Family homes in Houston are financial instruments and political symbols - and they're supposed to be stable family nests as well. Mythic vehicles for our next selves, they embody the idea of reaching generations into the future. However, these days their moral and material exhaustion is easy to spot even soon after completion. Even from far away, down the street. Mottled by mold, softened by rot, and hollowed by pestilence, they speak a tale less of stability than of expedience.
ORIGINAL SIN
For many thousands of years, a vast forest extended from the Texas Gulf Coast, far to the north and east - all the way up through the Carolinas. Comprised largely of hardwoods like oak, chestnut and hickory, this expanse also hosted large stands of Longleaf Pine (the “Southern Coniferous Forest”). From this pine – dense with insect-repelling resins, wrapped tight with close annual rings – pioneers built the houses and towns of early Texas. Hard, strong and straight, it could sometimes be confused with hardwood - and there seemed so much of it. But big growth in the Big State brought forward names like Kirby and Temple, and the reduction of these forests to stumps and dirt. Replanted with fast-growing Loblolly and Slash Pine, their reservoir of construction grade lumber steeply declined. For a time, engineers outran this degradation with calculations granting viability to lighter assemblies made of smaller boards. From 1950 onward, plywood sheets and careful nail patterns became the order of the day. Though the old growth Longleaf Pine is commercially extinct (down to 3% of its former range), even as late as 2000 solid construction seemed reachable via engineering.
DEGENERATE CONSTRUCTION: METHODS & MATERIALS
What we've seen instead is an endless synthesis of building materials, substituting original virtues with additives, additions, and "treatments." Practically speaking, the wooden buildings of 21st Century Houston are made largely of sawmill waste: panels of chips and saw dust bound with glue, propped up by loose-grained sticks from inferior trees, and with "structure" provided by "beams" of yet more glue-bound mill waste. The reality is that, although modern houses may look like houses, they are as much a substitution as the materials from which they're made. They are images more than objects, and communication more than facts. Their production is a world of technical band-aids rigged to mask their materials' degeneracy, while symbolically claiming durability.
FOR EXAMPLE: A SERIOUSLY BAD IDEA
Band-aid of the day is a second generation fix to the mold-tendencies of Oriented Strand Board (OSB), a type of structural sheathing devised to substitute for lumber by using mill-waste and glue. This next step is the lamination of a thin layer of mineral-saturated kraft paper (Formica anyone?) to both sides of the OSB panel. This would seem a solution to moisture penetration and pestilence, with the added benefit of looking wonderfully clean when first installed. However, after 10,000+ nails for attachment - yielding 10,000+ little holes for moisture penetration - these panels present just another version of the same problem. Even worse, actually: once damp, always damp, since the OSB's glue binder and the kraft paper do not quickly release built up moisture. The result is mold and disintegration.
... AND THAT WAS BEFORE THE FLOODS
It's always the best of times, and the worst of times - unless there's a storm like Hurricane Harvey. In that case, it was really bad all the time, and the home-builders’ balance of fake and function no longer equated to anything functional. Moisture and heat joined with massive, enveloping downpours in dire war upon low class materials. In this kind of Nature-made sauna, there is no hiding from the inner lack - namely the technical and material bankruptcy - of modern home construction. Absent first-class studs of Longleaf Pine, without the lumber for "ship-lap" sheathing, and with no access to beam-dimension or plank Cypress - to name just a few fundamentals - the current builders of "wooden" houses are indeed trapped. It seems whatever they do, and however they do it, their products are bound for maintenance nightmares - as is visible all over Houston.
It is for this arena that the Category-5 Storm Defense House was designed. Yes, building higher than the flood is important, but what about the Category-5's one hundred+ year life-span? The immediate benefit of such longevity is a maintenance-free honeymoon many times longer than with its wooden counterparts. More than that, construction with real materials (actual steel, actual lumber, etc.) produces a building that's cleaner and simpler than the veneer-after-veneer-after-veneer band-aids of conventional custom homes. Category-5 doesn't install anything made of wood chips, sawdust and glue. And with access to damp and pestilence dramatically reduced via proven, largely inorganic wall assemblies - to say nothing of elevating 60" above dirt, disease and flood water - the Category-5 offers hygiene as well as integrity. That's the future as seen by the Category-5 project: strong and durable, safe, clean and comfortable - as only a real building made of real materials can be.