22nd Century Building

Today’s new buildings should still be here in the 22nd century because they are built to last and built to be loved (and therefore they will be maintained and protected over time).

Buildings should work in every way: they should be beautiful, durable, healthy, comfortable, and less costly to operate and maintain. In most cases, they should produce more energy than they consume. While most in our industry do the minimum necessary to satisfy building codes, we invest thousands of hours each year to R&D, testing, and monitoring to learn how to make the best possible buildings for you.

Building is not a static endeavor. It’s a process of embracing new learning and engaging in continuous improvement of systems and approaches. Craft does not end with beautiful wood and exquisite joinery. It extends to the careful exterior detailing and application of building science that ensures long-term durability and comfort.

Building & Woodworking

Building is at the heart of what we do. We build nearly everything we design. Combining the finest craftsmanship, the best technology, the latest building science, and centuries-old traditions leads to exceptional buildings that will last for centuries.

Our primary work is making things — like houses, furniture, porches, and pathways—that are visible, tangible, and functional. We hope our projects will have lasting value. It’s surprising how few people in this country actually make things that last anymore, and how few make things at all.

Newell Isbell Shinn, our Director of Production, is at the hub of our building activity. He is assisted by Rachel Wild.

The jobsite is the domain of project leads – Rocco Bellebuono, and Chris Wike – and a team of experienced assistant project leads, carpenters and craftspeople.

Peggy Mackenzie and Peter D’Angelo co-manage our Maintenance Division, which tends to smaller projects and maintenance, alterations, and adjustments to dozens of the buildings that we have made over the last four decades.

The Spirit of Craft

If building is at the heart of what we do, then craft is the soul. In fact, we weren’t always South Mountain Company – we began long ago as South Mountain Woodwork, a custom cabinetry shop.

Craftspeople take their time. You can’t rush quality; it develops at its own pace. You can’t rush the skills of craft, either. They have to be learned and absorbed over time. Some of our employees have been learning the skills of craft their entire lifetime. Our crew has – literally – hundreds of combined years of building and woodworking experience.

Everything can be imbued with craft

Creating a workplace that engenders the spirit of craft is what makes it possible for us to fulfill the wishes of those for whom our work is done. The imperatives of craft create an internal set of standards that inspire our designs and our creations.

Craftsmanship translates well to different scales—everything we make, from a knob to a neighborhood, can be imbued with craft.

Today, in our fully equipped woodworking shop we know we can make almost anything. This liberates us to design exactly what is right for each project. The shop is run by longtime Co-Owner Jim Vercruysse and staffed with superb cabinetmakers. Most of the custom designed cabinets, built-ins, and furniture we make go into the houses we build, but they are also available as individual commissions.

Our relationship to what we build doesn’t end with the making. We also take care of many of the houses we build post-occupancy – we observe, we maintain, and we update. In some situations we offer full property management services, and this becomes a part of the long-term art of design/build and the practice of 22nd century building.

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Making something is a telling of the truth

Craftspeople (the people who make things) have strong feelings about what they make and how they make it. Sometimes there are elaborate discussions in our shop about a single piece of wood—recognizing how the grain runs, how it grew, and where the strength is, considering the orientation that will work best for the function intended, speculating about how to tease out all of its beauty, and how it will finish.

The pleasures of craft can soar above the tedium that—at least some of the time—characterizes all work. When we make something well designed and executed, it is a telling of the truth.

The difficult ones to please are the designers and makers themselves, who are never satisfied. Each building could be detailed more coherently, each chair could fit the body just a tad better, and every color could be one shade closer to artful perfection. We grumble, we assess, and we curse our imperfections. We are gratified when we get close.

Net Zero & Deep Energy Retrofits

Buildings must do more than look good and keep us dry. They must work – now and for the long haul. Low-impact building, meticulously designed and crafted for high performance, is at the core of what we do. This is not new to us; it’s what we’ve been doing for 40 years.

You can own a high-performance building

We use many strategies to help us optimize land use, minimize maintenance and operating costs, and maximize comfort, health and durability in the buildings and landscapes we produce for you. This is what we call “high performance building.”

After reducing energy loads as much as we can through a host of building envelope and efficiency measures, we incorporate renewable energy production (mostly solar electric).

Net-zero energy

A fundamental goal for each building we make or renovate, each property we work on, is to produce on-site as much energy as it consumes. In new construction we consistently make net zero energy homes a reality (we call them “net-zero possible” because actual energy use depends so much on individuals and how they live).

Deep energy retrofits

We also bring our decades of experience in energy conscious design and construction to the challenging endeavor of doing the best possible energy retrofits. Deep Energy Retrofits (DERs) – renovating buildings for profound energy use reduction (we aim for a 60% reduction from your standard code-built home), increased health and comfort, and greater durability – have become an important part of our work. DERs are about fixing what we’ve got and doing it right, with thorough design and top notch building science. In our retrofits we aim for new-home performance – our DERs surpass the new homes built by others.

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Deep Energy Retrofits involve:

adding insulation
installing high performance windows and doors
installing high performance mechanical systems
air sealing
adding energy recovery ventilation
adding solar

Sometimes it’s best to do these things in phases, as elements of the building (like roofing, siding, windows, and mechanical systems) reach the end of their service life. We specialize in long term master plans for buildings, so that the maintenance, repair, and replacement work incorporates deep energy retrofit measures without missed opportunities.

On the Vineyard, there are roughly eighteen thousand existing buildings. Each of these will either be brought into this century in terms of performance, or at some point it will be summarily discarded – torn down and carted away. Most buildings are good candidates for DERs. Would you like to discuss a DER for your building?

Resource Conscious Materials

An important aspect of craft is the materials we select. We consider how and where materials are manufactured, how well they use resources (we try to minimize embedded carbon), and how healthy (or not) they are for the planet, and for those who make them, use them, and live with them.

The rate of change in building technology is staggering and accelerating. We are constantly educating ourselves as new information becomes available and new materials and building systems are developed. We are digging deeper and deeper into life cycle analysis (comparing the environmental footprint of materials from all stages of their life, from raw material extraction through processing and manufacturing, transportation, use, and ultimate disposal or re-use).

An important aspect of our materials use is our 30 year adventure with reclaimed wood. We inventory large quantities and incorporate these beautiful and soulful resources into our projects as appropriate. Our salvaged wood comes from many sources: wine and beer tanks, pickle barrels, dismantled warehouses and water towers, lake and river bottoms, barns, de-constructed houses – you name it.

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Woodworking has always been an important part of our business. For many years we used large quantities of old growth redwood, cedar, cypress, and douglas fir. As we watched the quality of the material decline, we became dissatisfied about using material that was disappearing at a rate that far exceeded its renewal.

Experienced wood, complex processes

In response, we decided – in the 1980s – to source wood for our projects in new ways. We made reclaimed lumber – “experienced wood”, our friend Merle Adams used to call it – a priority, and our practices changed dramatically.

We learned that there is a wonderful and widespread salvage resource, but that using reclaimed wood is a complex and nuanced undertaking. The successful use of salvage requires large inventories, a good supply network, specialized equipment, and careful integration of design processes to ensure the material is put to its best use, aesthetically and functionally.

Reclaiming old growth cypress

A wonderful by-product is the stories and histories that come with the wood. We share these stories with our clients in their owner’s manuals.

Here is one.

Our bread-and-butter wood is reclaimed cypress which is mined from river bottoms in the south. This material, known as “sinker” cypress, is timber that sank to river bottoms in the South during the era – around the turn of the last century – when they were logging the old growth cypress forests. In those days much of the land along the rivers was in small holdings. When the rivers rose, the owners would brand their logs, push them into the river, and float them downstream to the mills, just like a cattle drive. Some of the logs would get caught in eddies, or bends in the river, and sink. The riverbottoms are littered with this extraordinary resource.

We deal with several salvagers in the Northern Florida panhandle and Southern Georgia. They dive the rivers, chain the great old logs, haul them out, and take the logs to mills where they are sawn, dried and dressed to our specifications.

For another story about de-construction and undevelopment, read this article.

Sourcing for low impact

When salvage is not appropriate, we try to source lumber certified to come from sustainably managed forests, such as white cedar shingles from trees grown on lands owned by Seven Islands Land Co. in Maine. Seven Islands sells timber to the Maibec Company in Quebec. Maibec makes wood shingles. We buy their shingles.

In addition to wood, we try to use as many materials as possible that are recycled and/or recyclable. We use tiles made from recycled glass, roof shingles made from plastic waste and sawdust, carpet made from soda bottles, insulation made from recycled newspapers, and select architectural antiques.

This multi-faceted approach to sourcing and using materials challenges us constantly. Ultimately, we aim to become a waste-free company. We also aim to use ever more natural, low-embodied energy, and low toxicity materials. These are tall orders. We understand that there’s a tough and complex road ahead, filled with potholes and switchbacks.

Buildings That Age Well

To maintain alignment with our environmental principles, it is essential that our buildings “wear well” and last, hopefully, for centuries.

Our CEO and Founder, John Abrams, tells the story of taking his mother-in-law, a surgeon, to tour some of our houses. As we headed home she said, “You know, I’ve spent my life working my fingers to the bone to help and save people. But all the work I’ve done will soon be gone. What you do is lasting. It remains here forever.” We wish she were right. We didn’t have the heart to tell her that most houses built in this country may barely out-live their mortgage. Some of her patients will last longer.

Her words were important, however. We who build leave something behind. And the life of our buildings should be measured in centuries, not decades. We have a wonderful opportunity, but a powerful responsibility as well.

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The buildings that last are the buildings that are loved

Stewart Brand, the author of How Buildings Learn, says that the only buildings that last are buildings that are loved. These are the buildings that are maintained and carefully re-adapted over time as the needs of the occupants change. If we make buildings that are easy to maintain, operate, and change (and beautiful too!) they stand a better chance of being loved.

Making buildings that work, and last, requires learning over time through experimentation, patient observation, dogged perseverance, and attention to detail. This is why we are so committed to remaining involved with the buildings we make – adding, altering, and maintaining. We have been doing this with some of our buildings for over four decades. Our maintenance group is always available to fix and adjust. Along with providing immensely valuable on-going service to our clients, they are our feedback loop to our buildings. They tell us what works, what doesn’t, and why.

Tools that help our buildings to endure

All new cars have owner’s manuals. Why don’t houses? Some commercial buildings are equipped with owner’s manuals, but very few houses are. Houses, however, are complex. They’re more subtle than a car, and have a longer life. Shouldn’t all the operating and maintenance instructions be collected? When you buy a house, shouldn’t its documented history be a part of its contents?

We think so. A South Mountain building comes with an owner’s manual that articulates how all of the operating systems work and documents all aspects of the design and construction process.

In addition to owner’s manuals, we’ve developed a second important tool, which we call a “roughing book”. It’s a series of photos of all walls and ceilings, keyed to a set of plans, taken before walls and ceilings are closed in. This gives us x-ray vision into the walls and ceilings, forever.

The longer a building endures, the more valuable these tools become, as memories fade and alterations and repairs become necessary. We make both of these for every building we produce. It’s one of the most important things we do. For more, see the Fine Home Building article, “Making an Owner’s Manual” and Stewart Brand’s book How Buildings Learn, where he wrote about our practices.

All these approaches combine to make Buildings That Age Well.

22nd Century Building

Building & Woodworking