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Check out the 2010 edition the annual Boise Cascade ldea Book on framing design and construction. You'll find wavs your builder customers can profit from more efficient design, accurate estimating, less waste and shorter framing time. Plus green building with SF|@-certified, NAHB Research Center Green struction is equally relevant to the residential market, even in areas where non-wood practices have traditionally held sway. Along the Culf Coast, for example, raised wood floor construction is gaining new appreciation as an alternative to concrete slab on srade practices. Key reasons are impioved performance under storm surge flood conditions, better accommodation of expansive soils that prevail in some areas, and growing awareness of the sustainability benefits of wood.

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An instructive example of raised wood floor construction is the winnins entry of a design competition "o-rponl sored recently by The Rice Design Alliance, a nonprofit organization dedicated to the advancement of architecture, urban design, and the built environment in the Houston region, and the Houston Chapter of the American Institute of Architects.

The competition, part of the city's effort to revitalize older inner-city neighborhoods using public and private funds to build new housing units, set as key requirement that designs, once built, be offered at a maximum sale price of g99gO0.

One criticism of green building, regardless of materials used, has been the belief that sustainable construction is of necessity more expensive and thus prohibitive to all but high-end residences. The 99K House, as it is called, helped prove thar sustainability and affordability can go hand in hand.

The winning design, since built as a prototype in Houston's Fifth Ward, was submitted by Owen Richards Architects and HyBrid Architecture, both of Seattle. Their entrv. called

CORE, was a 1,ZSOlsq. ft., two-story, wood-frame structure featurins a raised wood plywood floor, plywJod shear walls, and wood roof system.

While some might assume that a slab-on-grade design would be the only way to meet the project's low cost requirement, architect Owen Richards said his team quickly determined that a pier and beam raised wood floor was the better approach. "A raised wood floor design was best for Houston's soft soils and allowed for better natural ventilation," he said.

Raised floor construction is also environmentally superior in terms of embodied energy, a major factor in determining sustainability. A wood joist floor system consumes less than half the fossil fuels lequired for a concrete slab and just 20Vo of that consumed by a steel joist floor.

Bob Clark, APA's Gulf Coast raised floor project manager, found it interesting, though not sulprising, that three of the five competition finalists used raised wood floors. "Most low budget homes in the Houston area are built using slab on grade," he said. "However, these architects started with a raised wood floor, took all the pennies out of it, and made it very cost effective."

Houston AIA's'Barrie Scardino said sponsors were not surprised either to see wood play such a big role in the winning design, or in so many of the 184 other entries from l6 countries. "Wood is a versatile, affordable building material ," she said. "We were pleased to see how creatively people used wood, which shows that sood design doesn't need to be expensiie."