Biography
BRUCE KING is the founder and director of the Ecological Building Network (EBNet), a nonprofit information resource based in San Rafael, California. EBNet, with its many colleagues, has:
• organized an international conference on ecological building (in 2001) with attendees from 15 countries;
• conducted hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of research into alternative building systems, most recently a much-needed fire test of strawbale walls, opening the gates for that promising system of building;
• helped write improved building codes from California to Mongolia that have facilitated more ecologically-sound methods of building.
In affiliation with the Rocky Mountain Institute, BiomimicryPractice of imitating nature in the design and/or production of buildings, systems, or products.
Institute, Environmental Building News, and others, EBNet is hosting the Building After Oil Forum to identify a new palette of construction materials for a post-carbon world.
King is a registered civil engineer with a private structural consulting practice in San Rafael, California, and 25 years of experience in green building. In his career he has worked on high-rise structures in San Francisco, aircraft remodels in Miami, Tahitian resorts, Buddhist monasteries in the Colorado Rockies, passive solar designs all over the world, and hundreds of houses of every type throughout North America. He has given lectures around the world—from showing young schoolchildren about natural building with clay and straw to speaking on ecological building at the invitation of Prince Charles’s Foundation for the Built Environment in London.
With his wife and partner, Sarah, King is the founder of the Green Building Press , and the author of Buildings of Earth and Straw (1996), Making Better Concrete (2005), Design of Straw Bale Buildings (2006), and dozens of papers and articles for conferences and journals.
Green Story
He has always had a powerful dislike of waste.
As a little boy, Bruce King was the butt of many jokes in his family for pulling things out of the trash because “they were still useful.” As it turned out, he also had an aptitude for science and math; he was fated to be an engineer. "I found that in engineering, as in math, the equation must always balance—nothing is thrown away," explains King. "This is no trivial abstraction, as it turns out that nature also works that way. My odd childhood obsession was thus vindicated and articulated by biology and ecology. Nothing is thrown away because there is no 'away.'"
When he started his business as a structural engineer 25 years ago, King found himself part of an industry that, as he says, "is not merely wasteful, but often seems to systematically destroy as much as possible."
"Energy, water, and materials are routinely squandered in construction," King says. "Less obvious, but far more widespread and destructive is the waste of knowledge and common sense; we’ve learned a lot about how to build well, but don’t."
King began to wonder how to bring his training and experience to the dawning green movement. The big chance came in the early '90s when he was asked to engineer the Real Goods Solar Living Center in Hopland, California. "That project was hugely successful for a number of reasons: a talented and mutually-respectful team, an ever-evolving and joyful sense of the design, careful and lovely use of reclaimed land and water, and novel (at the time) use of materials such as straw bales, sustainably-harvested lumber, recycled tile, flyash concrete, and all sorts of old junk turned to good use," King recalls. "Most exciting was the complete energy independence of the building, which passively keeps itself cool in summer and warm in winter, while providing more power than it needs with solar cells and wind turbines."
The engineer had found his niche. "Climate change and peak oil will soon change the way we build, whether we like it or not," King points out today. "We will once again have to rely on our smarts, local resources, and our collective experience to build well. And so to me green building means making every effort now to smooth the transition to the world our children will inherit. It’s the least we can do."
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