Engineered Architecture

My doctor wanted me to start coming in to see her every year for my “annual checkup”. She explained that this would give her a baseline as I grew older and oddities and such appeared. Would that we did that for our built environment, and looked our buildings over, which like an annual physical for the human body would document current conditions of major building systems and components in the following areas using the ASTM 2018-15 Baseline Property Condition Assessmant (PCA) format:

•   SITE CONDITIONS     
  •             Topography     
  •             Pavement and Parking  
  •             Landscaping, Site Improvements & Site Amenities         
  •             Municipal Services & Utilities    
  •             Natural Hazards
•   BUILDING CONDITIONS         
  •             Substructure    
  •             Superstructure  
  •             Facades          
  •             Roofing           
  •             Roofing           
  •             Basements/Attics         
  •             Interior Finishes & Components
  •              Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA) Accessibility      
  •             Suspect Mold and Moisture      
• BUILDING SYSTEMS          
  •             Building Plumbing        
  •             HVAC  
  •             Building Electrical         
  •             Building & Site Fire & Life Safety          
  •             Elevators         
•   MATERIAL CODE VIOLATIONS           
  •             Building Department     
  •             Fire Department           
•   REFERENCES and REFERRALS           
  •             References Contacted  
•   IMMEDIATE AND SHORT TERM REPAIRS AND REPLACEMENT RESERVES  
  • Immediate and Short Term Repairs and Capital Replacement Budget Reserves      

Buildings use forty percent of the energy we consume. When I speak of building for climate change I rather mean that we should build our buildings to minimize the non-renewable, fossil-fueled use of energy to minimize the rate at which the climate is changing, and also build them to survive the effects of the changes in sea level and storm fury brought about by the past overuse of fuels that lead to greenhouse gas accumulation. Forty feet of sea level rise and storms with 150 miles an hour sustained wind. Got your attention? 100 degree days with 99% relative humidity. Continuous thunderstorm cells sitting off the Gulf of Mexico and a hurricane every three days on the Georgia Coast [yes, Florida is under water!] Paying attention? Yet?

The perfect wall would have to be incorporated into the “perfect building” since we have agreed that buildings should be looked at as a system. The best step we can take is to back up to say, “In climates where heating is the predominant activity, better to have the cold dry air leak slowly into the building which makes it warmer and drier; in climates where cooling predominates, better to have the cool conditioned air leak outward to become warmer and drier.” Herein lies the peace of moisture controlled.

We seem to be a long way from the self-repairing building that would be the analog of the human body. Many have written about the building skin as analogous to the body skin, but remember: wound the building skin, and it will be a long time before it “heals”. Sure we have self sealing membranes under our shingles; but that is for nail holes, not tree limbs or bullets.

I always used to wonder at the great thermal numbers we got looking at log buildings until we realized that if you have air leakage, and air leakage used to amount to half a buildings heat loss, in a log building you usually could also see daylight. In a frame house the air leak can be 8 feet away on the outside wall from the outlet on the inside where the air pours in: try to trace that path and caulk it. With the log building the leak goes from in to out and you can cure it in an instant.

All cladding leaks! I remember Joe Lstiburek’s “Flash for Cash” presentation well. Even all glass boxes leak at the seams! If 99% of caulk holds, you have 1% holes. Claude Shannon, the father of information theory applied redundancy to transmitting data packets without errors, similarly, adding redundant paths for water to leak to the outside and away from the building walls assures building structural integrity and avoidance of organic growth (the politically correct version of MOLD) colonies becoming established. Some even like to differentiate between mold and fungus. OSHA says:

“Molds are fungi that are found everywhere – both indoors and outdoors all year round. The terms fungi and mold are often used interchangeably, but mold is actually a type of fungi. Concern about indoor exposure to mold has increased along with public awareness that exposure to mold can cause a variety of adverse health effects. There are many thousands of species of mold and most if not all of the mold found indoors comes from outdoor sources. It seems likely to grow and become a problem only when there is water damage, high humidity, or dampness.

Molds produce and release millions of spores small enough to be air-, water-, or insect-borne. They can also produce toxic agents known as mycotoxins. Spores and mycotoxins can have negative effects on human health. For those people who are affected by mold exposures there can be a wide variation in how they react. People at greatest risk of health effects are individuals with allergies, asthma, sinusitis, or other respiratory conditions, as well as infants and children, elderly people, and pregnant women. In addition, individuals with a weakened immune system are at risk.*”

Redundant is as old as construction itself. If a roof of palm fronds is not thick enough, the successive layers will be insufficient to assure that drips will slide (kind of like the chutes and ladders game of childhood) down and sideways until eventually dripping off at the eaves outside of the building walls.

It is also critical, and Boy Scout tent pitching emphasized: to place your building (or tent) above the surrounding ground, sloping away on all sides. If you pitch your tent in a bowl, you will sleep in the soup if it rains.

Why is this mentioned at all?

Because everyone agrees that it is a good idea, and then proceeds to place the foundation too low for the surrounding terrain. And to make matters more confusing, they do it on steeply sloping ground. In the steep slope scenario, this can be a recipe for disaster, with rampant erosion and foundation walls becoming retaining walls without benefit of proper design.

And the things that can be done with a blank sheet of paper or a refined 3D CAD program! Imagine where the water goes when it rains on this bulding???

*https://www.osha.gov/SLTC/molds/

We humans have enjoyed a long and fruitful symbiotic relationship with mold organisms. They have made us sick, made us well, preserved and enhanced our foods and diets. In short: Where would we be without them? Toting around sour milk, vinegar and malted, sprouting wheat. They help digest our food and all the wastes we create. They even participate in the “rotting” that created our coal deposits:

 Mold for Coal, then Gold

Mold is smarter than the average one celled organism, (I shouldn’t mention that while fighting a cold, the rhinovirus might be surfing the net). I was amazed and perhaps a bit doubtful when I read in Bill Bryson’s Brief History of Everything that garden mold, when its environment has been threatened, forms up into a multi-celled “mold slug” that boogies over to greener, wetter pastures. There it sends out spores to re-establish a one celled colony.

And that finally is what triggered this post: We have mold colonies all over the place, yet they exist for years just making the place smell musty. So why does good mold go bad? Why suddenly so toxic? Look at these happy little colonies:

Photo 1: Mold on nutritious, moist medium

Back to my cold. Yesterday, I saw my doctor, because I felt like I had been run over by a truck, yet had no ostensible symptoms otherwise. He gave me antibiotics, we threatened my hitch-hiking viri. After an overnight of circulating cyclosporins (mold based pharmaceuticals are a huge segment of mold in white hats), I awoke with SYMPTOMS. The colony is preparing for departure, good news to me, but they are asking me to please broadcast their seed, or whatever a virus spore is called, as they leave my premises.

Back to the mold, after the dish dries:

So mold removal is a ticklish problem. If you have a leaking roof that has kept a sheetrock cavity moist enough to keep the local mold colonies happy, when you repair the leak, be prepared to remove the moldy colonies at the same time. Stories abound of situations that became toxic when the repairs began.

Some of us remember the John Hancock Fiasco when I.M.Pei designed one beautiful all glass building in Boston, and before it was finished the windows started popping out. Theories of failure were abundant, and it turns out the problem was the glass was too well made. Oh well. After hearing a presentation on the Hancock, the presenter showed a slide (remember those 35mm things? pre Powerpoint) of the downtown skyline of Boston and said he was actively working on 11 other buildings that were losing slabs of limestone, granite, and bricks! I was reminded of this when I saw the following example of flimsy attachment of trim on a well built masonry building that had been gussied up with EIFS trim. There are two ramset fasteners visible and no more. The problem with making things foolproof is that fools are so clever. Did anyone watch this installation. Probably not. The “Structural” inspections had all been passed. This was in the realm of the painters. To avoid adding injury to insult we must remember that all things subject to gravity must be taken seriously.

This piece landed in an alley.