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Thank you for your interest in our products and services. And congratulations on your recognition of environmental concern in construction.

Over the past several years there has been a growing awareness of the need for humanity to reverse the destructive trends of modern industrialization and embrace a more holistic, harmonious and sustainable legacy for future generations.

Worldwide, the largest industry on earth is building construction. Even in North America, the construction industry is double the size of the auto industry, which is the second largest industry in the USA.

The most comprehensive and focused body of knowledge that examines the delicate balance between human health and the built environment is called Bau-Biologie (Building Biology). Through the International Institute for Bau-Biologie & Ecology, Inc., a world wide network of Building Biology training centers have been established with the expressed goal of creating this more holistic, harmonious and sustainable habitat for humans on earth.

www.buildingbiology.net

In recent years our firm has had the great privilege to have participated in the design and construction of over 80 natural, "Bau Biologie", breathing, low toxic and fully non-toxic buildings in 11 states. Some of the alternative construction systems our firm has used are: Straw Bale, Straw/Clay, Rammed Earth, "Durisol" block and most recently "Hebel" aerated concrete block.

Many of these projects have included solar electrical and hot water, natural rain water harvesting cisterns and non-polluting "gravel marsh" wetland septic systems. Other natural features include breathing, soft, wood chip/concrete "terrazzo" floor slabs, natural earth floors, traditional straw/clay plastering and integrated cistern cool water and solar hot water, whole house cooling and heating systems.

Authorized representative of Durisol and Hebel building systems
(Nationwide distribution with Factory Direct pricing and integrated design/build services)

"From the earliest origins of human life, mankind has adapted to living within structures built of natural materials—such as stone, wood, and earth. Materials introduced during the latter half of this century (synthetic plastics, metals, and resins, among others) have disrupted the harmonious equilibrium established between ourselves and the environment. Contemporary building practices encourage the use of these materials, which may weaken the overall immune system of many individuals—leaving them vulnerable to unknown and unpredictable reactions.

BIOGRAPHY

George Paul Swanson received a Bachelor of Science in Industrial Technology from Western Washington University in June 1975. Since that time he has worked throughout the Pacific Northwest, the Great Plains, and Southeastern United States, designing, building, and managing construction of homes and commercial buildings. In 1981 he published the bestselling Dome Scrapbook culminating his experience of designing and participating in building more than 300 geodesic dome structures in the Pacific Northwest between 1974 and 1981.

Over the years Swanson Associates have completed over eighty low-toxic, and fully non-toxic "Breathing" natural building projects in eleven states and several foreign countries.

A few of the building systems used were traditional, StrawClay, Rammed Earth, "Faswall", clay-treated woodchip block, "Hebel" aerated concrete block wall systems and most recently MgO natural ceramic cement based building systems . Several of these projects have included: single family wetland septic systems, roof top water collection systems, pervious concrete landscape features and solar voltaic energy systems.

George Paul Swanson is a registered graduate of the IBS International "Bau Biology & Ecology" program as a "Building Biologist" as of 1992 and is listed in "Who's Who" in America in 1996 for his contributions to Sustainable Technology. Currently he offers natural home and commercial building consulting, designing and construction oversee services throughout the states and abroad.
In recent years Swanson Associates have been lead design/build consultants for numerous commercial projects including several churches, a monastery and a twenty-one building natural medicine complex in Austin Texas. Ongoing long-term international projects include: a waterfront Eco-resort in Kauai, restoration of an ancient hacienda in Mexico, and an Eco-Village complex in Trinidad. Recently he has returned from his 4th trip to China where he is conducting ongoing product development for Dragonboard.net products, including all natural fiber/MgO cement based wall, roof and floor prefabricated structural insulative panels (SIP’s)

Since 1975 he has conducted hundreds of seminars across the country and abroad on the benefits of natural building design.

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People today are constantly reminded of the need to reestablish connections with nature’s purity. Aware individuals today want and demand pure air and water for themselves and their families. They desire homes constructed of non-toxic materials. They seek insulation from the potentially harmful aspects of today’s environment. And they pursue designs that allow their homes to reflect the eternal structures and cycles of nature.

A building is more than a collection of bricks. Today people want their surroundings to reflect their deepest inner values. They want every aspect of their living environment to refresh and regenerate both their outer and inner beings, and to support their progression toward physical and spiritual goals.

I am committed to working with individuals willing to consciously explore the relationship between these inner and outer values. Together we discover ways to re-establish the richness of life. By utilizing design and construction techniques discussed in this web site, we can open daily living to a new panorama of possibility.”

The most time-honored principles of building design are found in the ancient Vedic texts of India. These principles extend into modern day applications in forms as diverse as Thomas Jefferson's Monticello and the traditional Asian practice of Fung Shui, the balancing of wind and water, found in Japan and China.

A balanced, harmonious design combining ancient concepts with the most advanced technologies of passive and active solar design is at the cornerstone of our design philosophy.

The idea that commonly used building materials in our homes can adversely affect our health is a relatively new concept in North America. Only recently has there been any large, significant public outcry about the Indoor Air Quality (IAQ) of the average American home. The terms "Sick Building Syndrome" and "Multiple Chemical Sensitivity" are becoming media common- place. But the two main media villains in the great IAQ debates, mold and fungus, have been around since the beginning of the human race. Why and how have these omnipresent, usually benign, naturally occurring molds and fungi suddenly become the issues of such controversy?

Put simply, sick building syndrome is a product of the modern materials in your 20th century house and the way they are put together. Until the early 60's, most homes in North America were constructed with some knowledge of the importance of breathability. Most pre-WWII lath and plaster over frame homes with fibrous insulation and steam heat "breathe" well and are far less mold- prone than today's homes. Modern homes, in contrast, do not breathe. Built of sheetrock with vapor barrier, non-moisture diffusing fiberglass insulation, and centrally forced air heating and cooling, they are practically designed to ensure that any moisture that gets in cannot get out. In this damp,unventilated environment, mold thrives. It is distributed around the house via the heating and cooling vents and breathed in by the inhabitants. Living in houses of this sort is as unhealthy and as uncomfortable as living in a plastic bag.

It doesn't have to be this way. Most of the world's buildings have been, and still are, constructed with bio-compatible materials--wood, earth, stone, cement and plaster--put together in a way that allowed the building to breathe properly. Before the days of central heating and air conditioning, your building had to breathe on its own without the assistance of mechanical heating and air conditioning.

Happily, the least mold- and fungus-friendly homes are also the most energy efficient. Such homes are found throughout western and eastern Europe, Asia, Austria, New Zealand. In other words, just about any place outside of North America. In these countries, oil based plastics, wood and energy are costly. So homes are built of cheaper natural materials like earth, stone, cement and plaster which have high thermal mass, meaning that they retain heat and cold. These homes have been skillfully crafted, blending thermal mass (earth,stone,cement and plaster) with insulation and "out"sulation (woodchips, straw, air gaps and various forms of cellulose) to create some of the most comfortable dwellings on earth.

Why, in contrast, has North America been saddled by some of the least efficient, most toxic building systems known to mankind? Looked at historically, it only make sense in terms of a continent with overabundant wood resources and cheap energy--both of which have recently run out, along with our reasons for continuing these building practices. In modern times these continued practices only exist with the help of your tax dollars in the forms of massive government subsidies to the wood, plastics, oil and energy industries.

One of the most talked-about subjects in modern building design is the relationship of "thermal mass" to the insulative or "R" value of a building system. Thermal mass refers to the ability of a material to retain heat or cold (materials with high thermal mass include concrete, stone and rammed earth). Insulation or "R" value on the other hand refers to the ability of a material to resist temperature change (materials with high "R" value include fiberglass, cellulose and plastic foam).

An ideal building system both stores built-up heat or coolness and at the same time resists the transfer of the costly-to-create interior temperature to the ravages of the outdoors. In addition, the building's insulation must at all times be able to keep itself dry. through minute' "breathing". Almost all insulative materials lose their insulative properties and actually become conductors of heat and cold when damp. Wet "pink panther" fiberglass insulation, for example, will actually conduct heat or coolness into your house when the outside air reaches only 70% humidity-a condition reached almost daily in most Southern states.

Another important form of breathing is "electromagnetic breathing"--that is the balance of (+) para-magnetic and (-) diamagnetic charges of a material. These are the subtle (less than 1/100th the size of regular magnetic) positive and negative charges that govern whether a materials atoms or molecules can align in the direction of a applied field. This "receptivity" to external fields governs how well a material can deal with moisture.

As an experiment take equal size handfuls of cotton balls and fiberglass insulation. Mist both with water and note which one dries the fastest. Although it is true that either material "sealed" into a non-breathing frame wall could cause moisture problems, you can easily see why cotton, which has balanced electromagnetics, diffuses moisture much more rapidly, would be the clear choice. Another good analogy is between human bone(+) and tissue(-) which create a push pull pulsation that is largely responsible for maintaining ,replacing and flushing cells in the human body. It has been proven that if your heart were strictly a pump it would need to be roughly the size of a small house to pump the 60,000+miles of major blood vessels in the average adult. It is no minor coincidence that people who live away from the natural balances of earth & vegetation have many times the number of heart failures of their agrarian ancestors.

The ideal balance between thermal mass and insulation is different for different climates. In Taos, New Mexico, a solid adobe wall works well but in northern Maine a thick blanket of "outsulation" over adobe is mandatory. Most modern building materials lean towards the insulation side of the equation with little or no thermal mass. For example sheetrock has only 10 minutes of thermal storage. That is, once heated or cooled it can only maintain its core temperature for 10 minutes. This sheetrock over stud wall construction is the most common construction type in North American --and we all know all too well the consequences of having to replace the heating and cooling of our homes every 10 minutes!

In contrast, most ancient building materials lean towards the thermal mass side of the equation. They do a great job of storing hard earned interior heat or coolness but then allow much of it to conduct through the solid mass, stone, rammed earth or solid log wall. So although the mass wall would be much slower to change temperature, once the outside temperature gets inside, it can take a very long time to reestablish the desired comfortable indoor temperature.

Combining insulation, thermal mass and breathability has proved a formidable challenge for modern building technologists. A reasonable, time-honored solution has been to blend natural, thermal mass materials with natural insulative materials. A few traditional methods of achieving this thermal balancing act are StrawClay, Cob, StrawBale and Cordwood construction. All these systems worked well except they evolved under the assumption of low cost labor (10 kids in the family) and unlimited time (10 years with all 10 kids helping). Straw Clay construction, for example, requires building two full building frames, an inner and outer separated by about 18", building temporary forms on the outside of both frames and hand stuffing clay soaked straw, layer by layer, to the top of the wall. Beautiful results- -unbearably time consuming process. Having personally built all except the Cordwood example above, I can attest to the labor intensive and tortuously slow methods involved in construction of each of the traditional systems. Typically, however, overall operational energy usage is between 40-70% less than conventional construction.

A few modern attempts at blending thermal mass, insulation and breathability are AAC Block (aerated autoclave concrete), Clay-treated Woodchip Block,Compacted Strawboard Panels, Pumice crete, Concrete-bonded Foamchip Block and Ultra lightweight fiber reinforced concrete tilt up walls. Two of the above, the Woodchip blocks and the Foamchip blocks are actually ICF's (Insulative Concrete Forms) that require hollow cores in the blocks to be filled with concrete and steel or fiberglass reinforcing rods on site. The AAC block is "semi" load bearing, requiring fewer pre-hollowed blocks to be reinforced. The others are solid through load bearing systems. Notably missing from this list are the currently popular all plastic foam ICF's--because of their inability to breathe (trapping moisture in the block) and their non-compatibility with natural masonry based breathing stucco finishes. Only one of the above, the Woodchip blocks, have also proven to be "electromagnetically" balanced and therefore 100% biocompatable.

All of the above modern systems, much like their historical predecessors, typically consume between 40-70% less energy in both the production of their natural materials and in overall heating and cooling costs. In addition they are usually structurally sounder and are many times acoustically quieter, more mold, mildew, fire, earthquake and flood resistant and will typically outlast a conventionally built structure by several times. But unlike their ancestors, these modern alternatives to conventional buildings are also cost- and time-competitive.

Until recently, the development of sustainable, healthy building materials in North America has been held back by the difficulty of bonding together bio-compatible materials. For example, presently the only way to bond recycled wood-chip to concrete requires the cellulose wood to first be "crystallized"--that is, to have its sugars, acids and oils neutralized--before it will bond to conventional concrete. This is an expensive,time-consuming process that is currently patented by only a few international corporations.

But recent rediscoveries in the field of cement technology hold great promise to expand the current, limited shortlist of bio-compatible appropriate building materials. By combining magnesium oxide with selected nitrates and rock powders, bonding cements can be created that can bond almost any dissimilar materials together. That means almost any imaginable recycled or renewable local material can be bonded to almost anything else to form a climate balanced insulative thermal mass building material.

Historically, magnesium-based cements have been used successfully in bonding StrawClay, Cob, Cordwood, Stone/Woodframe and super adhesive mortars. With the reintroduction of MgO cement along with the increased awareness of the value of non-toxic, insulative thermal mass materials, a truly sustainable "green" building culture could replace the currently energy and transportation intensive, chemically based, mold-friendly construction systems. For example, dipping site-grown dried palm leaves in the correct MgO cement mix could create an on-the-spot 50 year roofing material--bypassing your local lumber yard, the interstate highway system, government subsidies and the clear cutting of America's last old-growth cedar forests.

It has been estimated that the construction industry is at least double the size of the auto industry, which is the second largest industry in America. If the massive amount of tax subsidies that currently prop up our oil, energy, plastics and lumber industries were to dry up tomorrow, then so would our unique, inefficient sticks- with-toxic-insulation American construction industry. For example, the cost of an 8' 2x4 wood stud in Germany is $31US or about eight times higher than in the USA. Nobody throws sheetrock over $31 studs, and worldwide virtually nobody builds with 2x4 sticks and sheet- rock construction.

The German government will pay 100% of the cost of remodeling your home if prescribed by your doctor. They do this not out of tender-heartedness but because linking health care to environmental factors makes good economic sense. It simply costs less to prevent the health problems caused by sick buildings rather than try to treat them or, worse, provide lifetime expenditures for the chronically ill. The World Health Organization recently listed America #39 among industrial countries for quality of health care per person and #1 in the world for health care cost per person. Our German neighbors are rated #3 for quality of health care and #17 for cost per person. What appears to be our recent economic prosperity may well turn out to be just another form of deferred maintenance. It¹s like making the quarterly report look good by not paying the janitor and putting tape over the oil light instead of changing the oil.

The good news is that with even a small percent increase in the cost of lumber and energy (or even the slightest reduction of government subsidies) the cost of construction for the sustainable alternative building systems mentioned above will be less than that of conventional construction. With political will, this could happen tomorrow. Then the days of mold-friendly, energy-inefficient, electromagnetically unbalanced, stick and sheetrock toxic buildings with their 30-year life expectancy will simply be an inexplicable, embarrassing chapter in American political and architectural history.

" AFFORDABLE "BREATHING WALL" BUILDING ENVELOPE DESIGN",* A POWERPOINT PRESENTATION, EXPLORES A "BUILDING BIOLOGY" APPROACH TO HEALTHIER FRAME WALL ON CONCRETE SLAB CONSTRUCTION PRACTICES.

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