Designer Forum - April 2009
By John Peterson
Re-used and salvaged materials are a highly sustainable option. There is also a design bonus to using these materials. Not only do the raw materials that you specify as a designer have inherent meaning, but salvaged materials also provide an additional layer of meaning. They have unique histories; ones that can give meaning to users.
These materials can give insight into the history of the site or the history of the community. Aside from facilitating the creation of buildings, we as designers are the creators and arbiters of meaning. Re-used materials can be like short stories embedded in our work.
These are good times to find value in new places. Even better if those new places are old, cheap, or discarded. Public Architecture has been working with discarded and salvaged materials for the past several years. We didn’t ease into it, we dove in head first—the deep end—and we didn’t know how to swim.
In the summer of 2005, we designed a two-bedroom house using only salvaged materials. To complicate matters, it was designed and built in six weeks with all volunteer labor. “Scrap-House,” as it was called, was a demonstration house that became the centerpiece of World Environment Day 2005, which was hosted by the City of San Francisco that year. The entire experience was so entertaining—at least for spectators—that it became the subject of a National Geographic Channel documentary. The effort had all the drama of a reality TV show; no chairs where thrown, but there was just about everything else you would expect to find. Nothing sparks the passion of a contractor more than an impossible schedule, design changes and new materials that show up at the site on an hourly basis.
ScrapHouse had, among other things, floors made with materials from very unconventional sources. The challenge with salvage flooring is that the sub-flooring is often harder to find that the wearing surface. Plywood and other sheet materials are some of the most difficult materials to come by in the world of salvage. Structurally sound sheet materials have so many uses that they typically never make it into the waste stream. We were able to find some old staging platforms to make up the ground floor structure. However, the 24” spaced framing did not provide adequate support for its thin plywood top and there was far too much deflection for most flooring options. So, we needed something that could span 24”, wear well, and was free. Through our two most valuable assets on this project, luck, and a willingness to consider anything, we found a few dozen solid core doors that had been set aside from a demolished local public school.
Like with so many of our ideas, it seemed with every problem solved that a new one was created. Our floor had holes in it, one for the lockset and a larger one where the vision glass used to be. Someone suggested epoxy resin. A beautiful idea, you could imagine the colored translucent infill creating a loose pattern set against the grid of doors. But it fell victim to “Who’s going to do that in a couple of days, for free?” In the end, we turned to a stalwart flooring surface: concrete. A local contractor had some half hardened bags of ready mix and we filled and troweled all the openings with that. Finally, we had a floor that could handle the 10,000 visitors that came through the house over the four days it was open to the public.
We were hoping to showcase different flooring in the bedrooms. Now that the doors offered a stable substrate, we had a great deal more options to choose from. Someone had a friend who ran a leather production business and was offering us their leather scraps. As you can imagine, the scrap pieces were random corner and strips. We needed some uniformity so that we could assemble a flooring surface that would hold up for a few days. (As it turned out we should have used stronger glue; we had pieces curling up after the second day.) The leather manufacturer had a machine for cutting leather samples. So one of our volunteers punched out a few hundred rectangular leather swatches. They then glued the pieces to old sheets of paneling that were finally installed in one of the bedrooms.
Both of these, I hope, are useful examples of how designers can look to unconventional sources to produce sustainable solutions. However, in many projects there exist barriers to wholly unconventional approaches. These barriers can be onerous. Material testing and accurate performance information are likely the most common challenges. Single-family residential is, of course, the most forgiving project type. However, commercial and institutional projects often require specific data on fire spread, slip coefficient, and toxic contents—not to mention issues of constructability, durability, and lifecycle costs. Fortunately, there is a great salvage option that is readily accessible and has reliable performance information available—reclaimed wood flooring. Not only is it an environmentally friendly option, in many cases it outperforms current off-the-shelf options. Generally, old flooring was milled from old growth lumber with superior grain and color. The cost is often less. However, there may be an increase in labor needed for sorting and prepping.
When choosing reclaimed flooring, you should be mindful of three things: the consistency of the condition and thickness, remaining wear life, and the history of the flooring. Reclaimed flooring is typically more consistent in color and grain, although there can be condition differences due to past staining or water damage. Because of uneven wear, there can also be differences in thickness. Inspect the wearing life of the flooring—how many sandings can the flooring withstand? Finally, if possible, it would be useful to know if the flooring was originally in an environment that could have exposed it to toxic materials. Many sellers have knowledge of the flooring’s past use and you can screen it for possible toxic exposure.
Copyright 2009 Floor Focus