|
|
|
|
 |
THE SMC STORY
Humble Beginnings The company that emerged began as a cabinet making and woodworking shop in New City, New York in 1973. In 1975 my partner Mitchell Posin and I came to Martha's Vineyard to design and build a house for my parents. My parents' house was like grad school for Mitchell and me. (Undergrad had been Harry Saxman's house in Vermont in '73, the first house we ever built. We didn't have a clue how to do it. Every day we worked hard at the jobsite; every night we spread out on the floor at home with a pile of carpentry and building books, desperately trying to figure out how to do the next days' work. Crash course!). Like Harry Saxman, my parents had the (mostly false) impression that we could actually design and build them a house. I think their faith in us made us think we could.
We bit off more than we could chew. We planned to spend six months building and leave the Vineyard with a pocketful of change, but 12 months later we were still hustling to finish this detailed, timber framed house with handmade doors, windows, cabinetry, and built-ins. While struggling through this first Vineyard project, new projects came our way, and we stayed on the island (a great surprise to us - we never expected to). In the fall of '75 we set up in Roger Allen's old shop at the Allen Farm and SMC began to set roots. From the beginning our calling card was design/build. Our abilities were crude and our aspirations high. The key elements of the work were our devotion to woodwork and our commitment to exploring alternatives to conventional construction practices. We combined timber framing, passive solar, and an eclectic, unschooled design sense to make learn-by-doing buildings with mixed success. We had no conventional training so we were unconstrained by knowing what couldn't be done. The harsh Vineyard winds drove water in and around the poorly flashed, creatively futile walls and roofs that were our best efforts. We spent equal time admiring what we were able to accomplish and doggedly fixing our many mistakes. During the years 1976-1978 we hired Steve Sinnett, Heikki Soikkeli, and Pete Ives in quick succession.
(Pete Ives' story bears telling. He came to work in 1978. At the time he was an accomplished mason, painter, drywaller, floor sander, tilesetter, and surfer. He'd never done a lick of carpentry. He became a very good one. In those days he said, "Just tell me what to do. I'll do anything, as long as I don't have to tell anyone else what to do." He was loyal, dedicated, skilled, and afraid of responsibility. He began to find confidence in his work. He learned to be a foreman, first reluctantly, then with pride. So much for not telling people what to do. So much for not taking responsibility. Pete was to become one of the original employee owners when we restructured in 1987.) In those years SMC remained a true family business. My wife Chris and Mitchell's wife Clarissa were as involved as the several employees. They plastered and painted, Chris prepared the bills and picked up materials in Boston (ace truckdrivin' woman!), and we all lived at the Allen Farm. Five important projects happened at the tail end of the 70's; each provided different lessons. We designed and built a small house for Rob Kendall, a dedicated solar advocate. It was our first earth integrated passive solar house and a harbinger of things to come. Then we designed and built a house for Eli and Frimi Sagan that was more refined, more carefully designed, and more complex than anything we had done to date. I stopped doing carpentry and concentrated on design and project management. The Sagans' great faith in us pushed us further. Their house was an important turning point in our young company life. We also built two projects that we didn't design. They were both designed by Boston architects. The projects went okay, I guess, but they confirmed our devotion to the integration that design/build offers. It's now been 25 years since we built anything that we didn't design. Finally, we designed and built a solar greenhouse attached to the Edgartown School with help from the nonprofit Energy Resource Group (which we had helped to form), and teachers and students. It was our first significant venture into community demonstration work. It felt good, and it was clear there would be more of this in our future. The Early 80's Our interest in affordable housing came into focus at the beginning of the decade. In 1980 we combined this commitment with our growing passive solar expertise to build two wonderful (we think!) little houses - for Madeline Blakeley and Cathy Weiss - that were financed by Farmers' Home Administration low interest loans.
By documenting potential energy savings over the life of the mortgages, we convinced Farmers' Home to finance beyond their fixed maximum limits, thereby allowing state-of-the-art passive solar to be incorporated in both houses. Even with the added funds, each house cost about $45,000, soup to nuts, and their owners were thrilled beyond reason. Those were the days! This was our first opportunity to influence public policy to align with our beliefs. The following year, 1981, the SMC office moved out of Chris' and my bedroom at the Allen Farm. Big change! That summer, my friend Lee Halprin and I built a fine little earth integrated passive solar office next to our shop at the Allen Farm. Today that building has become the farm's retail shop, but in the early summer of '81 it was just a hole in the ground. I'd work mornings doing my usual stuff and then everyday at 1 PM, like clockwork, Lee would walk across the road from the barn and we'd get to work. By the time Lee headed back to Cambridge at Labor Day, we were ready to move in. I loved that place - a real honest-to-god office at last. Lee played another important role in the development of SMC - as supporter and critic. He followed our work closely, always had plenty to say, and never minced words. He was responsible for one of the pivotal moments in our history. In those days Mitchell and I had the dubious distinction of losing money on every project we did. We were on a simple dual mission: keep working and build the perfect house. We kept working. You can be certain that we were less successful at the other. But we learned a thing or two. The defining Halprin moment came one afternoon when we were touring some of our projects. He admired the work. "Beautiful work," he said. "Making any money?" "No way," I laughed. "Nice idea, Abrams. Novel, anyway. Subsidized housing for the rich!" Hmm. . . . at that moment, I began to seriously wonder about business. It occurred to me that we were, in effect, burning the house to stay warm. I realized that if we were going to give away our services, at least we damn well better give them to someone who needs them. It was time to stop selling short the very efforts upon which our livelihood depended and our ability to made a difference. At that moment, I suppose, SMC truly began to be a business. Through the middle years of the 80's there were significant projects. The Clark House in Edgartown incorporated some unique solar siting and construction systems. In 1983 we built several houses at once for the first time and learned to juggle multiple projects. When the design work became too much for me to handle Peter Rodegast was hired to help. Our design work became more competent and versatile, and in 1984 we designed and built perhaps our most well-resolved house of the first decade, the Wuerth house, on a tricky site on the Lagoon in Oak Bluffs. One night in 1984, asleep in our new house up the hill from the Allen Farm, Chris and I were awakened by Vern Welch, who was shaking my shoulder and yelling in my ear, "John, wake up! Wake up! The shop's on fire!" I jumped out of bed, threw on my clothes and bolted out the door and down the hill. The sky was bright - flames leaped above the hilltop. The shop was engulfed in fire and the firefighters had their hoses aimed at our precious little office, which was smoking but not yet burning. They managed to save it, and my gratitude was boundless. The next few days we cleaned up the wreckage and hauled truckload after truckload of twisted metal to the Chilmark dump. Sad scene - all our wonderful old hand tools and fine cast iron machines, and that fine funky old barn, forever gone.
We regrouped soon after and began to build a new shop up the hill on our property. A few months later we moved into new quarters with a well-equipped shop below and spacious offices above. The newness was strange, but the space felt good. We were back on track. The
Re-Structuring
In 1986, at Steve's urging, we began discussions about a conversion to employee ownership. We were excited by the possibilities that emerged from these discussions and frightened by the implications of the decisions we were about to make. With some trepidation we hired Peter Pitegoff, an attorney at the Industrial Cooperatives Association in Cambridge, to advise and assist us with the transition and restructuring. I sold the company to a group which consisted of Steve, Pete, and me. We became three equal owners. Our jobs didn't change but our responsibilities did. We introduced several forms of profit sharing. There were seven other employees at the time of the restructuring. For more information about the philosophy, and our experiences of being a worker owned company, see our Ownership Narrative. Stumbling
Toward the 90's The next year we designed and built three modest houses for the Dukes County Regional Housing Authority. This was a big step into the public arena for us. We were aware that the Authority owned a number of properties, but didn't have the capacity to do anything with them, so we proposed to design and build three houses on their sites. We would orchestrate the entire development process; they would take care of financing the project and selecting the recipients. They reacted positively - we shook hands and went to work. We labored over the design, we enlisted our subcontractors to work at low rates, we convinced our suppliers to discount materials, and we still had to contribute financially ourselves to make the project work. It was a wonderful project, we survived it well, and it reminded us that periodic projects of this nature were important to us. We figured that by keeping plenty of lucrative work going we could afford to help underwrite projects like these on a regular basis. About this time we began to feel that our continued use of old growth fir, cedar, and redwood was morally objectionable, and that it was becoming harder and harder to get high quality wood. We began to look for sources of salvage lumber, found many, and began to buy. It was like the creation of a new business - the extensive use of salvage wood required new business, design, and building practices. We had to inventory supplies and design around availability and both the shop and the crews had to learn how to effectively use the materials. We rented the Windy Gates barn for wood storage, and began to increase our use of salvage and certified wood. The decade ended with a solid group of 11 working at SMC. Steve Sinnett had departed (his new company, Indigo Farm, was doing our landscape design and building, and they do to this day). Peter Rodegast and Mike Drezner had joined Pete and me as new owners, and more were on their way. Near the end of the 80's we hired Jim Vercruysse, a talented and experienced woodworker, to run the shop. Coming of Age In 1990, after I took a trip to Denmark to study cohousing communities, we attempted to develop a property called the Rogers Farm to further our affordable housing goals. It didn't work out, but the thinking that went into it led tothe Island Cohousing Project that we began in 1996. The early part of the decade was filled with wonderful clients and projects: Weinstock, Hamermesh, Thulin. We solidified our landscape design and construction relationship with Indigo Farm - when Sanford Evans of Indigo began to do all our landscape design we were able to achieve a new level of design sophistication that matched site with house and seamlessly welded the two. For further detail see Site and Landscape. In early 1992 we hired Tim Mathiesen to run South Mountain Solar - specifically to distribute a solar water heating system that we liked. The company that made the system went bankrupt a few years later, and South Mountain Solar fizzled, but Tim, who is now an owner, had become indispensable and stayed on in a variety of capacities. I had become involved in the work of the Northeast Sustainable Energy Association in the late 80's, organizing Green Building conferences and workshops. I collaborated there with an architect, Bruce Coldham, and an engineer, Marc Rosenbaum. I liked and respected both. When the Wampanoags approached me in 1992 about their proposed Tribal Center, I realized it was a job South Mountain couldn't quite handle, but one which would be exciting to do. I approached our Board, and Marc and Bruce, about forming a partnership between South Mountain and Bruce and Marc, specifically to do integrated design for environmentally sensitive institutional and commercial projects. We agreed to form the ARC Design Group, submitted a proposal to the Wampanoags, and it was accepted. Thus began an extraordinary odyssey that resulted in the first building the Wampanoags had built as a tribe in several centuries. The building was completed at the end of 1993. Solar Today article. That same year we ran out of space at our yard and at Windy Gates and began a search for commercial property. We bought a piece in the West Tisbury business district, built a storage building, and filled the yard with salvage material. By 1994, when we built the White/Josa-Jones house and the Lewis/Marshall house, we were using salvage wood for almost all our exposed wood inside and out. Our focus on solar and energy conservation had evolved to a more integrated and sophisticated approach to design which fully incorporated good daylighting, sun-tempering, and green material selection. For a more detailed discussion see our environmental building and salvage articles. We developed a significant new practice: providing detailed owners' manuals for each of our projects. The seed for this was planted in the mid-80's, when we began to make "roughing books", a series of photographs of walls and ceilings before closing in and keyed to a floor plan. This encouraged easy finishing, maintenance, repair, and later expansion, and became a historical document that lives with the house and provides "x-ray vision" for all time. We collected service manuals and product literature and gradually expanded this to be a guide to the care and operation of the houses - similar to the owners' manual that comes with a car. It includes a history of the materials in the houses and becomes a valued part of the real estate. Stewart Brand wrote extensively about our technique in his seminal book, "How Buildings Learn". We are pleased that the practice has spread to many other companies. More details are in the Fine Homebuilding article, and How Buildings Learn. The year 1995 was a watershed - we built our two largest projects to date, the Dick project in Menemsha and the Kohlberg project at Swan Neck. The Kohlberg project was a multi-million dollar development of a large family compound on 75 acres. The fundamental design goals were to house their entire clan comfortably and to maximize sensitivity to the fragile Great Pond environment. Our profits soared and profit sharing became significant. That year Vicki Romanauskas became our second owner to depart when she moved to Rochester to be near the new love of her life. In the years since, eight new owners have joined. Deirdre Bohan was hired to take on bookkeeping and office responsibilities. Twenty
Years Later The following year was complex - we did a tough, rushed commercial renovation at the Hot Tin Roof, we dug into the Sounding renovation at Seven Gates, and we began design of two important projects: a four unit affordable housing project called Sepiessa and the tremendously complex Vagelos project (similar in scale to the Kohlberg project) on an 80 acre parcel on Chilmark's North Shore. Patrick Lindsey had joined us as a third designer, and now Derrill Bazzy switched from field crew to office and became our fourth. Sepiessa was an economic challenge, but a social and aesthetic success, and the Vagelos project was an opportunity to stretch our design and craftsmanship abilities substantially for clients who were willing to reach with us. We also expanded our interior design services and our furniture-making abilities.
The interior design work is now handled by Deirdre, who streamlined the bookkeeping job to make enough room for her to both study and practice interior design. The furniture group - both designers and makers - are doing extraordinary work. Each year these aspects of our work expand. At the same time the Island Cohousing project in West Tisbury was heating up and inching along its complex four year path to completion. Sixteen houses and extensive common facilities were carefully clustered on 30 acres of land - brand new territory for us. We began construction of our new shop and office adjacent to the Cohousing community and in July of 1999 we moved into generous, gracious, soulful new quarters, a far cry from our cramped space in Chilmark. As 2001 begins, I'm grateful to be able to say that
the company is healthy and vigorous, although not without conflicts and
tensions. Morale is good and there are exciting times around the millennial
bend. We continue to seek new business opportunities that expand job diversity.
This is an extraordinary group of 25 individuals who collaborate remarkably
well. We've been consistently profitable for many years and are gradually
able to do more to be of service at once to ourselves and our families,
our clients, and our communities. The adventure continues. Change is constant.
Some have said our motto is, "If it works, change it." That may not be
quite accurate. Our character as a company may be closer to the saying,
"The first rule of intelligent tinkering is to save all the parts." We
try to save the parts that work and build on them, just like we do when
we renovate a building.
|
