thatch compostable cladding / fairytale futures
cladding research assembly plants
olive lazarus
We all know the image of the timeless English farmhouse — thick straw poured over time-worn walls, a soft, protective blanket sliding down the rafters and clotting at the eaves. But what is thatch, really—and does it offer any opportunities for contemporary designers in so-called Canada? Broadly, thatch refers to any layer of vegetable fibre, laid in parallel and used to shed water from the exterior of a building. From sugar- palm thatch in Bali to sigsig grass in Ecuador, communities have harvested, bundled and layered local fibres into durable envelopes since prehistory, and many of these craft lineages persist in majority-world regions today. On Turtle Island, various Indigenous groups used local grasses for weather protection, and European settlers brought their own thatching practices when they planted fields and built farmhouses. Despite its proven beauty, insulating capacity, carbon- circularity and performance as a water-shedding system, thatched roofs are now virtually absent across Canada and the United States. While there are still master thatchers working on heritage and new custom projects in the UK and Denmark, there are none operating in North America.
Much of the industrialised world has roofs of asphalt and steel and walls clad in vinyl and synthetic stucco. We line our envelopes with layers of polystyrene and seal them with chemical adhesives. These materials are inexpensive to purchase, easy to work with and require almost no upkeep until, after fifteen or twenty years they become brittle, fissure, and are subsequently banished into landfills where they off- gas, leech and degrade into microplastics for hundreds to thousands of years. These materials set the standards in our building codes because they are easily graded, quantified and catalogued. They are as dependable as the petrol burnt to power their extraction, transnational distribution and ultimate synthesis. They are as consistent as the low-income communities and pitiable ecosystems, forced to engage directly with the toxic brunt of their formation and arduous disintegration. below: Mapping the hidden costs of global supply chains. The map reveals a potential supply chain for XPS foam board insulation. The circles indicate the supply node locations while their relative diameter represent GWP impact. Each node is linked to a local newspaper clipping critiquing the potential environmental/human impact at that industrial site, while the collages stand as representational accompaniments highlighting the violence of these production activities.
all images and drawings: Olive Lazarus
40 on site review 48 :: building materials
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