FRANCISCO COLOM AND AMY BROOKS THORNTON
Introduction
At 1400 feet on the top of Knox Mountain, New Hampshire, which lies on the eastern side of the volcanic and circle-shaped Osippee Ring Dyke, sits a circa 1978 single-wide, manufactured home. We call it MHOK.
The mountain and lake views from this iconic North American architectural artifact are spectacular. The abandoned structure is a piece of North American history and culture, and as worthy of being recycled and used as any precious piece of barn wood or salvaged marble countertop. MHOK, now 40 years old, would be seen by most as at the end of its life. However, it is only at the ebb of a pulsing cycle—the restoration stage where “designs change and adaptations will prevail” (Moe, 2013). MHOK still could be used as it is—albeit with some maintenance. With material recycling and reuse and “accumulation of local resources” (in this case it is softwood), MHOK could enter another growth stage, serve more people and functions and evolve into a “more stable, diverse, and complex system” (Srinivasan and Moe, 2015). The disparaged, defamed, ridiculed manufactured mobile home of the United States has potential.
It seems fittingly nonmodern to extend MHOK’s life. On old farms, “everything is saved and reused” (Moe, personal communication, fall 2017). While much of MHOK will be recycled, we will design and build a new building from New Hampshire grown cedar logs which will sit on MHOK’s steel frame. The new version, a wooden home on Knox, is WHOK. Initially a home, WHOK can become the initial community gathering structure for an experiential and educational campus dedicated to exploring simple and complex (but not complicated) built systems and practices that support both environmental and human behavioral health.
Context
The physical system boundaries include the 50 acres on which MHOK now sits. We feel it essential to include a description of the soil, vegetation, topography and microclimates. To design and build unaware of and excluding these factors of the natural environment would be counterproductive to our goal of maximizing the power of the natural environment, and human connection to it, in our building.
Topography and geography.
The 50-acre site lies at 1400 feet, the top of Knox Mountain, Center Ossipee, New Hampshire. The land is exposed to the East, North, and West providing breathtaking views of the White Mountains to the North, and Ossipee Lake to the East. However, the winds can be high due to the exposure.
Knox Mountain lies on the southeastern side of the ancient volcanic Ossipee Ring Dike. Multiple eruptions and subsequent collapsing of an ancient Cretaceous stratovolcano (125x106 year old), once 10,000 foothigh, formed this geologically unique, circular and mountainous land mass. The Ossipee ring dike complex now covers 40,000 acres and contains two isolated ponds. While the highest mountain elevation in the ring dike is an unspectacular 3,200 feet, when you enter the volcanic circle by one of only three dirt access roads, none of which bisect the complex, it feels is utterly remote and timeless. Yet, it is only 2 hours and 15 minutes from Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Opportunity: The site provides ample opportunity to capture solar and wind energy. The site demands and inspires exposure to and immersion in the natural environment. Due to the ring dike formation, it provides unusual quiet and retreat.
Soil
The soil beneath us shapes our lives. It is the nutrient rich and biotic substrate for our food, it is the foundation for our shelters, the filter for our wastes. In mountainous areas altitude and topography affect the soil’s energy balance and thus, soil temperature. This in turn influences snow cover duration and precipitation.
The Web Soil Survey for the site reveals that the soil composition is mostly Becket fine sandy loam (57D) and very stony. It’s well-drained, not “prime farmland” but with compost amendments and nitrogen fixing plants from the parent material, basal melt-out till from granite and schist.
Opportunity: with compost additions, a kitchen garden could be maintained.
Trees
New Hampshire is home to a wide variety of hard and soft wood trees. Eastern hemlock (tsuga Canadensis), which is excellent for timbers, grows abundantly on the 50-acre property. Also, balsam fir and red spruce. A wide variety of large deciduous trees excellent for fuel and interior building abound. These include American beech (fagus grandifolia), red maple (acer rubrum), sugar maple (acer saccharum), white ash (fraxinus Americana), and Northern red oak (quercus rubra).
Hemlock could be used for structural timbers but not for log home siding. The remaining tree species are not good for the logs used in a log home. Cedar is the best choice grown in the Northeastern forests yet it likes wetlands, not mountaintops. Both New Hampshire and Vermont wetland forests have an abundance of cedar. The best logs are from older trees which have higher concentrations of decay resisting toxins, less decay, and more heartwood.
Opportunity: Hemlock and other softwood conifers can be used for exterior building material, deciduous (hardwood) trees for fuel.
Climate factors
Mean annual precipitation: 39 to 50 inches.
Mean annual air temperature: 37 to 46 °F.
Frost-free period: 90 to 160 days.
Depth to water table: About 24 to 42 inches. No flooding.
What matters to us
Behavioral and Environmental Health
We care about care. As Bernice Fisher wrote: “On the most general level, we suggest that caring be viewed as a species activity that includes everything that we do to maintain, continue, and repair our ‘world’ so that we can live in it as well as possible. That world includes our bodies, ourselves, and our environment, all of which we see to interweave in a complex, life-sustaining web” (Fisher, 1990).
With this definition of care in mind, we aim to design a campus that encourages the experimentation with, and study and “field” experience of (or immersion in) built systems and practices that support both environmental and human behavioral health. We believe this effort, which can be measured both qualitatively and quantitatively, increases the power of the infrastructure. Providing a place where humans and the natural environment collaborate and thrive has the potential to transform the biotic energy and “reinforce” production through positive experience and feedback loops (Srinivasan, Moe, 2015). To note, we believe humans and the natural environment are one, yet because our modern culture has derailed this unity, we will separate the two for clarity.
Toward this end, the new structure—a Wooden Home On Knox (WHOK) based on the frame and shape of MHOK—will support lifestyle behaviors that are well researched to improve mental and physical health through design while working with and minimizing harmful impact on the natural environment, and maintaining a low environmental loading ratio, ELR.
1. Adequate sleep with daylight cycles
2. Unprocessed food grown on site
3. Movement/physical activity
4. Positive social interaction
5. Nature immersion/connection
6. Contemplation
7. Creativity
Socio-economic
8% of total US housing or 10.5 million housing units are owner-occupied manufactured/mobile homes—9 million and 1.5 million rentals (Census and HUD 2011). Contrary to popular belief which has added to the disparaging commentary about mobile home living, the majority (two thirds) of manufactured/mobile home owners also own the land under their home (American Housing Survey for the United States, 2011).
Keeping in mind the concepts of care and maximizing the power of the project, we see the opportunity of this project to help the increasing numbers of elderly who are moving into manufactured mobile homes by creating a renovation model that is affordable, uses little or no fuel, and costs little operationally to maintain.
The lessons learned from
- evaluating the existing structure’s emergy and material geography,
- recycling materials and remodeling the main building which extends its use and maximizes its power,
- increasing its functionality to serve more individuals, and
- fuel and corresponding economic efficiency,
may also be valuable to the increasing number of retirees choosing to move into affordable mobile manufactured home living.
Currently, mobile home owners spend about 50% more for energy per year than the comparable site-built home. In 2009, the national average was $1,800 per year which, per square foot, is more than twice as high (American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy).
The facts about our retirement population are concerning. 10,000 people are turning 65 every day (Pew Research Center). Yet, among people over 65, wealthiest 20% own almost all of nation’s $25 trillion in retirement accounts while brokerages and insurance companies that manage retirement accounts earned roughly $33 billion in fees last year (Economic Policy Institute). The 2015 report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office cites that nearly 30% of households headed by someone 55 or older have neither pension nor any retirement savings (Jordan, Sullivan, 2017). Social Security benefits have lost about a third of their purchasing power since 2000 (Jordan, Sullivan, 2017).
Because of the savings paucity and diminishing purchasing power, of the 20 million Americans living in mobile homes, 23% are retirees (2011 Census). That’s 4.6 million retirees—not an insignificant number. In 2017, nine million senior citizens work, compared with four million in 2000 (Jordan, Sullivan, 2017). Often, they work from their mobile homes as they travel around the country. This elderly, traveling cohort are called Workampers…
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