Vision

First, I created this site to showcase what you can accomplish sustainably without compromising conventional comfort. It begins with materials. Take concrete for example, something I always try to assess personally + professionally prior to spec’ing. Concrete is a number one off-gassing producer of CO2 on the planet. It has contemporary applications, but is dramatically overprescribed across the construction industry. Combined with its post-installation permanence, concrete needs to be rethought in our everyday life.

Creative alternatives + reuse of materials are a passion, and I feel this thinking is a necessity for our collective future. To use concrete as an example, I have completed a variety of pretty common domestic projects at different scales that are conventionally ubiquitous to concrete, but entirely eliminated concrete from them. Furthermore, the performance data + dynamics of these alternative design approaches satisfied- if not exceeded concrete. Those data range from the engineered load-bearing properties of alternatives, to the flexibility + reduced invasiveness of the project intervention across its lifespan through post-installation, and often removal and reinstallation. Repurposing a concrete footing is pretty limited. The most common application I’ve seen it reused in is crushed gabion fill. Whereas the helical screw pile footing can be extracted, reused, and installed without gas-powered equipment, without nearly as much terrestrial invasiveness, and for a comparatively competitive cost (especially when factoring labor + performance).

Second, I tend to always be working on something. When I encounter voids for design solutions a switch flips in my mind. To hearken Frost, I go in to get back out. And ideas need to be shared. In my mid-20’s it became apparent that a lot of others were interested in similar project endeavors. So I finally decided to showcase mine, and will continue to do so as they roll out. Thank you.

Site Story

I built my first worthwhile website in 2009. It was built from a Flash template for my grad school portfolio of student design work. Shortly thereafter I realized my favorite software [Adobe Illustrator] could export crude table data with PNG links using its Slice tool. This gradually allowed me to construct new websites from the ground-up, then work backwards in Dreamweaver to interpret how my websites were structured in basic HTML. That led me to develop CSS and manipulate javascript, but some problems arose in that I would then append my pages like Frankenstein and have to maintain my own server while update each page to the latest compatible code for every browser, and I could only approach any of that as life allowed. After several years it pointed to this blog-style page which is a leap from all that. It seems silly now, but the leap took some forced surrender from the sadistic control of editing native code in order for me to accept this easy-bake blog-style platform. Initially I was not a fan, but it has allowed me to focus on documenting my projects which means more opportunity to format + showcase fun work! I hope the site proves useful.

Keenan Gibbons, PLA, LEED GA