020 ended circling the proverbial drain, for better or worse. The jury’s out on what’s incoming. Maybe that’s okay. Maybe you’re just relieved to see these last 12 months go. Or maybe you’re nursing flashbacks of gleefully bidding good riddance to 2019, as this year cackled in wait (one stall over).

Fair enough all around, really. For now, take a beat. Take a breath. And when you’re ready: For the second time in as many months, we come bearing encouragement. Or at least an encouraging proposition.

That proposition? Well, last month we explored the disproportionate carbon draw-down possibilities that come with embodied carbon storage in building materials. Sure, you might say, but how many carbon-sink buildings can you get up while you wait for everyone else to make the jump? On one hand, that’s a good question, inasmuch as it gets at scalability -- which is critically important and precisely what we want to talk about here. On the other hand, it’s kind of the wrong question.

First, let’s break down scalability. Conventionally, it refers to the ability of an operation or organization to continue to function well under an expanding workload or demand. This could apply to an algorithm, or a democratic process, or (say…) constructing buildings from straw bale panels that store atmospheric carbon in exactly the ways we described last month.

In that sense, scalability is a measurement. It’s also sometimes used to describe the method or process by which the scope of an operation is increased. This gets at why that earlier question might be the wrong one, and the crux of the aforementioned encouraging proposition: There isn’t any one way of going about scaling-up a given operation, and sometimes how something is scaled up can not just make or break the whole endeavor, it can change the game.

At New Frameworks, we’re discovering that the obstacles to scaling up carbon-sink building construction aren’t what you might think. Further, we’re learning it’s not unidirectional. And that goes deeper than you probably think.

Pull up a chair.

The Contours of Craft

Straw-bale construction has been around nearly as long as humans have been building things. The last quarter-century or so, it’s made something of a Santana-esque comeback in the US as ecological considerations have been brought to bear on construction. Renewable material, excellent insulation, atmospheric carbon storage -- we’re big fans. But evangelizing on its merits and/or hitching its growth (even in small part) to our growth won’t really cut it when it comes to scaling up its footprint in construction more broadly. So. What, then?

Indeed.

In an interview for Sam Jones’s Off Camera web series, comedian Patton Oswalt described a key experience in his journey doing standup. It’s more instructive than you’d expect. He’d established himself as a stably successful road comic, honing material that crushed in mainstream venues around the country. It performed well for middle of the road audiences, consistently got laughs, and sustained his career across four years. “I knew the mechanics of it, I knew the grammar of it, I knew the rhythms of it,” he says. Then, one night in 1992, he had the opportunity to do five minutes at an open mic in San Francisco, to a room of other comics, alongside people whose boundary-pushing work he’d devoured with zealous admiration. As anyone in his position would’ve been, he was giddy at the thought of showing them what he could do. It didn’t quite go as planned.

None of the comics watching were surprised that his material had worked on the road. All the obvious elements were there. But that obviousness was precisely the problem: It didn’t move people who knew that risk was central to serving the craft. He didn’t get booed, but he didn’t get laughs either, and ended the night in a Taiwanese restaurant across the street, tearing all his old jokes out of his notebook. The sting instilled something critical. “If the joke isn’t a surprise to the comedian telling it,” he says, “it’s not going to be a surprise to the audience, either.”

In the interview, Sam Jones comes alive, hearing this. He sees the same dynamic in the art of interviewing; of asking someone to reflect on an aspect of their work they’ve never noticed before, and the magic of making that connection in front of someone, in real-time. “[In the moment] I’m surprised these two things haven’t been connected,” he says. “And when they do get connected, all of a sudden the whole room’s alive.”

“Yes,” says Oswalt. “For little moments, we’re actually in it together.”

It’s not just true of standup comedy. Or the art of conducting interviews. It’s true of what we do, too. Surely, there’s a formula for upscaling something like straw-bale construction; maybe it’s enough to be fluent in the mechanics, the grammar, and the rhythms of ecological construction and hit all the intuitive marks along the way. But it’s a vision of growth in which we remain relatively siloed. And inasmuch as we know that the future we want to build counts on the alchemy of interdisciplinary encounters -- engaging with people at the frontlines of everything from sustainable agriculture to movements for racial and economic justice -- what’s obvious and established is unlikely to serve the craft.

tl;dr - we’re here to serve the craft.

Getting Pre-Fab(ulous)

New Frameworks installing straw panel walls in Leyden, MA [2019]

Our big idea? Panels. Specifically, a skillful expansion from an eco design-build general contractor, into fabricating straw-bale panels -- not just for our own building sites, but at scale, supplying construction projects by other builders. Drawing on the examples of European firms EcoCocon and ModCell, who’ve been integrating these sorts of wall panels into large-scale commercial construction, along with our co-conspirators Jen Feigin and Chris Magwood at the Endeavour Centre and Builders for Climate Action in Ontario Canada, who open-source-shared their straw panel innovation work on this continent with us, we invested in and developed a system for producing our own, which can be delivered to a project and set within a few days. This enables us to play Johnny Appleseed a bit, distributing plant-based carbon-storing materials beyond our own construction footprint, while getting more conventional builders confident with using them. A small step, with disproportionate impact.

Straw bale delivery from Aurora Farms/Nitty Gritty Grain Company to New Frameworks shop [2020]

But there’s more.

Scaling up straw-bale production in this way requires… well… more straw bales. That cuts two ways: Sourcing, and fabrication capacity. In other words, the straw bales have to come from somewhere, and someone has to make panels out of them. Solving for either or both of those is, strictly speaking, not rocket science. But we wondered: What if they weren’t just problems to be solved? What if they were constraints within a creative process; forcing us outside ourselves in moving forward? What might we learn?

So, we did two things. First, we linked up with Aurora Farms/Nitty Gritty Grain Company, to source straw bales -- straw being a byproduct of wheat production. And so far, upwards of 1,300 of them have passed between us. Working with a 7th generation family farming operation here in Vermont was an intuitive move. We’re purpose-driven, they’re local, and ecologically committed end to end. Thing is, while it was right in front of us all along, seeing we could support feeding people, through the proverbial side-door, by sourcing building material through this partnership was massive. It didn’t just solve a scalability challenge. It changed how we see our work.

Second, we went to Vermont’s immigrant community to build out our fabrication capacity, leveraging their skill and ingenuity, and creating an alternative to industries. In collaboration with Migrant Justice, we’ve been able to develop on-site translation and workplace safety materials and forge lines of solidarity that allow every aspect of our work to be informed by immigrant justice movements, with the hope to increase our collaboration towards a just transition.

All of this has positioned us to deepen supply chains and relationships of reciprocity at all levels. Most recently, we’re working on designing prefabricated straw-bale panels to help construct the walls of the nearly 6,000 sq. foot program center for Soul Fire Farm -- a BIPOC-led, anti-racist food justice farming community just across the border in upstate New York. Working with them has allowed us to resituate our building practices within the indigenous contexts from which they’re drawn, rather than fortifying a disembodied professional operation.

It’s also found us working within the alchemy of shared realizations; the irreducible, generative space of encounter and vulnerability foreclosed by the beaten path; seeing in each other’s work what none of us would’ve seen in our own, on our own. For little moments, we’re actually in it together. That’s a reality we can reach out and touch. One that winks at us, as if to say, “If you lived here, you’d be home by now.”

For Little Moments, We’re Actually in It Together: Straw Bales, Scalability, and Serving the Craft

The Contours of Craft

Getting Pre-Fab(ulous)

Introducing our Casitas: affordable and eco-friendly ADUs

Embodied Carbon in Buildings Summit