New Additions to Narrow Bridge: Recycling Water

Part of Narrow Bridge Art Club’s commitment to carbon neutrality and environmental care is the reuse of materials, both man-made and natural. One element of this process is setting up a rainwater catch system, mainly used to care for the garden out front.

A rainwater catch system, in this case, made of a series of water collection barrels connected by pipes and valves directing water to a spigot, collects rainwater so it can be reused later. The barrels themselves are reused food-grade fifty-five-gallon barrels, so the construction requires as little new material as possible. While it cannot be used for drinking water, it can be used for garden irrigation, car washing, cleaning outdoor supplies, and other activities that don’t require filtered water. This system is similar to a greywater system, which functions in the same way but instead collects and reuses greywater — water that has been, what I would call, “lightly used” for things like showering or washing dishes. One of the main benefits of these types of gravity-fed systems is that once set up, they are self-sustaining, requiring no electrical input and little adjustment. The lack of maintenance or consumption of new resources makes these a long-term environmentally friendly solution.

As a Narrow Bridge intern helping with but not leading the construction of the rainwater catch system, I was surprised at how accessible the making of this system felt. We were able to put together all the necessary parts with two people, although it’s possible with just one, and followed instruction manuals showing how to set them up. Environmental solutions are often presented as inaccessible and far away, which can encourage inaction, hopelessness, and sympathy for large environmentally damaging institutions. However, seeing various stacks of materials become a functioning water recycling system over a few days was a reminder that there are existing solutions that can be implemented right now to address concerns over issues such as excessive consumption and energy conservation.

Written by Theo Luna Baker-Stohlmann

Planting and Tea with Alexy Irving

You are invited to join our featured artist, Alexy Irving, on Sunday. We will be starting the Foedge (food-hedge). This front pedway garden will be a series arcing mounds made of buried and stacked 100-year-old wood that has been salvaged during the construction process. The different layers and heights of a hedge provide sunlight, shade, and compost-enriched soil for small trees, shrubs, and ground plants whose growth habits complement one another.

On Mother’s Day, Alexy selected, roses, strawberries and daylillies to get us rolling, all flowering edible plants. Come, enjoy a nice cup of iced tea and join the making and planting.

If you love old growth forest

By Amber Ginsburg, Executive Director

If you love old growth forests, it makes perfect sense to harvest hardwood flooring from turn of the century buildings. I have been taking apart hardwood floors with a studio assistant,  Cooper Page, using a steel pallet buster. Pallets and hardwood floors have a lot in common. Both are comprised of long running hardwood boards nailed into cross pieces called stickers. I genuinely appreciate this big blue bulky tool.

Spending hours prying off each 3” boards, I had a fair amount of time to think about the materials involved. There are the oak floor boards. The pine stickers. And steel nails. As building materials go, all components are separable, which equates to salvageable. With labor. A lot of labor. A lot of, lot of, labor. If one only considers a time based economy, it does not make sense to save old oak flooring. 

First, the oak is separated from the stickers. This is a board by board process. Enough time to notice grain, different wear, and curious stains.

Mostly, I was thinking about the trees, the source of this wood. Oak trees are familiar to me, growing up in northern California. Oaks dotted the landscape of my childhood in open lands, along highways, and in front yards. There are many fewer now than when I was growing up. While this is due to many factors, Sudden Oak Death, a disease that targets oaks, has been a caused rapid decrease in the Oak population  So the trees and the grain of this 100 year old midwestern forest definitely felt familiar. While the forest species are different in the midwest and much of the topography is flat, Oaks were an integral part of the Midwest landscape, a mix in the forests and a companion to the prairie. I don’t know the stats on Oaks, but I do know that less than 1% of paraire still exists. And for the forest context: 

In 1892 alone, 13 billion board feet of timber was cut from the Wisconsin north woods, which according to Mike Dombeck, former Chief of the US Forest Service, was, “enough to build a boardwalk more than 300 feet wide circling the equator.”

Edward Hein’s National Forest Use Book, Sara Black and Raewyn Martyn, Pg, 20

If I had not intervened, this wood was headed for the dumpster and then to landfill. Once moist in landfill, wood decomposes quickly and releases its carbon back into the atmosphere.

As the boards pile up, the volume of one floor section takes hulking shape. This bit of flooring starts to reference a forest. This is not one tree, but many. And this from one section of one house. Imagine all the houses on the block, the neighborhood, the city. If you live in an old home in Chicago, you live with the once vast Midwest forest, cut down, milled and living with us.

Pulling these boards,  de-nailing them, and re-staking them to be repurposed as benches over the geothermal ducting, I am working in a carbon economy. An economy that exists in the imagination of many people, including Kim Stanley Robinson. In the world of his book, Ministry of the Future, Cooper and I would be paid for this. The time it takes to do this work may not make sense in our current economy. But it makes carbon sense.

In a nothing-goes-to-waste ethic, the stickers, which are pine, will be buried in the yard as Hugelkultur berms. As the wood breaks down, the nutrients will feed the roots of the young plants growing on top. And, it will provide the yard with some undulating topography.

​​Not sure what all the steel nails in the pine stickers will do…maybe keep future archeologists guessing about this mound? And in the meantime, old growth forest will support the growth of new trees and plants.

Geothermal is the new Steam Punk

There are a few things we are doing in the building that are foundational to hitting carbon positivity.  A big element is adding geothermal. For those new to this heating and cooling system, and really I never get bored thinking about it,  this system takes advantage of the consistent 55 degree ground temperature, below the 3 foot freeze zone. On the side lot next to Narrow Bridge, we dug 7 geothermal wells, each 470 feet straight down. The wells are about 4 inches in diameter. Each well has a hose that  loops down and then comes back up, all connected  into the building.

It was a beautiful moment to see how the “circulatory system" of the geothermal loops work.  The Arts Club on the ground floor will be heated and cooled with radiant floors. The coils (who knew they would be such a beautiful red) loop back and forth over the entire floor.  Now that the concrete slab is poured, the 55 degree water running throughout will keep the entire space cool by the reflected temperature of the floor.  There will be no “air conditioning” rather “floor conditioning”. There are no hot and cold air ducts, rather a subtle and wonderful even temperature across the entire place. 

It works similarly in the winter. The water that loops through the hoses in the floor, down into the wells, and back up through the floor, and across a heat pump that heats the coils. The way this system works it is a closed loop that efficiently heats off the 55 degrees ground temperature and only needs to get to 70 degrees. That is a lot less than the air temperature in Chicago, which in the winter get  below zero.

In the end, all the gorgeous drawing with red hoses and the looping water system is invisible. The concrete wa poured and  is curing. While it is beautiful to begin to see the space get a more finished look, I don’t know if I have even been more delighted in this process than looking at those looping tubes and seeing how we can efficiently heat and cool such a big space. 

However,  the choices in how to attempt rigor with regard to carbon are NOT clear. The materials going into this part of the project,  in particular the rigid foam and the concrete, are some of the highest  “pluses” we are adding to our ongoing carbon “accounting”. I am so lucky to be working with Charlie Vinz, architect and friend. We are looking at the carbon birth, life, and death of this building. So much of the carbon “cost” in construction is not considered and does not include the carbon used in the creation of a building, or even worse, the death of buildings. Construction waste is a huge carbon burden. When buildings are rated, it takes into account how the building will “live”, its heating, cooling, lighting etc. Narrow Bridge is an experiment with more truthful accountability. 

As such, we have given ourselves a “carbon credit” for the building, all the brick, all the steel, all the wood, already in the building. These are items which, had this been sold to the other bidders, would have ended up in landfill. If I had my druthers, we would not add concrete to this building, as it is a big carbon “cost”. However, it is the most efficient heat and cooling sink. We graded the floor to pour as little concrete as possible. We will look at the carbon calculation at the end, but likely, almost certainly, we know we will go over the “credit” we have for the existing materials in this retrofit. It is better than tearing the whole thing down and starting over, for sure, but it is still a humbling experience to really look at materials in a project and not ignore the hard choices, even when they are towards a better system for the “life/use” of the building.