BIOFUEL BALONEY

We Americans have happily given our cars the run of the country, paving over a good forty percent of our cities so they can roam unfettered, and generously ceding a big chunk of our hard-earned homes to keep them warm and dry. But apparently that’s not enough. Now some interests are suggesting that, in order to keep our four-wheeled friends tanked up at all costs, we share our food supply with them as well.

Imagine creating fuel from plants instead of having to drill for it! We can guzzle all the biofuels we can grow! No more oil wars! No more Third World countries trying to push us around! 

Alas, as appealing as all this may sound, it’s a pipe dream. Among the many pitfalls of the biofuels concept:

Economics. Farmers across the globe, whether corporate or independent, will switch to growing plants for biofuel the instant it becomes more profitable than growing food crops. The current price of gasoline will give you a good idea how many seconds this decision might take. Result: Besides ceding even more of our environment to automobiles, we’ll also be competing directly with them for food. 

Logistics. To replace even a small fraction of current fossil fuel consumption, vast portions of arable land would have to be dedicated to growing biofuels crops. It’s been calculated that satisfying ten percent of the European Union’s total fuel demand with biofuels would require an agricultural area the size of Spain.

Science. U.S .and E.U. leaders alike are jumping on the biofuels bandwagon as a panacea for petroleum woes. Case in point: An E.U. directive instituted in 2003 required that 5.75% petrol and diesel should come from renewable sources by 2010--a quota the E.U. plans to increase to 10% by 2020. Yet the European Environment Agency’s Scientific Committee--the E.U.’s own advisory panel on biofuels--has concluded that this move will not curb the production of greenhouse gases, and in fact may actually increase them. 

“I see absolutely no reason to use a lot of energy, money and large swaths of farmland (to produce biofuels),” concluded Professor Helmut Haberl, a member of the E.U. panel. “The E.U. should scrap the 10 percent mixture rules."

In the United States, a recent study led by Timothy Searchinger, an agricultural expert at Princeton University, concluded: 

“By using a worldwide agricultural model to estimate emissions from land-use change, we found that corn-based ethanol, instead of producing a 20% savings, nearly doubles greenhouse emissions over 30 years and increases greenhouse gases for 167 years. Biofuels from switchgrass, if grown on U.S. corn lands, increase emissions by 50%.” 

While the scientific news is bad enough, the worst thing about the political push for biofuels is that it only mires us deeper in a broken system, pandering to America’s energy addiction and perpetuating a culture and an economy in thrall to the internal-combustion engine.

We’d all like a world with adequate energy, a clean environment, and fewer conflicts. If biofuels can’t help deliver it, what can? In the short run, at least, that answer truly IS easy: Conservation. American technology, not to speak of American resolve, could easily reduce petroleum consumption by ten percent given the moral leadership to do so. The fault is not in our fuels, but in ourselves.

WHEN SIZE DOES MATTER

How many structures have qualified as the tallest thing ever built? Surprisingly, it’s a pretty small club. 

We don’t know much about structures of the distant past, of course. But we do know that if you’d been hanging around Giza in 2570 BC or so, you’d have found the spanking-new Great Pyramid soaring some 481 feet into the sky--high enough to hold the title of tallest manmade structure for nearly four thousand more years. 

The Great Pyramid was finally overtopped around 1300 by England’s Lincoln Cathedral, whose spire was said to stand 525 feet tall.  Alas, this record-breaker was wrecked by a gstorm in 1549, ceding the honor to St. Olaf’s Church in Tallinn, Estonia--whose spire was barely three feet shorter--until this too burned down after a lightning strike in 1625.

Thereafter, the title to seesawed between a series of German and French churches--first St. Mary’s in Stralsund, Germany (495 feet tall, but guess what?--another lightning casualty in 1647); then back to France’s Strasbourg Cathedral (1647, with a 469-foot spire). It took the Germans over two hundred years to reclaim dominance with the spire of St. Nikolai at Hamburg (1874, 483 feet), only to have the French embarrass them again two years later when the cathedral of Notre Dame de Rouen topped out at 495 feet.

The Germans ultimately won the spire wars in 1880 with the stupendous 515-foot tall northern spire of Cologne Cathedral, but this also turned out to be the last hurrah for Christianity’s long monopoly on erecting super-tall buildings. Instead, a secular structure--and one in the New World at that--claimed the title of World’s Tallest Structure for the first time. After being long delayed by a shortage of funds and then by the Civil War, the Washington Monument finally reached its full height of 555 feet in 1884 after 36 years under construction.

Yet this triumph was short-lived. Five years later, France once again reclaimed ownership of the World’s Tallest Structure, this time delivering a walloping knockout punch with its 986-foot Eiffel Tower. So complete was the Eiffel’s domination of the height race that it managed to retain its title right through the flurry of skyscraper building that took hold of America after 1900. Only in 1930 was it finally bested by New York’s 1,046-foot Chrysler Building.

The latter, ironically, had perhaps the most fleeting reign of all. It was unseated the following year by its downtown neighbor, the Empire State Building (1,250 feet), which retained the title for the next 36 years.

Although we usually think of skyscrapers when we consider super-tall structures, any freestanding structure qualifies, and thus the next two world height records were set by communications towers--first Russia’s Ostankino tower (1967, 1,772 feet) and then 

Toronto’s CN Tower (1975, 1,815 feet). The latter owned the trophy for the rest of the twentieth century. 

In 2000, however, Canada’s pride was quietly surpassed by a building still under construction in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Designed by architect Adrian Smith, the 163-story Burj Khalifa (known as Burj Dubai prior to its opening in 2010) sets the modern record at 2,722 feet, or just over a half-mile high. It's far and away the world’s tallest freestanding structure--for the time being, anyway.

PLASTIC, BY ANY OTHER NAME

The other day I came across a plastic house. Not the futuristic World’s Fair variety--this was just an ordinary old house that had been “improved” with a brace of glaring-white vinyl windows, lots of wavy vinyl siding, and some flimsy looking vinyl gutters and downspouts. As icing on the petrochemical cake, it was ringed by a white vinyl picket fence. If there were any termites left in the place, they must have been pretty hungry.

Vinyl is, of course, the plastics industry’s more euphonious name for polyvinyl chloride, or PVC . It’s the world’s second-largest commodity plastic, second only to polyethylene. About 35 million tons of the stuff are cranked out in a typical year, but with the housing market in rebound, production is now predicted to reach 49 million tons by 2017. 

You may be surprised to learn that the building industry is the world’s biggest consumer of PVC. According to an industry website, <pvc.org>, about 23% of PVC production is used for pipes and fittings alone. Another 27 % goes to extruded profiles such as those used in vinyl window frames, gutters, and the like, and 10% or so to other building applications such as coatings and vinyl flooring (the latter, not to be confused with more eco-friendly linoleum, shows up in two out of three American kitchens).

Like many other environmentally troubling manmade materials, PVC starts out innocuously enough: its raw ingredients are salt and petroleum. Salt water is electrolyzed to produce chlorine, which is then combined with ethylene obtained from oil to produce ethylene dichloride. This compound is processed at high temperature to create a vinyl chloride monomer--still with me?--which is finally polymerized to form a polyvinyl chloride resin. Various additives make the resin suitable for different uses and protect it from its archenemy, ultraviolet light. 

The final result is a material that’s cheap and easily processed, which is one reason millions of tons of PVC are gobbled up each year in the form of vinyl windows, siding, gutters, flooring, and other economy-grade building products. Alas, when these not-very-substantial products end up in the landfill--which they usually do much sooner than the traditional materials they aim to displace--there’s trouble. A number of environmental authorities consider PVC to be the most toxic plastic in the environment. Bury it in a landfill, and it just sits there. Burn it, and it produces dioxin, a toxic chemical compound that’s a known teratogen, mutagen, and carcinogen.

PVC has proven its usefulness in many applications. On the other hand, it’s also wended its way into markets for which it simply isn’t suited. PVC gutters, for example, are neither durable nor attractive--in fact, other than their cheap first cost, they have no advantage whatever over more traditional gutter materials such as sheet metal, wood, aluminum or copper. The same goes for PVC fencing and the host of other nominally architectural PVC products on the market. Even in the vastly successful arena of vinyl windows, long term durability remains an unknown, manufacturer’s claims notwithstanding.

Every miracle material conjured up by man has downsides, and PVC is no exception. Since for practically every newfangled architectural use of PVC there are more eco-friendly traditional materials at hand, it’s worth thinking twice before choosing “vinyl” for your home. By any other name, it’s still 35 million tons of PVC.

RUINOVATION

The word “renovation” implies they you’re replacing something old and worn out with something new and better. Yet too many so-called renovators simply replace things that are old and substantial with new ones that are cheap and flimsy. That’s not renovation--it’s more like ruinovation. 

If every modern building product were better than its counterpart of fifty years ago, meaningful renovation would be easy. But they’re not, and so it isn’t. While some things really have improved--modern heating systems, for example, are vastly superior to those of years past--the sad fact is that many building products are mere wisps of their former selves. 

The euphemistic “economic pressures” that corporate types like to talk about--put plainly, “greed for fatter profit margins”--are the real culprit behind the declining quality of so many building items. The practice of outsourcing to cheap labor overseas means many name-brand products are now manufactured in places with indifferent or nonexistent quality control, regardless of what manufacturers claim to the contrary. The fact that many venerable American brands are now haphazardly manufactured in Third World countries may do wonders for corporate profits, but it won’t do wonders for your home. You’ll merely be replacing things that have lasted twenty-five, fifty, or even a hundred years with new ones that’ll break in four or five.

Therefore, before you replace any item in your home in the interest of sweeping renovation, ask yourself two questions. First: Does it still serve its purpose well?  If so, it shouldn’t be high on your renovation agenda--certainly not for reasons of fashion alone. 

Second: If it no longer serves its purpose, can it be fixed? Here’s where many stalwart Americans seem to have lost their Yankee grit. We’ve slowly come to believe the fallacy that throwing things away and replacing them with new ones is easier and cheaper than fixing them. In the case of many items in a house, however, this is just plain bull.

Windows, for instance, are a frequent candidate for ruinovation, due mainly to cunning marketing by window replacement companies. Many people are talked into replacing their windows to save on utility bills, but the truth is that, in an average house, heat loss through windows makes up a relatively modest fraction of total energy use. Therefore, upgrading your home’s attic insulation or even replacing your furnace would probably be a much more cost effective way to conserve. 

Moreover, no matter what the problem with a home’s original windows might be, chances are it would take less money, effort, and resources to have them repaired by a local window shop than it would to replace them wholesale with new ones. The fact that this approach also best maintains a home’s original style is just icing on the cake.

But whether we’re talking about windows, doors, flooring, hardware, or plumbing fixtures, there’s little to be gained by replacing sound original items en masse just to experience the briefest thrill of newness. On the other hand, there’s much to be lost: As often as not, you’re actually be downgrading the quality of your home, and spending good money to do it.

AN ARTFUL PILE OF LUMBER

A century ago, Henry Ford’s canny use of mass production put the automobile--a former plaything of the wealthy--within reach of the average American. Since then, mass production has made complex products from clocks to computers affordable to pretty much everyone. 

In the same hundred years, however, the way we build houses has hardly changed at all. In fact, if you set aside niceties like electricity, telephones, and central heating, basic building techniques have actually changed very little in a millennium. Whether we assemble houses with oaken pegs or pneumatic nails, they’re still largely handmade from laboriously cut and fitted individual pieces, and put together one at a time.

Over the course of the twentieth century, there were many attempts to bring mass production methods to the building industry. The Aladdin Company began selling precut houses in 1906, and two years later, retailing giant Sears Roebuck began offering houses by mail order. Each Sears Modern Home came in a 25-ton kit consisting of precut lumber and virtually all the other materials required to complete the building. Prices ranged from $650 to $2,500, and twenty-two styles were offered. Precutting the lumber not only made the houses cheaper, but also reduced onsite construction time by some 40%. Over 70,000 Sears Modern Homes were sold before the program ended in 1940, a victim of the Depression economy and vexing differences in local building codes.

Inventor Buckminster Fuller began pondering the concept of mass produced housing in 1927, and by the close of World War II, he’d arrived at his Dymaxion House, a futuristic circular structure slung from a central pylon. The house used aircraft-style aluminum skin construction, allowing it to be mass-produced in aircraft plants left idle by the war’s end. It also incorporated a slew of visionary conservation features we’ve yet to see in today’s homes. Yet only two Dymaxion houses were actually built in prototype form before the venture’s commercial failure. 

By far the most ambitious attempt to mass produce complete houses was the Lustron House, developed by inventor Carl Strandlund and introduced in 1947. Although the house featured a sleek porcelain enamel exterior, its design cleverly evoked a traditional cottage, and the company quickly piled up more than 20,000 orders. Strandlund’s one million square foot factory, built with 32.5 million dollars in Federal loans, was laid out like an automotive assembly plant and was widely presumed to augur the future of the housing industry. Yet Lustron was ultimately able to produce only 2,498 units before declaring bankruptcy in 1950.

Since that time, other attempts at mass producing houses--or at least sections of them--have come and gone. A number of companies continue to furnish kit houses of various kinds, from log cabins to domes, but true mass production remains elusive. Ironically, the much-maligned “mobile home” industry--whose products were once known as house trailers but are now more politely dubbed manufactured housing--probably comes closest to offering a truly mass-produced house. Alas, the industry hasn’t yet managed to shake the public image of its products as flimsy, lookalike boxes. 

Time after time, it seems, ambitious and sophisticated housing ventures have been torpedoed by the vast startup costs inherent in any mass-production enterprise, as well as by the equally vast resistance of both the public and the building industry to radical new ideas.  Yet as the need for broadly affordable housing increases, the disconnect between how we build houses and how we build everything else will only become more glaring. If the previous century couldn’t offer a viable solution, we’d better hope that this one can.

HEAVY TRAFFIC

Someday, when the history of our Petroleum Age is written and the internal-combustion automobile is seen as a quaint and rather silly conveyance on par with the oxcart, scholars will have a field day examining the twisted aspects of our vanished autocentric society. And without a doubt the most moribund and farcical discipline connected with this era will turn out be that of the traffic engineers, whose automotive monomania helped turn the built environment into a playground planned almost exclusively around motor vehicles--to the detriment of pedestrians, other modes of transport, and Mother Nature herself.

It may not seem odd that traffic engineers should be preoccupied with cars. But the word “traffic”, it’s well to remember, doesn’t refer to automobiles by default--it refers to the movement of people and goods. You’d never guess as much judging by contemporary usage, because the central and practically sole concern of traffic engineers across America has to do with moving cars around at the expense of all else.

Most engineering disciplines pride themselves on creating progress in their respective fields. In a single century, for example, aircraft engineers went from building sputtering kites of wood and paper to designing planes that can fly by themselves at six hundred miles an hour. And in just fifty years, electronics engineers have made even more phenomenal strides: Consider the astonishing progress made in audio alone, not to speak of computing.

Yet until very recently, the traffic engineer’s only response to the demands of a changing world has been to bang out the same old two-note refrain: Wider roads, more traffic lights. This is basically the same so-called solution that’s been offered since the 1920s, even though neither strategy has ever shown any success in easing traffic congestion. Moreover, during the last two decades, while computers have been used to make virtually every two-bit consumer item smart, traffic controls remain determinedly brainless. Only recently has the consideration of “dynamic elements” even entered the realm of traffic engineering.  The radical idea here--are you sitting down?--is that traffic controls should actually respond to varying conditions using sensors that measure traffic flow. 

Hence, after eighty-odd years of stubbornly resorting to the same ham-fisted repertoire of road widening and signal planting, some nameless traffic engineer apparently had the wit to wonder, “Gee, should our designs actually relate to what’s going on? Should we try to make use of that wacky new computer technology everyone’s talking about? Should traffic signals actually recognize that no one is coming the other way, instead of stopping people just for the hell of it?”

To which his or her colleagues no doubt responded: “Nah, that’s crazy talk.“

Given the glacial progress traffic engineering has made in the past eight decades, don’t expect the introduction of dynamic elements, or anything else, to improve your neighborhood’s traffic situation for a long long time. By then, perhaps, our autocentric definition of “traffic” will have grown to reclaim those who walk, bicycle, or take public transportation, leaving traffic engineering as it’s currently practiced right up there with alchemy, bloodletting, and other things we used to think made perfect sense.

CALCULATED BEAUTY

We hear the terms “well proportioned” and “ill proportioned” all the time, but we seldom really think about what they mean. What exactly gives an object good proportions, or bad ones?

For instance, why do many people find a brick wall attractive, but a concrete block wall ugly? Color, texture, and historical associations all play a role, but the main reason is is more subtle: While the exposed face of a brick has proportions of about three to one, that of your typical 8x8x16 concrete block has proportions of two to one. It’s a coarse, clumsy ratio that’s simply less pleasing to the eye. 

Why should an object’s relative shape have such profound qualities? People have pondered this question for millenia. In ancient Greece, Plato, Pythagoras and Euclid all delved into the mystery of geometric proportions. Among other things, the Greeks were fascinated by the Golden Rectangle--a shape so proportioned that when a perfect square is removed from it, the result is another Golden Rectangle (this proportion turns out to be about 1.618 to one). It’s often said that the Parthenon, Greece’s architectural masterpiece, owes its celebrated beauty to the use of this geometry.

Much closer to our own time, the architect Le Corbusier was equally smitten by Golden Rectangle--one of the few concessions he made to ancient ideas. And who knows how many contemporary architects quietly apply tried-and-true proportional rules to their work without letting on, lest they diminish their own stature as compositional wizards.

There’s no doubt that the human eye, or more properly the human brain, finds some proportions more pleasing than others--but why? One reason could be that the brain likes to place every piece of information it receives into some kind of rational framework. A rectangle with certain geometric properties may be more satisfying on a subliminal level, even though these qualities may not be obvious to the conscious mind. 

It’s not hard to believe that the mind’s preference for some proportions over others comes about through  some kind of instant internal calculus. Over the years I’ve experienced hints of such a thing in my own line of work. Often, at the very outset of designing a project--long before I’m forced to deal with nitty gritty details--I’ll toss off a little thumbnail sketch that pleases me, put it aside, and forget about it. Then I’ll go on to the practical realities of making the thing work: planning, revising, and wrestling with details and dimensions, until I think I’ve finally gotten it just right. 

Yet when I happen to come across that little thumbnail sketch and compare it to my final design--the product of months of cogitation--I often find that they’re virtually identical, right down to the roof slopes and window proportions. In other words, my instincts have beaten my intellect to the punch.

To me, this suggests that, as useful as design rules can be, we don’t really need geometric formulas to come up with beauty. On the contrary: Sometimes, we just need to let our rational minds step back, and let our instincts tell us what looks right.