Architecture: Dense and Durable

Originally published in the Globe and Mail. Read the full text here.

This Edmonton home features a refreshing take on eco-friendly construction

Euna Kang met Jesse Soneff, the guy who built her home, when she showed up at his door. In 2015, Ms. Kang, an Edmonton-based graphic designer and art director, bought a crumbling house in the Garneau, one of the city’s oldest communities. The dwelling, which once belonged to the region’s first preacher, might’ve been a candidate for heritage preservation had it not been ruined through a series of botched renovations. “I felt bad taking the old house down,” Ms. Kang says, “but, realistically, there was nothing I could do.”

In its place, she committed to building a home that would be a long-term asset to the neighbourhood. Instead of looking to the past, she looked to the future. Or rather, down the street, to a gabled duplex, which, because it was cleaner and more contemporary than its peers, seemed like a model for what she sought to do. “I knocked on the door,” Ms. Kang recalls. “When Jesse answered, I said, ‘Who built your house?’ He said, ‘I did.’ I hired him right away.”

Mr. Soneff is the project manager for ArtHouse Residential, a firm he co-founded in 2015 with his childhood friends Scott Wilson and Alex Primrose. The company does infill builds in mature Edmonton neighbourhoods and has a refreshing take on eco-friendly construction – insights they brought to bear on Ms. Kang’s house.

For Mr. Soneff, environmentally conscious design is reduceable to two principles: density and durability. When people brag about the greenness of their homes, they’re often discussing gadgetry – heat recovery ventilation systems, electric car charging stations, and other devices that can reduce day-to-day expenditures. But daily energy consumption is only part of a bigger picture. Home construction is, inescapably, a carbon-intensive undertaking. It requires energy to excavate stone, mill wood, and manufacture concrete – and to transport these materials to a building site. That’s why most houses already have a massive carbon footprint long before the first utility bill shows up in the mail.

If home construction imposes an ecological cost, Mr. Soneff argues, developers have a duty to make it worthwhile. That’s where density and durability come in. Imagine a large dwelling that houses four people at a time over a lifespan of 40 years. Now imagine a smaller dwelling with a capacity of eight or nine occupants and a lifespan of two centuries. The construction of each house would require immense energy expenditures, but the payoff on the second would be larger than on the first. It hardly matters, therefore, which home has the most high-tech systems; the second is surely greener. To work responsibly, Mr. Soneff believes, contractors must build for many people – and they must do it well.

This is an excerpt. Read the full article here.