The De-Materialized Zone on Queen Anne Hill

Summer in city and at the building site of Seattle’s newest urban-infill green development, City Cabins, the pace has picked up with an assortment of activity.

Foundation walls, slab flooring and exterior steps are being poured today.  To a casual observer this would look like a pretty typical construction site. What goes unnoticed are the “dematerialized “steps taken to get to this point.

Builder Martha Rose, of Martha Rose Construction, Inc., and her team of designers, architects, soil and structural engineers had carefully evaluated the existing foundation to gage what portions of it could be re-used and optimized with minimum site disturbance once the existing structure was carefully disassembled.

Rose and her team are big on waste management and have a strategy for powering through the 4R’s (reduce, recycle, reuse, and recover) when looking at waste minimization for the project. This approach helped them yield 2400 board feet of 2 X 8, 1000 board feet of 2 X 4 of Douglas Fir dimensional lumber that normal would be slated for the landfills.

Retaining 80 percent of the existing foundation with 25 yards of new concrete for the slab and grade beam made with 25 percent fly-ash instead of cement greatly reduced the need for new raw materials used to make concrete while ensuring the structural integrity of the foundation.

Minimizing site disturbance, reusing existing foundation and dimensional lumber, breaking up existing concrete slab and reusing as fill serves several purposes; avoids adding material waste to landfills, reduces the amount of  fuel used to transport and tipping fees while reducing the amount of raw materials needed to replace the repurposing of existing materials.

City Cabins on Queen Anne Hill are being built to qualify for Energy Star, Building America and Built GreenCertifications.

The homes are scheduled for a November 2011 completion, for more information contact Adrian Willanger 206 909-7536.