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Working, living, and building green can look a lot of different ways. At Solaqua Power & Art in Chatham, New York, it might take the form of a giant filter used to strain French fries out of the recycled vegetable oil used to heat a warehouse. At Konkapot Farm Agroforest in Southfield, Massachusetts, it means the possibility of meeting a Scottish Highland bull named Russell the Great, the farm’s mascot, on a walk through the woods. And at the ClockTower Condominiums in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, it’s visible in the contrast of one-hundred-year-old brick walls alongside brand-new, energy-efficient appliances.

Any way you view it, these three projects—a small-town eco-vil-lage, a parkland estate, and an urban dwelling, respectively—represent the future of green development.

“We’re in a transition, looking at the impact our lifestyle has, from the homes we live in to the food we’re eating to the energy and re-sources that go into each of these,” says Nancy Nylen, associate direc-tor of the Center for Ecological Technology (CET). Each in its own way, Solaqua, Konkapot Farm, and the ClockTower project, are all responses to this transition.

written by tresca weinstein photography by Jason houston

Three visionary developers look To The fuTure wiTh projecTs ThaT save energy, reuse properTy, and inTegraTe land and housing

GREENZONE

Jody Rael: Founder and president of Solaqua Power & Art, a proponent of solar energy since the 1970s.

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Jody Rael, founder and president of Solaqua Power & Art, is an old-school visionary. A proponent and developer of solar-energy systems since the 1970s, Rael is one-third mad scien-tist, one-third aging hippie, and one-third whip-smart CEO. Bearlike and barrel-chested, he wears a plaid flannel shirt and

New Balance sneakers, and fastens his gray ponytail with a filigreed silver barrette; in Solaqua’s marketing materials, he’s pictured playing a banjo. He hasn’t lost the excitement that comes with invention, nor the conviction that he can make a difference—whether it’s with his Under One Sun solar ovens made of foil and corrugated plastic that are shipped flat to poverty-stricken countries such as Haiti or Uganda and assembled on arrival, or with off-the-grid houses made from steel shipping containers, each topped with solar panels that produce all the home’s energy, heat, and hot water.

In February, Solaqua, as part of a cooperative effort coordinated by the Columbia County, N.Y.-based group Haitian Community Development, set out to help fill a twenty-foot shipping container with donations and supplies for Haiti. Through his seven-year-old solar-installation company, SunDog Solar, Rael has taken the idea beyond survival to sustainability, with plans to outfit the shipping container so it can be reused in Haiti as a solar-powered community center, complete with battery backup, LED lighting, solar ovens for cooking, a water pasteurizer, and a charging station for battery-pow-ered devices such as cellphones and laptops. It’s the kind of project that integrates all three parts of Rael’s persona.

SunDog Solar shares a twenty-thousand-square-foot building on the eastern end of the Chatham property with Kling Magnetics, a company Rael inherited from his father, Sol, who invented magnetic playing cards in 1963, followed by a magnetized version of Scrabble (that one didn’t fly). The Raels moved Kling north from New York City to Hudson, New York, in 1984, and when the Columbia Box Board mill in Chatham announced its closing ten years later, Jody Rael approached the company about purchasing a single building to

house Kling. (The site has a green history; Columbia Box Board pio-neered the use of recycled newsprint for feedstock.) Rael was told the twelve buildings—some hundred thousand square feet of space—and the hundred and eighty woodland acres around it were a package deal, and in 1997, after two years of negotiations, Rael found himself the proud owner of a miniature city along Route 295.

“I kept walking through the space and the obvious thought was an arts center,” he recalls. “Then it hit me like a flash—let’s make it an arts center that runs on renewable energy.” What he now imagines is a complex that will integrate renewable energy, business, education, and the arts: a solar village with restaurants, galleries, a green motel, an outdoor café, a solar-powered stage for performances, offices and studios, metal and glass-blowing foundries. An alternative-energy training center would host demonstrations, classes, workshops, and conferences; Solaqua is already affiliated with Bard College’s intern-ship program and with numerous regional community colleges and local private and public schools.

The surrounding acreage, which includes a thirty- or forty-acre cleared area as well as woods, would be placed in a community land trust and used for sustainable cluster housing and a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) garden. The Stony Kill Creek runs through the property, leading to a waterfall on adjacent land that could be used as a power generator.

Detailed sketches of the project line the hall leading to the Kling offices and production warehouse, but it’s easier envisioned than made a reality. “If I had a four-million-dollar no-interest loan, I could do it in six months,” Rael says. However, one aspect of the project is al-ready flourishing: SunDog Solar, Solaqua’s first “incubator business,” which installs solar electric and solar hot water systems in commercial and residential buildings, is now booked a year in advance and is ap-proaching the megawatt mark (one million watts installed).

The building that houses both businesses—the only one on the property currently in use—is a carbon-neutral industrial facility, ac-

cording to Rael. It runs on a 37.6-kilowatt solar-energy system and is heated with waste vegetable oil collected from restaurants through-out Columbia County. Lights on the warehouse’s production floor are equipped with motion sensors, so only those areas where work is going on are fully lit. To further decrease energy usage, the entire building is sprayed on the outside with a closed-cell bio-foam insula-tion (made mostly of soy) and painted bright yellow, making it look a little like a giant bounce house.

The inside of the building appears kid-friendly as well. The walls of the second-floor offices, many of them transformed into the equivalent of refrigerator doors by an application of Kling’s magnetic paint, are covered with brightly colored magnetic letters, numbers, and graphics. Downstairs in the high-ceilinged warehouse, the Kling production lines (clients include the U.S. Army and the Pittsfield, Massachusetts-based Blue Q) sit alongside projects that would be right at home in a science fair: a prototype of the company’s new SunDog Rover, a scaled-down solar electric generator that can be hooked up to a bike or car to take on camping trips; an electric Gem Car fitted with solar panels that power Bose speakers for outdoor festivals and events;

and the “Tower of Power,” a contraption involving a hand crank and four bulbs—incandescent, fluorescent, LED, and halogen—which was built to show fifth-graders how much energy has to be generated to make each type of bulb light up. Rael has also developed a mobile training station that includes all the equipment necessary to teach plumbing and heating contractors how to install solar-thermal water heaters in residential homes.

The principles used in the Kling/SunDog workspace and the con-cepts behind Rael’s vision for Solaqua are examples of what Susan Witt, executive director of the E.F. Schumacher Society, calls “citizen-driven, local, community-based economics that is … needed as a response to our failing global economy.” Based in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, the Schumacher Society is dedicated to building strong economies that link people, land, and community.

“I think we’ll find the innovation that, if you scratch the surface, comes easily here, will be looked at and copied and replicated else-where,” Witt says. “Since we’re not in an area where there are huge swaths of land available, the scale of our innovation [is] flexible and nimble.”

Solaqua Power & Art shares its space in Chatham, N.Y., with other Jody Rael busi-nesses SunDog Solar and Kling Magnetics.

“We're in transition, looking at the impact our lifestyle has, from the homes we live in to the food we’re eating to the energy and resources that go into each of these.” —Nancy Nylen

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David Carver of Scarafoni Associates, based in North Adams, Massachusetts, is repurposing old mill buildings in a very different way. After the development company purchased a group of former Crane Paper mill buildings

(four or six depending on how you divide them up) on South Church Street from MediaNews Group, the Berkshire Eagle’s Denver-based parent company, Carver tore down two of the buildings—some fifty thousand square feet—to make room for parking and access. The re-maining fifty thousand square feet, in two attached sections dating from 1888 and 1900 (when they were built for the Eli Terry Clock Company), has been transformed into private housing.

“Ninety percent of our work is adaptive reuse of existing build-ings,” Carver says. “We focus on private housing—there’s enough

retail and office space out there.” Each ClockTower unit retains some element of the bones of the

original structure—massive wooden beams, high ceilings, maple floors, exposed brick, even metal bolts and fastenings. Most of the original brick has been cleaned, but in the ground-floor hallway, a section of brick collaged in layers of white, green, and dark-red paint has been left as a record of the years gone by.

Twenty-six one- and two-bedroom units are planned, and thirteen have already been sold; ten of these are occupied and three are under construction, gradually being carved from the vast third floor of the southern building, where sunlight pours in through a row of seven-teen south-facing windows. The units are constructed as they are pur-chased, allowing homeowners to customize the space, with energy use

figured into the equation throughout each renovation. “If someone wants exposed brick, we have to balance it with extra insulation in the rest of the unit,” Carver says.

The project, designed by Bradley Architects of Pittsfield, has earned an Energy Star rating, in part for its water-source heat-recovery system, powered by natural gas, that circulates water in a low-temperature loop and directs extra heat to the hot water tank. Energy and heat are effectively shared among the buildings and the units. Walls between sixteen and twenty-five inches thick (part new, part original) and new vinyl-framed windows, which provide a higher thermal performance than wood, exceed new-construction standards for preserving heat and energy; on a bitter January day, the building was comfortably warm. On the roof, a deck has been paved with squares of recycled truck tires.

Frank and Suzanne Engels moved into the ClockTower Condominiums in 2008 because they wanted to live within walking distance of downtown. Both work at home—he’s a consultant, she’s a web designer—and although they own two cars, they sometimes go days without driving. “We have al-most everything we need right outside the door,” Suzanne says. They walk to restaurants, the Beacon Cinema, and meetings of their volunteer organi-zations, Habitat for Humanity and the Pittsfield Cultural Council.

A neighborhood of sorts has also developed within the building, Suzanne says, with residents taking turns hosting get-togethers in their apart-ments or on the roof deck. In fact, the couple has been so happy with ClockTower living that they successfully persuaded Frank’s parents to relocate from Connecticut last October.

“Sometimes we think we have to sacrifice, but in reality we can live in a beautiful space, use fewer resources, and improve our quality of life,” says the CET’s Nylen. Projects like the ClockTower serve as models. “There are aspects we can transfer to individual or single-family homes and neighborhoods, raising awareness in other parts of the community.”

t o reach Bruce H. Poor’s house deep in the Konkapot Farm Agroforest, one crosses a covered bridge and follows a curv-ing dirt road along which sheep and llamas graze, through forests where cattle take shelter beneath the trees. Poor’s

home, shaded by sugar maples and walnut trees, the siding painted a deep green, looks out over two man-made ponds to the mountains be-yond. To the east, Poor has converted the foundation of the property’s original 1763 farmhouse into a sunken garden.

“Once you cross the bridge, you leave the real world behind and enter the imaginary one—or vice versa, depending on your point of view,” says Poor, who is in the early stages of creating a miniature utopia that combines upscale housing, a wilderness preserve, and a

certified-organic farm. Poor purchased this four-hundred-acre parcel, formerly a working farm, ten years ago. The site boasts forests of coni-

fers, birch, oak, maple, and poplar, some of which Poor has cleared to reveal breathtaking views of mountains and

the Konkapot River below. He has carved out fourteen “homesteads” on the land and a nearby parcel he recently

acquired, all between five and fifteen acres in size; the land surrounding these privately owned lots will be preserved as working farmland.

“My thought was to create a for-profit model for sav-ing farms—to do a limited amount of development in non-arable areas, then [use] the money to buy [adjacent] land and to preserve the rest of this area,” says Poor, 72, whose slim physique and carefully trimmed mustache bring to mind the old-fashioned word “dapper.” Inspired by the parkland forest land management model used in Scotland, he aims “to create a successful model that other people can copy and at the same time to share my property with others, create a little bit of a neighbor-hood while maintaining privacy and clear views.”

As a teenager, Poor loved to tag along on jobs with his uncle George, a land surveyor, and, along with more than his share of poison ivy and mosquitoes, he acquired a deep love for the land. He became a surveyor himself and then moved into real estate development—his projects include the conversion of a total of three hundred and fifteen acres, during the course of four

Carver Country: David Carver has transformed old mill buildings into one- and two-bedroom environmentally friendly ClockTower Condominiums in Pittsfield, Mass.

“Ninety percent of our work is adaptive reuse of existing

buildings. We focus on private housing—there’s enough retail

and office space out there.”—David Carver

64 Berkshire Living May 2010 www.berkshireliving.com 65

or five different projects on Nantucket into conservation land and cluster developments—but his greatest interest and passion is in sav-ing farmlands.

Already Konkapot serves as a habitat for one hundred Soay sheep (a miniature heritage variety from Scotland), several donkeys and lla-mas, an Exmoor pony, a quarter horse, and fifteen Belted Galway and Highland cows, all of whom graze freely in the woods. One of the principles of agro-forestry is that forest and livestock form their own ecosystem; the forest floor is fertilized by the grazing animals, who in turn stay cool in the trees’ shade in summer and are sheltered from high winds in the winter.

Poor is in no rush. He plans to build one house per year—three-thousand-square-foot homes modeled on New England vernacular architecture—along with outbuildings and water features. He even plans to furnish the houses. Construction will utilize as many on-site resources as possible; the flooring in Poor’s own house, which he built three years ago, is made from cherry and walnut planks cut from trees culled off the land, and he heats it with wood. Building the new houses tight and well-insulated is his first priority in terms of energy conservation, though he is also considering adding solar panels.

Eventually, future residents will be able to purchase organic, pas-ture-fed beef and lamb, freshly laid eggs, milk, goat’s-milk ice cream, artisanal cheese, and cider pressed from the farm’s forty ancient apple trees. “This is going to appeal to the second-home buyer, someone who lives in the city now but grew up on a farm or in a rural area and wants to return,” Poor says. “You get all the benefits of having a farm, but you don’t have any of the headaches. To have that integration of living and agriculture and wildlife to me is the ultimate place to live.”

“Most developers are one-dimensional—it’s about profit,” Poor adds. “I’m a two-dimensional developer. I want to create something that’s a good steward for the land and makes a profit.” With Zeke, his

chestnut-brown Australian shepherd beside him, Poor climbs slowly up the hill toward a wooden bench that marks one of the most beauti-ful lots on the land looking out on a view that encompasses the hills of Connecticut to the south, the Taconic range to the west, and the Berkshires to the north. “This is the ultimate sandbox,” he reflects. “It’s a project I can never finish.”

each of these three ventures, in its own way, addresses the “three Rs” of the green movement: reuse, reduce, recycle. Each one also positively affects the big three energy consumers: transportation, heating and cooling, and electricity, says the

CET’s Nylen.But what’s especially significant about developments such as

Solaqua, Konkapot Farm, and the ClockTower Condominiums, Nylen says, is their focus on community and lifestyle as well as energy conservation. “They’re tackling all three aspects of our carbon foot-print pretty effectively, [but also] these are beautiful places to live,” she says. “More than saving energy, it becomes a whole lifestyle that people who value the land and the beauty of their environment can come together around.”

Despite the diversity of the three projects, Witt, of the E. F. Schumacher Society, believes that the innovation and sensibilities that drive the men behind each vision are not as different as they appear. “It’s an illusion that they’re working independently,” she says. “They’re working in the context created here—this soil, this history that is the Berkshires that allow individual projects to thrive. They’re part of our common dream.” BL

Tresca Weinstein is a frequent contributor to Berkshire Living. She grew up in a little house in the big woods, heated by a woodstove and lit by kerosene lamps.

European Foods from Maria's: (left to right) Vodka candy, Salami and dried mushrooms.

the GOOds

ClockTower Condominiums South Church StreetPittsfield, Mass.Stonehouse Properties413.232.4253www.stonehouseproperties .com/ClockTower

E.F. Schumacher Society140 Jug End Rd.Great Barrington, Mass.413.528.1737www.smallisbeautiful.org

Konkapot Farm Agroforest283 Main St.Great Barrington, Mass.www.konkapotfarm.com

Scarafoni Associates103 Main St.North Adams, Mass.413.664.4539www.scarafoniassociates.com

Solaqua Power & Art343 Route 295Chatham, N.Y.518.392.4000www.solaqua.org

The covered bridge that leads to Konkapot Farm, four hundred acres designated for fourteen “homesteads” surrounded by working farmland.

“You get all the benefits of having a farm but you don’t have any of the headaches. That integration of living and agriculture and wildlife is the ultimate place to live.” —Bruce H. Poor