GREEN BUILDING - Sirewall recognized for innovation

Salt Spring-based Terra Firma Builders was one of 12 companies to be honoured at the 6th annual MISTIC Innovation Awards last week, taking home the prize for advanced manufacturing for its Sirewall technology.

The award is but the latest in a number for the business, which is a three-time winner of the Canadian Home Builders’ Association’s best homebuilder in BC award (once gold and twice silver). The NK’Mip Desert Cultural Centre constructed in Osoyoos in 2005 earned a World Architecture Festival award, the Governor General’s Medal in Architecture and a Royal Architectural Institute of Canada award for innovation.

Company founder and president Meror Krayenhoff has been a local champion of the green building movement for over 20 years, pioneering a modern take on an ancient method with Sirewall, which stands for stabilized, insulated rammed earth. Using inorganic materials such as stone, clay and sand is the only way, he believes, of protecting what William Bryant Logan has called the “ecstatic skin of the Earth:” a living layer of biomass that is, comparatively speaking, thinner on the planet than the skin on a tomato.

“We’re of the view that wood is completely unsustainable as a building material,” Krayenhoff said.

“Sustainability is usually defined as not diminishing the prospects of future generations, so if we leave them with less biomass than we have, we’re diminishing their future.”

Krayenhoff observes it took ten thousand years after the ice receded from North America to build up eight inches of topsoil and organic material, but that clear-cutting and other practices can remove much of that layer almost instantly.

He points to once fertile areas such as Lebanon, Iraq and Easter Island, which all became barren wastelands following human interference. “So it’s pretty clear where we’re going,” if building practices don’t change, he said.

“Our ambition is to have our technology as common as stick frame is today — and when that happens, it will mean a million acres of trees not clear-cut every year.”

Using the abundant materials located just beneath the planet’s skin is not just sustainable. Krayenhoff notes that rammed earth homes can be toxin free, which is impossible for wooden constructions built to code; can stand for hundreds of years instead of falling to rot and mould; are insect and rodent resistant and inspire an architectural style that works with the beauty in nature.

Since rammed earth has become known as an available building material with the exposure gained from the NK’Mip project, Terra Firma and Sirewall have been at the forefront of innovative designs taking place around the world including Van Dusen Botanical Garden’s new visitor centre, a project that aims to become Canada’s first living building.

Other recent and ongoing projects include China’s first LEED Platinum-certified project in the Naked Stables retreat outside Shanghai, India’s first LEED Platinum building with a new hotel being built in New Delhi, a resort in Sri Lanka and a school addition near Shanghai.

“It’s really amazing to be involved with cultures of developing economies — the people are way more idealistic and visionary than we are in North America,” Krayenhoff said.

“We don’t set a very high bar here, and due to the nature of my work I end up on projects where people do set a high bar.”

To learn more about unsustainable building, check out the short video Sirewall: What it Takes to Build a Home on Youtube.