beausoleil architects

Now we’re cooking with … not gas!

In many parts of the world, for instance sub-Saharan Africa, rural India, the desert parts of latin America and even in China, there is a push to use solar cooking to reduce the amount of wood and charcoal burning, to reduce local environmental air pollution and to increase public safety. Wood gatherers, often children and women, are more prone to attack as they range further from their home base in search of scarce resources. Large stretches of the world are being deforested, in part, by people needing fuel for cooking.

My daughter is going to Senegal in West Africa this summer, on a service trip with her school to help build a rural school.  I thought it might be useful to bring a prototype solar cooker to gauge its social acceptability and to test it in the local environmental conditions. I decided the cooker would have to be:

• Useful for local culinary customs, which involve cooking grain porridges, boiling vegetables, roasting meat, possibly baking bread.
•  Made of cheap (for my budget and theirs), easily repairable, replaceable, and sustainable materials.
•  Effective during the long, hot dry season (roughly eight months of the year)
•  Easily transportable, i.e., light in weight, foldable, durable
•  Hopefully, capable of being mass produced cheaply, if found to be useful and effective.

Solar cooking is simple from a scientific point of view, and also quite intuitive, as anyone knows who has gotten into a hot car on a sunny day. Incoming solar radiation at sea level embodies as much as 100 Watts of power per square foot, mostly in the form of visible light. If the light is absorbed by a dark surface, the surface will heat up, and the heat will tend to be radiated away as thermal radiation. If the surface is surrounded by glass, however, which is largely transparent to light but largely opaque to thermal radiation, then the heat is trapped – this is known as the greenhouse effect.  Using mirrors or lenses, more solar energy can be focused on a small area, increasing the temperature.  Increase the heat enough, and you have a cooker.

My design was based in part from what materials I found readily, and what my tools and crafting abilities were capable of. The design also evolved with step-by-step experimentation. I determined early on that the cooker needed to incorporate a glass shell so as to use the greenhouse effect.  I was able to find an inexpensive, cylindrical glass vase to use as my shell; it’s shape determined that I would create an oven rather than a ‘stovetop’ style cooker.

The design I settled upon had a parabolic reflector wrapped around the cylinder, held in place with a structural frame made of thin sheets that could be knocked down for ease of transportation. The prototype used cardboard, with Masonite or a similar artificial wood panel in mind for a final version. The pieces knock down to a (mostly) flat bundle, small enough to fit within the length and width of a typical suitcase.

The absorber plate which lined the inside of the glass cyliner was galvanized sheet metal with barbecue grade flat black paint as the finish. Some hemp rope, scavenged from the garage, was used for gaskets. Some quick experimentation with aluminum foil and cookie sheets as reflectors convinced me to use real mirrors – true specular reflectors seemed to be called for.

The first test of the prototype reached a temperature of 235 degrees – not great but good enough to bake cookies.  Then disaster: I was showing the cooker off on Earthday and the wind blew it over and broke it into shards…Oh, well, scientific progress goes boink. It was only a prototype, and proved to be less effective than desired, besides being too fragile, and probably too expensive.  It was lovely piece of design, but back to the drawing board!
 
My Challenge to my readers:

Create your own solar cooker – an oven or a boiler
Research local conditions, cooking practices and culture in your target area
Study the science of visible and thermal energy, absorption, transmission, radiation, insulation, and cooking
Design a beautiful cooker
Make a prototype
Test your ideas and your design
Do it again until you get it right
Take it out and try it in the real life
Manufacture it locally, and help transform the economy

Have Fun and Change the World

Up on the Roof

Much of the curb appeal of a house is up at the roof level. While we live within the space of a house, and enjoy its environmental comfort, its furnishings and its security, how we feel about the appearance of our houses depends a lot on whether the roof design appeals to us.  Terra Cotta tile, wood shingles, copper gutters; the modern appearance of a horizontal cantilever, the ancient look of a steep slate roof with gabled dormers; these elements probably do more to establish the character of our houses than anything else. It’s clear from our own experience that a stucco box with antique clay tile roof has a whole different feel than the same house with cheap composition shingles.

Roofs are where the action is.  And for the last thousand years, they have also been where the latest high tech gadgets are on display.  In 1100, the average house had a fireplace – meaning a stone or brick lined area in the middle of the floor – under a smoke hole in the roof.  Lots of smoke everywhere, and lots of drafts taking away the heat.  Then some bright mason thought of creating a shaft to guide the smoke up to the roof. Supporting that shaft required backing up the fireplace with a wall, which to their delight, was found to absorb and re-radiate the heat of the fire. 

 

 

 

 

 There followed a few hundred years of experimentation, and the result was the ‘modern’ fireplace with its three sided firebox, smoke chamber above, and tall chimney.  Smoke and drafts were controlled, heating improved. Soon every lord and knight had a fireplace or two, the fancier the chimney the better.

 

Chimney design became so important that some French Chateaus seem like exercises in chimney design, with the building thrown in as an extra.

 

 

In the 1700’s, founding father Ben Franklin got us thinking about electricity. He invented the lightning rod and thus started another fad. As before, this functional element was soon refined by the wealthy into a decorative symbol of their importance.  Any house without half a dozen many fingered rods was not only unsafe but uncool.  Weathervanes also became au courant, and were often combined with lightning rods. You could tell when the storm was coming and know that you were protected. 

 

 

By the1950’s, chimneys began to lose their appeal as central heating became common.  What was the new status symbol?  The TV antennae, soon replicated on every roof in America. 

A few decades later, and it's satellite dishes.  Meanwhile, the chimney is starting to disappear as designers specify high-performance direct vent fireplaces or choose to eliminate the anachronism entirely. Traditional fireplaces are, quite literally, like burning money from an energy efficiency point of view.

 

So what’s next?  As energy costs rise, and as environmental awareness grows, I think we will see a lot more solar panels and wind turbines on roofs; green roofs too.  We’ve already seen how celebrities, like Jay Leno, and high tech companies, like Adobe, use wind turbines as a status symbol.

So, power up, be the first on your block to spin, absorb, or grow your roof into celebrity status.  And who knows, you might just save the planet.

 

 

 

 

Now, chill out with the lyrics from Up on the Roof by Gerry Goffin and Carol King. You probably know the tune:

 

When this old world starts getting me down

And people are just too much for me to face

I climb way up to the top of the stairs

And all my cares just drift right in to space

 

On the roof it's peaceful as can be

And there the world below can't bother me

 

Let me tell you now

When I come home feelin' tired and beat

I go up where the air is fresh and sweet

I get away from the hustling crowds

And all that rat race noise down in the street

 

On the roof's the only place I know

Where you just have to wish to make it so

Oh, let's go

up on the roof….

Architectural Magic

How do you turn a bay window into gold?  Simple, just make it disappear.

 

Corey and Ben McMills of McMills Construction had a problem.  Their investment property on Oak Street, near Ashbury and facing the Panhandle of Golden Gate Park, needed to have a garage built to enhance his tenant’s use of the building and maximize their rent.  Parking, as is true in much of San Francisco, is hard to find in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood and is almost more valuable than living space.  They turned to Beausoleil Architects for help.

The bottom floor of the building, a historic Victorian apartment house, had a hodgepodge of storage rooms, utility spaces and an ancient studio apartment shoehorned between a dozen wood posts.  The original brick foundations were underfoot.  The project structural engineer, Don David of Double D Engineering determined that as part of upgrading the seismic strength of the structure they could get rid of the columns and the partitions, build new concrete footings, and create a clean open garage space.  The problem, as Corey found out when he asked the planning department to review the project, was how to get a car in.

The front wall of the ground floor had a three sided bay window, with windows on each face, matching the bays on the levels above, and the city planning department had recently started enforcing its mandate to limit changes to the character of historic building’s front facades – including conversion of bay windows into garage doors. Their design guidelines require that fronts of buildings, front yards, fencing, and similar relics of historic design be left largely intact, and that changes must be made in accordance with the Secretary of the Interior’s Standards for Rehabilitation of Historic Buildings. Replacement of the bay window with a garage door, a common practice for many years, was no longer an option.

Corey, a mechanical engineer by education and a problem solver by nature, conceived the idea of converting the walls of the bay window into door panels that would fold into the garage space to allow cars to enter, and then fold back into place, keeping the historic appearance intact.  The planning department agreed that this concept was provisionally acceptable.  To help him realize this concept, Corey hired fellow problem solver Robert Boles of Beausoleil Architects to devise the details and keep the project in-line with the Secretary of the Interior’s Standards.  One of the goals of the standards is to keep not only the historical appearance, but to keep the ‘historic fabric’ – the original wood and glass building materials – intact wherever possible.

Beausoleil carefully measured the elements of the existing façade and drew them up, then determined how the bay window sides could be split apart from the rest of the building with almost invisible seams.  They envisioned a steel framework that would be secured to the back of the walls before they were cut away from the structure – allowing the fabric of the building to remain virtually intact, studs, siding, windows all moving in concert. The front yard, which had a possibly original wrought iron fence, also had to be redesigned to incorporate a driveway and a percentage of planting areas in accordance with the zoning code. Beausoleil prepared a supplementary set of construction drawings to complement the structural set previously approved.

To make the doors work mechanically, there are two floor mounted hydraulic activators, which rotate the doors on pivot hinges. Further details, including control and security hardware, were worked out in the field by the installer, Rick Dentoni of Automatic Gate Installations.

The new garage will provide four parking spaces, while eliminating only ten feet of parking space on the street.  While not entirely pleasing to the city planners, who consider cars to be the spawn of the devil, the new parking will no doubt be very useful to the tenants, at least until we can devise our next trick – teleportation!

The project still needs a little finish carpentry and painting, but you can get the idea in the photos and video below.

    

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Garage door closed                                             Garage door open

 

 

Stained or Art Glass...

 

Well, the silver lining in this recession is that having more free time on your hands can sometimes lead to time for creative artistic pursuits.  I started doing stained glass (or art glass as the preferred terminology since there is nothing "stained" about it) at MIT of all places, not as a regular credit class as part of my architectural curriculum (the only art class offered at the time in the entire school was life drawing), but through their Student Art Association.

There I learned the basics of the craft and made a nice little Christmas present for my Mom.  Over the years, I experimented on and off, not quite sure it was the artistic medium for me as it takes a lot of patience (which I am sometimes short of) and skill, as well as a good artistic sense for colors, textures and composition.    As I tend to cut myself regularly on sharp edges,  I often wondered if the flow of blood was an indication I should stop and find a different pursuit.  But then when I go to a glass shop I can hardly control myself.  Think of the young child in their first candy store.  The colors, textures, pure art within each simple piece of glass excite me so.  At least for now, with a little more time on my hands, I will follow that excitement and see where it leads!  (And besides, in one of those same glass shops, Dan a very experienced glass artist and teacher, has a box of band-aids right at the front as he admits to cutting himself multiple times in one day!)

This piece was inspired by my winter magnolia, which is the first thing to bloom in my garden every spring.  The Chinese poem talks of the hope this blossom brings, descended to the earth (from heaven) quietly with a wave of cold. (Thank you again, Lena, for the poem.)

I was rereading  Genesis this week - the ultimate work of creation.  If we are really made in God's image, then each of us has that creative spark, wonderfully unique in each of us, that so wants to explore and create.  Go do it!  You never know what you might discover about yourself!

For more images of my glass projects, including commissions, click here.

We be stylin' now

I was thinking about style the other day, while working on a new remodeling project.  I was trying to create a sort of Hawaiian / country / mountain style house for clients whose house is on a forested hillside next to a creek. They wanted an informal plan that could be opened up to outdoor living areas but which would also shelter them from the heavy rainfall in the area.  The project is in Los Gatos, not Hawaii, but as I thought of the classical Hawaiian house – walls that can be opened to the breezes on all sides, wide eaves to protect from the sun and heavy rainfall, natural stone and wood walls, metal roofing – it seemed an appropriate choice, at least as a starting point, for thinking about the look the house might have. Of course, the owner’s Hawaiian shirts, shorts and sandals might have had something to do with my thought processes...

Why do we need to think about ‘style’ for houses? What is a style?  More often than not, our clients come to us with a desire to build a certain style house (and with many functional requirements also, to be sure), generally expressed by a well-known name and generally agreed upon characteristics.  Tuscan villa (stucco walls with stone trims, clay barrel tile roof, simple forms), Craftsman (fine wood detailing and other artistic elements built into the home, horizontal lines, big porches), Contemporary (sharp angles, flat roofs, lots of metal and glass, clean articulation of forms) are typical examples. I think people use style names for the same reason that we put names to many things – as a quick, commonly accepted way to identify the characteristics of something.  It saves a great deal of explaining.

We also use styles as a way to identify with places and times that have given us pleasure. I think most people, when they set out to create a new environment for themselves, think of places where they have felt happy, or relaxed, or particularly sheltered.  Many ‘styles’ are grounded in a region’s historical methods of construction, based originally in local availability of particular materials and construction methods, and local climatic conditions.  These local conditions ensure a certain consistency of design within the region; if these regions are heavily visited by tourists – think Tuscany, Province, the Sierras, Hawaii – the local style of architecture can become attractive to people who want to recreate the feeling they had while visiting.

On a more grandiose level, style can be used as a status symbol.  Early on, the ancient Greeks used elements from Egyptian architecture to make their temples grand. The Romans copied Greek elements because to them, the Greeks were the class act of their world. Then Rome adapted the plebian arch, developed by military engineers for bridges and aqueducts, into their buildings and a new style was born.  Starting in renaissance Italy, more recent Europeans re-created this ‘classical’ architecture in homage to the great Roman Empire, and it became the preferred architecture for the great and powerful for several centuries, eventually spreading everywhere European colonization went. A similar process took place in Asia.

Thus, some of our clients want classic Palladian villas, not because they enjoyed their stay in Florence, but because the rich and powerful have lived in such palaces since the time of the Medicis.

More later…