New West Network

From The New West magazine

Q&A With Bozeman Architect Ralph Johnson

By Robert Struckman, 2-11-08

	Photo by Anne Medley.

Ralph Johnson is a Bozeman architect, professor and author of Building from the Best of the Northern Rockies.

NW: What will it take for meaningful green designs to get the benefit of large-scale production? You’ve studied and profiled some innovative projects in the book Building from the Best of the Northern Rockies, but many of them seem, well, pretty similar. Why, for instance, have we never seen anything fundamentally different, like a 200-home straw bale subdivision, popping up on the outskirts of Bozeman?

RALPH: There are a couple reasons why subdivisions look the way they do. Builders want to build what they’ve built before and sold before. Zoning ordinances where they exist are written to promote the normal. If you’re atypical – good or bad – you jump through far more hoops. That takes longer, and time is money. There’s also the – ‘I don’t like the look of that.’ And if the banker doesn’t like the looks of it, the bank isn’t going to give you a loan. That’s what it takes – some crazy builder willing to take this up.

NW: So you would need an edgy builder, a banker on board and compliant zoning. That doesn’t seem too hard. Leaving aside straw bale specifically, it doesn’t seem like a heck of a lot standing in the way of large-scale innovative building. What are other factors?

RALPH: I have a house I designed. It uses 50 percent of the energy an average home uses. It’s less expensive than most homes in its neighborhood, but when I put it up for sale, the real estate agents say it won’t sell quickly because it’s different from all the other homes. When you push the innovation envelope, you reduce your potential client base, probably by more than 50 percent. Can you overcome that? Every house, every month it sits on the market… either the price goes up or the profit goes down. That’s the cost of being innovative. There are so many forces working against it. That’s why the average builder builds safe things, things they know they can sell. It takes a builder who says, ‘Here’s a niche I can fill, and I’m going to exploit that niche.’

But going back to the straw bale, some people will know about it, but there are a lot of people saying, ‘Will the squirrels eat it?’

NW: That’s why the greenest building materials, the most innovative designs might get done once but don’t ever get the economy of scale that makes homes available for middle-income families?

RALPH: Well, and that’s not all. If you wanted to bid out a straw bale subdivision, the first thing is you’d need would be a local source of straw. That’s probably the first and most difficult part. We don’t have a rancher who’s necessarily interested in producing the right kind of straw. If you can’t find it locally, you’ve got shipping costs. You don’t want just any straw. You need a low-moisture straw so it won’t shrink a lot when you compact it. It’s like green wood.

You can bind it all you want, but until it reaches that low moisture level, it’ll shrink. When I first found out about it, 10 or 15 years ago, there was talk about an economic initiative on the Blackfeet Indian Reservation. ‘Let’s grow a straw that can make straw bale homes.’ It could be used to make homes on the reservation, and then the reservation could export the straw and the technology. ‘You’ll be experts on it.’ It fell apart on the get-go. Nobody wanted to raise that kind of straw on the guess that it would be consumed.

You’d need to school the builder on how it would be done. Once you start, it should be a pretty rapid process. I’ve wondered for 40 years why there are no geodesic dome subdivisions.

I’m interested in this ... not one house, but how do you create a subdivision that effectively makes (creative) housing more affordable?

This story first appeared in the preview issue of The New West magazine. For more information on the magazine, or to subscribe, go to www.newwest.net/magazine.