Normally when something even starts to go mainstream, I run the other way.  It’s been a point of pride.  But now not so much.  I think I’m gonna have to come back to the party and stand my ground.

I cut my teeth building timber frames in Michigan in the early 80’s just as You-Know-Who pulled the plug, so to speak, on emerging alternative energy technologies.  Nevertheless we persevered, aided in no small part by a severe winter climate, and pioneered the use of what was then called stress skin panels, now known as structural insulated panels or SIP’s, to super-insulate our timber frame buildings.  I even wrote an article about installing stress skins for Fine Homebuilding magazine published in 1984 (was that really 25 years ago?).  I felt particularly virtuous about that article, because while others were writing about the romance of timber frame buildings, I was talking about how to make them truly useful—even the best timber frame is useless without a “skin” on the “bones,” and these carefully enclosed frames would have a fraction of the heating and cooling costs of conventionally constructed buildings. They were green before green was green.

But something changed when I came out to the Left Coast.  As the nineties progressed it was harder and harder to sell the benefits of SIP’s.  Energy is relatively cheap.  The winter is relatively mild.  Houses are bigger and more complex; the complexity making SIP’s relatively expensive.  We have continued considering energy usage, but don’t really emphasize it.   And feeling very out of date with my message of super-insulation, I left the party to work on other stuff.  And now this green thing comes along and it’s green this and green that and where were these guys when we were getting dissed for talking about conservation?  And it grows and grows and it all begins to smell like the flavor of the month.

But it’s not. Buildings account for 40% of the energy consumed in the United States, and 80% of that energy goes into heating, cooling and ventilation. 

It is so easy to do better.  Efficient appliances and mechanical equipment are available throughout the world (though the best ones are not always available here at home!) and can help reduce energy consumption considerably.  The day when buildings generate energy on site through wind and solar technologies is at hand (see Greg’s article about our Net Zero collaboration with Kulshan Community Land Trust, and also note that there’s a move afoot to require all new buildings in Europe to be Net Zero energy consumers, perhaps as early as 2015).   But today, here and now, insulation is still a super hero!!!  The payback is reasonable even at today’s relatively low energy costs, and insulation is easy to live with. You don’t have to feed it, turn it on or off, change it’s fluids or filters.  It has no operating costs!  It’s a one time investment that pays back over the entire lifetime of the building. A no-brainer, I think.

So Cascade Joinery is coming back to the party.  The skills we’ve developed as timber framers—the ability to visualize details of a building before it’s constructed, working to very exact tolerances—will be increasingly valuable as energy saving technologies and techniques are more thoroughly integrated in future buildings.  And we will continue to work to encourage the construction community (builders, bankers, building officials etc.) to develop foresight and resolve and make the investments required to insure that beautiful, healthy, sustainable and affordable buildings are the norm instead of the exception.  That sounds like a party I’d like to hang with.