Architect Nabih Tahan’s home in Berkeley was built to Passivhaus
standards. It needs no furnace or air conditioning
and is comfortable year-round.I missed writing my blog entry two weeks ago because I was at the Squaw Valley Community of Writers writing poetry with about 60 poets from around the country. We created community through expressing artfully what is almost impossible to express any other way.

One of the highlights of the week was going on nature walks a few mornings with David Lucas, a naturalist. (He is the author of Wild Birds of California and revised the classic guidebook Sierra Nevada Natural History.) His insights about birds and other life forms found their way into many a poem written that week. Did you know that some bird species have more that 120 distinct tunes that they learn to sing in a certain order? I didn’t. The really hot singers can do a shuffle of songs but not miss one of the 120. Just before dawn, neighboring birds duel with one another with song variations. And their brains are so much smaller than ours!

Imagine memorizing 120 poems and being able to recite them all in a row, and then getting up early the next morning for a poetry slam where you mix and match stanzas; starting, for example, with some Wordsworth, then a little T.S. Eliot, mix in some Emily Dickinson, and end with some “Howl” by Allen Ginsberg.

So, What has this to do with green homes? Lucas showed us the force of nature that in all things wants to survive. At Squaw Valley we created poetry that in a short time connected us to one another. That feels to me like surviving in a culture that wants us always competing with each other. Creativity seems as natural as eating, and I think it’s how we are going to get out of the present environmental crisis we are in.

This morning I heard about some scientists at MIT who discovered a catalyst that could very well make the conversion of sunlight into hydrogen easy and inexpensive. And a few weeks ago I visited a house in Berkeley built to Passivhaus standards. The standards were developed in Austria but are new to the United States. The architect and occupant of the home I visited in Berkeley, Nabih Tahan, is bringing the concept in this country. A Passivhaus is so well designed that it doesn’t need a furnace for heating or an air conditioner for cooling, even in Germany. Because the house is so well sealed, it needs to be ventilated mechanically. That is done through a heat recovery ventilator, a device that pulls up to 80% of the heat from exhaust air and transfers it to the incoming, fresh air. These houses use very little energy.

The poets and the architects are doing it, and the birds are doing it with their tiny birdbrains. We all can learn to adapt creatively to different ways of thinking about our environment, different ways of building buildings, and different ways of living in them.

Cris Benton inspects his kite aerial photography rig
before sending it up in the sky. Credit: Jane Liaw.

UC Berkeley architecture professor Charles ‘Cris’ Benton is a kite aerial photography (KAP) enthusiast. Benton is well-known in the KAP world for sharing his knowledge and love of the art.

In this art form, a camera is carried aloft by a kite and operated remotely from the ground. The pictures taken provide a bird’s-eye view that can’t be seen from the ground or an airplane. Benton’s Web site, chock full of information and gorgeous photos, has attracted numerous newbies to KAP.

I am profiling Benton for the UC Santa Cruz Science Communication Program. As I was casting around for an interesting scientist to write about, Benton stood out to me. He has a distinct and coherent philosophy that extends through both work and hobby.

Benton explains his attraction to KAP on the Web site:

Kite aerial photography appeals to that part of me, perhaps of all of us, that would slip our earthly bonds and see the world from new heights. An aerial view offers a fresh perspective of familiar landscapes and in doing so challenges our spatial sensibilities, our grasp of relationships.

KAP is a natural fit for Benton, who says architects also think about bird’s-eye perspectives and relationships between buildings in the landscape.

KAP was invented more than a century ago, but fell out of favor as military and commercial photography from airplanes became popular. In past few decades, artists interested in a unique perspective from the sky have revived the art. Today, thousands of people worldwide pursue KAP, and Benton is one respected example. He builds the rigs that hold his camera aloft from parts he finds around the house. The camera cradle, for instance, is re-purposed from an old computer hard drive. Benton, who took his first aerial photographs at Cesar Chavez Park in 1995, has built every rig himself; he’s now on his tenth.

Benton’s creation is impressive. He has set a camera in a wooden frame, and engineered a remote mechanism that pushes the shutter button and can move his camera to vertical or horizontal positions. To take his aerial photos, he handles the spool of kite string with one hand and works the radio controller that remotely manipulates the camera with the other.

At Cesar Chavez Park today, I watch as Benton hooks the kite to a park bench after it’s aloft, then attaches the camera to the kite line, rigged in a pulley system that allows Benton to move the camera up and down the line. He snaps a few photos of himself at different heights to show me.

Benton peers up at his rig as he positions it for some
photo-taking. Credit: Jane Liaw.
Benton doesn’t use real-time video to help compose his shots, as some kite aerial photographers do. With video, the photographer on the ground sees exactly what the camera’s shot will look like. Instead, Benton “interrogates the landscape.” He thinks through the shot, forms a hypothesis on what he might see if he were looking through the camera lens in the sky, takes the picture, and compares his imaginings to the actual shot.

Benton has in recent years developed a fascination with the south San Francisco Bay. For several years, he has been documenting the area as part of the San Francisco Exploratorium’s Hidden Ecologies project. Benton takes kite aerial photographs of the South Bay salt flats and other Bay geographies, while a microbiologist takes “microcinematography”– photos of tiny critters such as bacteria and diatoms that inhabit these ecosystems, captured with the help of field microscopes.

Benton has published his photos on a blog: majestic overviews of the South Bay salt ponds that run the color spectrum from red to green to pink, depending on how the microscopic organisms adapt to varying salinity levels.

Cris will be collaborating with KQED staff on our next 2-minute “Your Photos on QUEST” segment for broadcast and web distribution. It will air on August 26, 2008.

His stunning set of Kite Aerial Photography of South San Francisco Bay did a wonderful job of expressing a sense of locale, with a passion for nature, via a process that captures something unexpected and essential.

In his own words:

"…juxtapositions abound – dendritic marsh channels as foils for the straight lines of infrastructure; wild openness confronting the confines of encroaching capitalism; salt ponds, vividly colored by the aforementioned halophiles, constrained by subtly hued mud and marsh; derelict, forgotten engineering works faintly echoing their former functions. ."

Benton makes his own kite rigs, but if you’re interested in taking up the hobby and are daunted by putting together your own equipment, you can also buy ready-made rigs online from Brooks Leffler, a pioneer of modern KAP.

Home designers and constructors are realizing that all houses are organic.

The California Energy Commission asked the Davis Energy Group in Sacramento to evaluate new home construction in California a few years ago. The following excerpt from Home Energy Magazine tells you what they found.
The increasing architectural complexity of new homes requires greater vigilance on the part of framers, insulators, and drywall contractors to create a single thermal/pressure boundary between conditioned and unconditioned spaces. The more complex the design of the home, the more coordination is needed among the various members of the design team. Yet, mechanical contractors are rarely consulted regarding the integration of ducts and HVAC (heating, ventilation, and air conditioning) equipment into the house design. Contractors often lack both the knowledge and the time to implement house-as-a-system construction concepts. In addition, there is not an adequate infrastructure in place to provide contractors and installers with necessary training and certification.
House-as-a-system, or whole-house design, requires an integrated approach to water management. When I visited Japan, I went inside elegant buildings that were centuries old and made almost entirely of wood. Japan has a prolonged wet season, much like the northern coast of California. Because of this, the roofs of the Japanese houses I saw were designed to move moisture away from the structure. Inside, the buildings were well ventilated with the wood framing members exposed. Wood absorbs water during the wet season and dries during the dry season, allowing these healthy buildings to breathe in and out like other organisms.
In previous centuries, building homes was a craft learned primarily through apprenticeship with a master builder who knew how to create a whole house that worked in the wet, dry, humid, hot, cold, and/or windy climate in which it was built. Today, however, the home building industry is fractured, with designers and general contractors and several trades doing their parts and not always talking to each other. In order to build a house that works, all the players need to know how what they do individually in a house effects what everyone else is doing as well. Plumbers have to respect air and moisture barriers, designers have to understand moisture dynamics, and HVAC contractors have to understand the pressure dynamics of the whole house; otherwise furnaces will backdraft, mold will form in walls, homes will have poor indoor air quality, they will cost a fortune to operate, be very uncomfortable, and fall down after a few years.
In order to combat global warming and provide affordable housing to everyone who needs it, houses must be designed, built, and retrofitted to be energy efficient, healthy to live in, affordable, and made to last forever (or at least for a hundred years). Interested in being a part of the solution to global warming? Get a green collar job. In particular, I would recommend a career in home design and construction to anyone with the time and energy to get the right kind of education, training, and experience. There is plenty of work out there and that’s not changing anytime soon. Home Energy publishes a training guide for people in North America interested in learning the concepts and tools of whole building design and construction. For the latest list, go to http://www.homeenergy.org/contrainingguide/index.php.

Jim Gunshinan is Managing Editor of Home Energy Magazine. He holds an M.S. in Bioengineering from Pennsylvania State University, State College, Pennsylvania, and a Master of Divinity (MDiv) degree from University of Notre Dame.

latitude: 37.8783, longitude: -122.287