Hemp Voices: Joshua Carel, Plural Office Architects
Joshua Carel is co-owner and Director of Architecture at Austin, TX-based Plural Office, LLC.
I spend a lot of time thinking about how to reduce the carbon footprint of our portfolio, which, in part, involves integrating materials like hemp. Hemp's ability to create carbon-negative, rapidly-renewable and non-toxic building enclosure assemblies is what interests me. Hemp-lime is essentially fireproof and pestproof, is vapor-permeable, and provides substantial sound attenuation and thermal resistance. No other material can do all that.
What was a win for your company in the past year?
Meeting our friends and collaborators at Tiger Fiber Hemp and U.S. Heritage Group. We're excited about the ongoing and future work with them.
What is something about hemp building/construction/processing you didn’t know a year ago?
I've learned more about how the ways we typically describe the thermal performance of a material, R-value/U-value, are too simple to explain how hemp performs. Hemp, through its hygrothermal and thermal inertia properties, can regulate heat and moisture in our buildings with incredible results.
What challenges does the hemp building industry face that it must overcome in the next five years?
Scaling: Our industry is stubbornly resistant to change. It will be a challenge to significantly scale the number of buildings that utilize hemp.
Education: Many industry professionals, let alone homeowners, in our community aren't aware of hemp's potential.
Testing: For hemp to be more widely embraced by architects, we need to see more testing that demonstrates code compliance, both at the material and assembly scale.
Contact: joshua@pluraloffice.com
(817) 319-7177