A CONVERSATION WITH LEE PORTER BUTLER
designer of the Ekose'a Gravity geo-Thermal Envelope Home
by Arjuna Da Silva New Florida Magazine April 1989
Familiar
stories from the sixties and seventies: creative, educated people go
off to dabble in dreams of fame and fortune or freedom from desire.
Some reach pinnacles, others turn back too soon to achieve, and some
spend long, cold nights of the soul on the heights. These days Florida
draws figures of genius and influence from all walks and weathers to
her comfortable shores. Such a figure is Lee Porter Butler, a
self-styled, self-taught and on the job trained maverick architect whose
designs have been acclaimed in professional journals, local newspapers
around the world Co-Evolution Quarterly and The San Francisco Bay
Guardian.
Lee started in Tennessee where he first made a name
for himself in architecture by designing his family home in 1970. A
series of environmentally sound design discoveries followed, notably
"the gravity geo-thermal envelope". In 1975 he transplanted himself
and his visions to the rich, innovative soil of California, where from
his offices in San Francisco he was commissioned to design and manage
projects across the country. As lee tells it, success in California
became a game, and it was easy to let its accoutrements-glamour,
possessions, prestige- obscure the original inspiration with which he
arrived.
God is good. Time passes. People grow.
Lee
came to Florida in 1985 with a bubbling crucible of ideas and a
commitment to work with environmentally and spiritually aware people.
he feels strongly that the gravity geo-thermal Envelope designs
combined with solar electric systems, organic waste recycling,
efficient food production, and the danish principle of co-housing
(clustering individual homes around a common house with shared
facilities) is the best possible answer to our modern human needs.
Lee talked with me about his ideas for "futuristic community". A
passionate speaker, he makes the most complex processes seem simple.
He spoke often of his desire to "get to work" with people of like mind,
heart, and spirit- to create "built environments designed to produce
food instead of pollution"
As we tune into the conversation,
Lee has just described the "moment of truth" in his early career. It
is the winter of 1972-73, in a small town not far from Memphis. The
Butler family is living in the first lee Porter Butler experimental
home. It is an exceptional house: well planned, spacious, beautiful,
energy efficient, maximizing the benefits of natural materials and
sunlight with a mastery of spatial design. One day, during an
unexpected ice storm, Lee stands on the second story balcony of the two
story greenhouse and opens the doors to go in. Whoosh-a swell of warm
air greets him, revealing to him the essence of the geothermal heating-
the earth providing sufficient warmth for indoor comfort a concept Lee
says the early persians and some Native American tribes also knew and
utilized.
LEE PORTER
BUTLER: It turned out we didn't need much energy to heat all the rooms
that faced into the greenhouse...I think our whole winter's heating
bill came to something like sixty dollars for ten thousand square
feet! The greenhouse created the geo-thermal because it had three
thousand feet of exposed earth floor. The solar component came in
through the greenhouse roof and even on overcast days- like the day
when the ice storm hit- it was enough to keep the greenhouse quite warm
on the upper level.
AdS: What other energy conservation design elements were used?
LPB:
I had a complete closed-loop waste recycling system...and I didn't have
to run furnaces for heating and airconditioning to keep it comfortable
ninety five percent of the time.
AdS:
You said that when you discovered the geothermal effect in your home
you became enthralled with the possibilities it presented and spent all
your energy- and money- funding a "think team" to help create an even
more comprehensive design. And then finally, when you were at the end
of your funds, the flash of insight came and you saw the envelope.
LPB: Yes, that's right.
AdS:
And what the envelope is is really a double-walled or skinned double
floored double roofed structure with a "gravity convection loop?" (Lee nods) Can you explain the convection loop?
LPB:
Very simply, cold air falls, displacing lighter warmer air near the
earth, which then rises up until its cold enough to fall again...
AdS:
I get the picture. Since then, your design has become even more
comprehensive. Your recent prospectus talks about lighting with
crystals. What's that all about?
LPB:
Solar tracking crystal reflectors can concentrate very bright light
beams deep into the interior of structures where smaller crystals
diffuse a part of this beam to light a specific work space. This
eliminates entirely electrical day lighting. A single highly efficient
source of electrical light will be used for nighttime lighting. Such a
system can be shown to reduce enrgy requirements for lighting by as
much as 96%.
AdS:
I've been looking over thes design descriptions and I'm wondering about
two things: first how expensive is all this extra construction and
second I'm thinking about all the houses we already have that are
totally inefficient and polluting.
LPB:
Well, every house in the world could be retrofitted with an envelope
and most people would have to lookvery closely to know it was there.
The envelope can be adapted to any design , material or site. Its
beauty is that a home canmaintainany desired temperature, interior
relative humidity or oxygencontent, in any climate without usingeither
fossil fuels or mechanical systems, and without creating drafts or cold
spots. Its quiet, ecological and healthy.
Building a single
unit envelope might be slightly more costly initially, though in the
long run huge energy savings would balance that out, and building a
cluster of units-- a development as they are called- would not be more
costly than the contemporary way at all.
AdS: Aren't these designs a little utopian?
LPB:
These are lots of technologies available today that contribute to the
success of the designs. Look, here's an exampl: when plants are grown
in the south facing portion of the envelope- which is the greenhouse-
the envelope becomes a natural electro-static filtering system,
removing all dust, pollen and other forms of pollution from the air.
AdS: Where was the first envelope home built and how many are there now?
LPB:
The complete envelope was built in Lake Tahoe in 1977. It was a
gravity geothermal, like my first home, but it had a complete envelope
completely encircling all the walls on the north and south and the
ceilings and under the floor- an earth-tempered air envelope on the
east and west walls, because just having them on the north, south, on
top and underneath, was enough to keep that house comfortable enough to
keep that house comfortable even at eight thousand feet with snow on
the ground all winter.
It's really impossible for me to accurately
say how many homes there are. I can tell you that we sold about fifty
thousand books Ekose'a Homes. We
sold ten thousand sets of plans and I've travelled around the United
States to do commissions, and just to visit cities, I've found
hundreds-literally- of envelope houses that were built from nothing but
the book. I know a lot of people built the house from the book,
because I told it all in the book. You don't have to order the plans
unless you want a blown up detailed version of every one house that we
provided custom services on, the same carpentry crew would end up in
the next two years doing about twenty mosre just like it.
