Denman & Associates have been producing it for 28 years
Denman & Associates have been producing it for 28 years
10/17/2009
Denman is one of four owners in the partnership; the others are Chuck Apple, Sally Butler and Bradley Gummersall. Denman is also owner of Santa Fe Stoneworks on Second Street, and has served as president for the last eight years at the nonprofit Sustainable Communities/ZERI-NM.
ZERI is the acronym for the Switzerland-based Zero Emission Recovery Initiative. "I'm a ZERI-trained practitioner, "Denman said. "The idea is that once there was no waste; everything was in balance until we came along. But if you look at our industrial and agricultural processes, there are many times when the waste can produce something really abundant.
"The best example to me is that if you take barley hulls after the (beer) brewing process, it's inedible and it's usually just landfilled. But if you introduce mushroom mycelium into it, the mushrooms transform it into an edible product."
He said the process was developed by a woman in Colombia. The grower can produce several generations of mushrooms in the barley substrate, which in the process is converted to a food that pigs love.
Sustainable Communities/ZERI recently worked on two projects at Picuris Pueblo: a mushroom-growing facility and a sustainable charcoal plant that makes use of small-diameter wood from forest-thinning projects.
Thinking about, and acting on, sustainability issues, Denman relates back to 1970, when he lived in a commune and worked for an organic farmer in the San Luis Valley of southern Colorado. He gained some experience there in building adobe structures and when he moved to Santa Fe in 1971, it wasn't long before he was putting up a passive-solar adobe house on Chupadero Creek.
Passive-solar homes make so much sense with all the sunshine New Mexico gets, and the Santa Fe area led the nation in solar design in the 1970s. But then, regrettably, the movement subsided. "Even today, with all this talk about zero-energy houses, I'm surprised how many people are getting that advantage from big, active systems, " Denman said.
One of his partnership's bigger projects to incorporate solar heating was Ironstone Gardens, an artist compound on San Mateo Street. A story in the October 1994 issue of DESIGNER/builder magazine quoted Denman saying that the usual emphasis in building is on making money, then, second, on creating something that looks good, and finally, if there's any money left, making the building environmentally sound. With this project, he switched the priorities around: "Make it environmentally sound, make it look good, and automatically it will make money," he said.
Ironstone Gardens was 18,000 square feet of new construction, with one of the four new buildings made with pumice-crete walls (the first such commercial building in the country, according to an article from the natonal nonprofit Community Sustainability Resource Institute), plus the adaptive reuse of 7,000 square feet of existing warehouse space.
The features included passive-solar design with thick insulation, framing that used up to 70 percent recycled-content steel, a water-treatment system that recycled the effluent to flush toilets and water landscaping, and an innovative co-generation heating system that warmed three studio spaces by recycling exhaust heat from the furnaces of two glassblowers.
Denman & Associates built actress Jane Fonda's house on the Pecos River. "She's my favorite client ever. She's such a worker," Denman said. "I drove up to the site the first time and there was all kinds of different activities going on and this landscaper drove up in a 4-wheel-drive ATV wearing a T-shirt and torn jeans and a beat-up cowboy hat and said, 'Hi. I used to be Jane Fonda.' She'd been out spraying weeds."
Denman & Associates has done a lot of design-build work since it started up in 1981. These days, the company usually works with architects, such as it did on a beautiful, straw-bale home designed by Beverley Spears earlier in this decade.
And while Denman has a solid reputation for projects relating to sustainability, Denman & Associates has a solidly "green" client only about one project in four.
"There are other things we have going that aren't very green at all, " he said, then added, "To me, there's a lot of greenwashing going on. I like the word "sustainable" more than "green," and one thing about keeping a business sustainable is there has to be work. You have to have cash flow.
"About a year and a half ago, the phone started ringing with people who were really serious about sustainability and energy-efficiency. The term 'zero-energy home' started floating around, and I think when gasoline got to $4 a gallon, people started thinking more about how they lead their lives and wondering how big of an energy consumer and a carbon gas producer their homes were."
Two glass awards in the Denman & Associates office testify to the company's early work along these lines: a 1998 Renew America Award for "green" construction and a 1999 Green Zia Environmental Excellence Program Award For Achievement.
Energy-efficiency is a top issue for Denman. He spoke with passionate enthusiasm of seeing large-scale wind-generating projects in England and New Mexico, and of witnessing a new technology that taps the power of the ocean.
"I was in Scotland this summer and I saw some of these big tide-energy rafts that have huge paddlewheels tethered to the ocean floor, and they're using tidal power to generate elecricity. I'm thinking we'll have tidal power on the coasts and in the Midwest we'll have more wind power, and everybody who's producing renewable energy is contributing in whatever way is best and most appropriate for the area."
Denman recalled the success of a campaign by Ed Smeloff, former director of the Sacramento (Calif.) Municipal Utility District, to convince homeowners to invest in rooftop photovoltaic systems. "Even though they would pay a little more, having PVs on their roofs would have cachet because it's the wave of the future, " he said. "They immediately had thousands of applicants, more than they could handle."
Even if people can generate their own electricity by means of photovoltaics, they should remain hooked into the energy grid. "I'm a grid-tied fan," he said. "I think it's a new wave of what I call 'energy socialism.' If all of us who produce energy alternatively are connected to a grid, the need for coal-fired, and even natural gas, begins to dwindle."
There are going to be "a lot of radical changes" in the world of energy, Denman believes. "At the Bioneers conference last year, I ran into a fellow who said that not only should we all be connected to the grid, but wait until we have millions of hybrid and electric cars sitting there in Los Angeles when the city has something verging on a brownout during the summer with all the air conditioners on, and those cars with all their batteries could provide backup to the grid.
"During those very short peak periods, the utility companies are bringing power in from Texas or wherever and they're paying two dollars and up for a kilowatt-hour, where normally they pay seven or eight cents. I'm not an electrical engineer, but that idea fascinates me."
Denman referred to architect Ed Mazria's 2030 Initiative, which aims for a "carbon-neutral" world. If the campaign (endorsed by the American Institute of Architects and the city of Santa Fe, among hundreds of other entities) is successful, all new buildings, by the year 2030, will require no greenhouse-gas-emitting energy to operate.
"We builders contribute to global warming by not building energy-efficient homes, " Denman said, "and we can really be part of the solution."