Follow the Story of Carbonshack
Episode 1: Rebuilding the Dream
Episode 2: From The Ground Up
Episode 3: Salvaging is the New Forestry
Episode 4: Surprise CO2 Savings
Episode 5: CarbonShack Design: Living with the Invisible
Episode 6: CarbonShack Design: Building in an Age of Climate Change
Episode 7: CarbonShack Design: The Pure Magic of Chloroplasts
Episode 8: CarbonShack Design: What Connects Us
Episode 1: Rebuilding the Dream
CarbonShack is born when Home Front Build sets out to salvage materials from a house built in the early 1900s and give them a new life.
Episode 2: From The Ground Up
Starting with the foundation, the team tries to measure the carbon dioxide emissions of building the CarbonShack.
Episode 3: Salvaging is the New Forestry
The CarbonShack takes shape as the team frames the house and discovers that some of their salvaged lumber came from trees dating back to the 1400s.
Episode 4: Surprise CO2 Savings
Skinning the home's exterior with salvaged clay roof tiles, stone, brick and reclaimed redwood shingles yields surprising savings in CO2, prompting the CarbonShack team to develop a calculator to measure embodied energy, and they finally learn the results of the CarbonShack's application to LEED For Homes, an exhaustive assessment of a project's green building features.
Episode 5: CarbonShack Design: Living with the Invisible
Transitioning from the construction phase to the design of interior finishes, the CarbonShack team works with an artist to dive into the microscopic world of bacteria and mold for inspiration, eliciting bewilderment but intrigue when they connect with local craftspeople to make tile and layer handmade processes to develop original textiles. With the impact of carbon dioxide emissions from our homes in mind, they must wade through the green-washing of everything from fabrics to countertops, chasing down the details to identify which materials and manufacturing processes are actually greenest.
Episode 6: CarbonShack Design: Building in an Age of Climate Change
Developing the interior finishes continues as the CarbonShack team works with artisans to further the project's use of salvaged wood in flooring, wood paneling and cabinets, rediscover a traditional technique of adding natural materials to textured plaster which they combine with lower-carbon intensive materials, and design sculptural low energy lighting fixtures inspired by the changes in climate.
Episode 7: CarbonShack Design: The Pure Magic of Chloroplasts
The wonder of photosynthesis as the basis of all life as we know it, not to mention an essential way that carbon dioxide is sequestered, sparks the team to work with a master woodworker to design a history of plants in carved furniture for the main room in the CarbonShack, and to collaborate with an artist to make intricate, sculptural lighting fixtures based on diatoms, the microalgae generating a great deal of the oxygen produced on the planet each year.
Episode 8: CarbonShack Design: What Connects Us
The biophilic designs are brought together across many of the CarbonShack finishes — fabrics, carved wood doors and furniture, tile and custom decorative grates — with an exploration of mycelium, the fungal threads that live under the forest floor, breaking down plant materials which they give to trees through their roots, in return for sugars the tree makes via photosynthesis, and creating a kind of wood wide web by enabling trees to communicate with one another to promote the health of the forest as a whole. Using the calculators the team developed for measuring embodied energy, they discover the amount of carbon dioxide they were able to save from being released into the atmosphere in building the CarbonShack.