Alternative Building with Confidence

You want to know that your building is safe and healthy, whether or not you need to secure a building permit in tough places like California. If you are new to straw bale, adobe, fly ash, SIP's, and other alternative systems, let me help your team with experienced engineering perspective.

Most building professionals are only familiar with the 'conventional' materials presented in the building codes. I have studied both historic and innovative systems from all over the gloge, and have direct experience engineering with just about every 'alternative' system out there - as well as all the mainstream systems.

I can help you select and work with the building systems best suited to your project, budget, and building performance goals, such as:

Fly ash, slag, rice hull ash, and other pozzolanic concretes

Insulating Concrete Forms (ICF's)

Structural Insulating Panels (SIP's)

Straw bales, straw clay, and other straw products like panels and blocks

Adobe, earth tires, earth bags and tubes, cob, compressed earth block, and rammed earth

Lime and other earthen plasters

Papercrete (and all '-crete' systems that basically mix stuff with cement)

Bamboo framing and products

Shipping containers, concrete rubble, plastic bottles, tires, and other industrial by-products in construction - harvest urban ore!

Let me engage your project early to save you and your clients time, money, and trouble down the road.

Material selection should follow - not precede - good design. No one material is right for every job, nor does the use of any particular material make the project 'green'. Designers and clients often come to me wanting to build a straw bale or adobe or SIP building, or use some other system in which they are interested. That can be a mistake, whether you want to go green or not, because material selection should be an offshoot of design, not vice versa.

Figure out the climate, sun, wind, soil, topography, budget, and building use, then design for the energy and financial efficiency with confidence.

I can help make this process relatively easy, which can save both time and money, especially at the beginning of design.