming up with Brach Design and Fisher Custom Building to build Utah’s first certified passive house. That is the plan anyway. Brach Design is Utah’s only certified Passive House architect and this will be his first passive house if everything turns out right.

You may be thinking, “Who gives a diddly ding dang do.” But let me tell all you Flanders swearing neigh-sayers, this is pretty ding dang diddly cool. Let’s not forget that 76% of all electricity produced by U.S. power plants goes to the building sector. Passive House started up as PassivHaus in the UK, but that was too stinking European sounding for God-Bless-‘Em-Americans, so we changed it to Passive House Institute US, but it is the same thing. Passive House is a certification that literally beats the insulation off of rating systems like LEED. The graphic shows it pretty well (although LEED is not pictured because it is a bit like comparing apples to oranges). But the point is that Passive House is the stiffest energy efficiency standard the world has seen by far.

Loco for Locals (cooperatives that is)

July 18, 2009 by David Mark Brown

Coop has just come closer to home for those in the SLC downtown area. And I, for one, feel it is a happy trend. Urban and fringe agricultural areas all over the U.S. have been seeing an increase in small artisan farming operations teaming up with each other to provide convenient store fronts to locals. Salt Lake City has now joined in the game.

Rico Locals has opened up on 800 S. and 500 E., SLC. The founding vendors include empanadas, cheese, beef, a goat dairy, eggs, lamb, and Rico Brand mexican stuffs. Not too shabby. And I have to say that I really hope this sort of Urban farming and cooperative trend takes off. I sometimes wake in a cold sweat thinking about small, artisan farms being gobbled up by large, industrialized tenant farming outfits. I just don’t think that anyone can care better for the sustainability of farm lands than a small generational farm supported by local customers and a local market.

Pre-fab Fad Falls Down, Again.

July 4, 2009 by David Mark Brown

zero-house-01 I just can’t feel bad about it. Post modern luxury and hippie just shouldn’t go together, and that is what so many of the most recently reencarnated pre-fab housing gurus have been trying to do. It has been doomed to failure since the start. Now the economic “downturn” is finishing the job, and I am hopeful that it may be one more good result that comes from it.

I think Buildblog puts it best in their recent post, “Pre-fab houses don’t work.” They go on to list 10 reasons why pre-fabbers have gotten it wrong at a time when I believe that most things were in their advantage to get it right. Like so many other huge changes that are taking place across the U.S. in the way that we think and live, this time of economic malaise could have been an opportunity for radical visionaries to rebuild American housing. Instead we came up with a stupider and more convoluted way to build the same old, stupid and convoluted environs. God bless America.