Tag: #buildingsystem

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ADUs & Poche_Truss

On December 30, 2021 I was leaving my doctor’s office at around 11:00. We noticed plumes of black smoke off to the south but went about our business in Boulder, stopping to eat at DOT’S before noting there was now LOTS of black smoke to the east.  As we ran our errands, the staff at Walgreens were all on their phones with reports of road closures, power lines down, and instructions to shut the shop doors. The winds were tearing up the sky and whipping the car doors from our grip. Eyebrows raised, we went off to McGuckin’s and found it…closed? By 4:15 that hospital and its campus had been evacuated by what would turn into the catastrophic Marshall Fire where 1,084 houses were destroyed, forever altering the lives of those households.

8 months to the day later, the Town of Superior has issued 32 building permits for 3.6% of their 380 houses counted as being destroyed or with major damage. Folks want to get back to their normal.

Here’s what I wonder: after COVID and the Marshall Fire and under the influence of climate change restructuring the planet’s ecology, is that even probable?

I jumped in with the rebuilding effort of Superior for two reasons:

1. Within months of the fire, Superior amended its zoning policy to allow ADUs to be built before the main house.

2. Xcel, the energy supplier for the area, was offering a significant rebate of $37,500 to rebuild to PassivHaus standards.

ADUs and PassivHaus will NOT give people back their normal. Instead, they set a whole new bar: better living, better building.

Better living: our ADUs are built with the Poche_Truss where the building form, both inside and out, are custom shaped to the contextual environment and desired experience, without a custom build upcharge. Living in an intelligent (think responsive) small (think less stuff) house will realign your living to what matters most – being present.

Better building: our ADUs are built to PassivHaus standards bringing superior thermal, audio, and environmental comfort; and by using the Poche_Truss building system, our ADUs achieve passive survivability in these times of uncertain utility reliability and climate upheaval.

Moving forward. Not going back. Good design is like that.  

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01 Poche_Truss: a patent-pending building system

Say you woke up tomorrow and found that the world no longer held to the rules you had invested a career holding on to. Rules such that land was malleable and light was functional, and that stillness was a phenomena to be debated but not apparently useful. And you found that instead, there was a growing awareness of a web of life stirring just below the surface of the land; and that light began to give way to emotion wrapped in atmosphere; and that stillness revealed its power to manifest everything.  Do you think this would change anything?

I have invented a new way to build. And it solves many of our current day construction issues such as lack of skilled labor, unstable material cost, and the lean toward making more environmentally robust buildings. As an architect, I am a problem solver, intelligent solutions come from fixing attention on the situation. And so it did with the Poche_Truss. The image below claims all of the above in its patent application.The thing, though, is that parallel to my inventing the Poche_Truss Building System, life happened. It brought with it tragedy beyond comprehension of a magnitude that dissolved my world. The conceptual way of thinking that is so prevalent in architecture slid away with it.                                                                

I feel like Peter  Zumthor must feel; I see like Glenn Murcutt must see;  I hear Ray Kappe’s quiet gaze, yet, more than anything from my learned world of architecture, I sense the presence of a profound reality that I can no longer dismiss.

No – I have not gone all woo-woo. I have held death in my arms and the gift has been to have life implode, snapping presence right here, right now, into the very current of life. This phenomena is not held by thinking, but is simply present in a humble breath.

Here is what remains: I have a patent-pending building system that addresses many of the challenges in our residential construction reality. The Poche_Truss Building System is an audacious disruptive innovation that will rock the construction world. I am just saying…this IS a tangible solution.

Have a look here, though. The thing about poche is that it has a substantive thickness capable of creating a threshold between a deeply human interior and the forces of nature and society on the exterior. If we engage this inherent quality of poche with rapt attention, we can reach a dimension of profound wellbeing. Confucius said that the beginning of wisdom is to call things by their proper name. The poche in our truss building system not only sets up for tangible intelligence, it suggests a new way for buildings to Be* by upping their capacity to change our environment.

*The extent to which a building can Be is determined by its ability to enable the currents of light, air, views, and precipitation to flow and by it being situated such that people can inhabit these currents.

4-06-2021 Boulder, CO

Many of us woke up and have found that the world no longer holds to the old rules and that this in fact changes everything. If you are interested in attending a presentation on the Poche_Truss Building System and/or if you are interested in executing and/or co-founding the Poche_Truss Building System project, please get in touch:  ml@studiopoints.com