Hi all – A Canadian builder asked me what trends I foresee in home construction, especially multifamily (I think that means apartments, condominiums, and maybe townhouses). I thought some of you might be interested in the topic. Here’s what I wrote:
There will be a lasting increase in the number of people working from home. This is because employers are discovering that a lot more people can work from home than were previously doing so. And while most people now working from home will end up back in a workplace, changes like this are at least slightly sticky and some people newly working from home will continue to do so after the pandemic is over.
For developers this would imply that more people will be interested in home offices, studies, dens, whatever they might call that room. For multi-family like apartments and condos there might be a new market for compact offices, and certainly a shift toward 2+ bedrooms compared to 1 bedroom or studios. As far as compact offices, there’s a trend in the US by some developers to have what they call a “pocket office”, which is basically a nook in a common area, like near the kitchen and family room. It allows parents to use a desk and computer in a way that doesn’t completely remove them from family life, like a separate office or den might. For a home office, they’d probably want a separate room, but for multi-family there’s going to be pressure on square footage, so a pocket office might be the ticket. See here: https://www.elyson.com/blog/posts-by-date/2018/january/pocket-offices-are-a-convenient-trend-you-can-see-in-elyson-s-model-homes/
Other trends I expect to see are antimicrobial surfaces, door handles, and so forth. Copper and silver are the most antimicrobial metals, and much better in that respect than stainless steel or plastic/polymer. There are a number of studies that compare these surfaces, including some brand new studies on the duration of novel coronavirus survival on them. Silver is too expensive to be used in solid form, and it tarnishes, but they can make materials that have silver embedded at a more granular or microscopic level. You might see a move toward copper door handles and other touch points. The virus only lasts a few hours on copper, vs. 2 or 3 days on stainless steel and plastic, maybe longer. Here’s a random article I noticed:
https://www.greenbuildingadvisor.com/article/copper-surfaces-are-antibacterial-and-antiviral
You might also see interest in features that make it easier to sort of detox when people come home. Right now a lot of people are taking off outerwear at their point of entry, on the advice of some authorities and experts, including shoes, jackets, sweaters, gloves, some people are taking off shirts, or having their kids take off their clothes. Masks of course, if they wear them. So coat closets and maybe expanded nooks and closets to partially disrobe at the point of entry might be features people would pay for. I’m not used to outerwear at all since I’m from southern Arizona, a hot desert climate, but it’s common in a lot of regions I guess.
(I later learned that the nook or whatever for disrobing at the point of entry is called a “mud room”. We don’t have them in Tucson.)
Replies
One has to wonder how essential a job is if you can work at home on your computer. Basically just number pushers for unnecessary corps. Kind of reminds me of Metropolis where workers spend their days moving a dial on a large clock like mechanism. Imagine if we used all these types of workers to provide and contribute to the basic necessities of life. Work loads would be reduced and we would only have to contribute a fraction of our time towards helping each other in society rather than helping out large corporations and would have a happier, healthier life style, not to mention a cleaner, greener environment not obstructed by huge sky scrapers and large corporate buildings and parking lots and more time to spend with our family and friends rather than being cooped up in a box all day sitting on our keisters doing nothing with nothing to show at the end of the day other than a big printout.
You seem to have a materialist/physicalist ideology around work and value creation. Doing nothing with nothing to show at the end? And a big printout? That's a goofy worldview bro. Software isn't nothing, and it's not going to manifest as a big "printout". Writing is another big one.
Something I did recently was synchronize the units of measure used by a biotech company. The lab might use a microliter of a reagent, or maybe something measured by molar mass. They needed their BOM (bill of materials) and SOP (standard operating procedure) software tools to support these units. The inventory team would have to order based on different units, certainly not molar mass. They would deal with things like bottles, tubes, and cases. The lab didn't think in terms of, or care about, bottles and cases. And the finance team might need different units as well.
They all needed to track usage in units that were meaningful for them, and needed software that supported this. So I figured out the correct units for a bunch of reagents and syncronized them. That's hardly "nothing from nothing" and is the kind of cognitive work that can be mostly done from home.
Anyway your vision for how everyone else should live would drastically reduce our standard of living, and our quality of life. When you reduce standards of living or societal net wealth you have a negative impact on health and probably lifespan. The world is dramatically better off today than in, say, 1900 because of the massive economic growth we've seen, per capita. See Max Roser's breakdown here: https://ourworldindata.org/economic-growth
Yes I understand what you are saying, but look back in history and at the achievements that were done that we can't duplicate today. How did they do it without the types of technology we have today. Take the great pyramids as an example or some of the great cathedrals in the world. It takes humanity working together. How many people today can't stand their coworkers (don't take that the wrong way), just another example. And most jobs that we do today were done in the past, they were just a little more time consuming and less efficient, but it still got done. If we can do things more efficiently today, why do we still have a 40 hr work week when what used to take two weeks to do now takes 2 minutes.
And as far as standard of living, that is a personal choice or opinion. I've been to remote villages where life is simple and less stressful even though they live below the poverty line and have a healthier, more free and less stressful lifestyle with plenty of fresh produce and food. (some of the best beef I've had in my life.)
And we can have an ideal or ideological way of life if we choose to and make it so. If you can think it, you can do it.
And think about biotech companies and what is going on today. It would make me think twice about what I was contributing to.
At the end of the day, one cannot eat or drink money, a stack of paper work or technology.
>"How did they do it without the types of technology we have today. Take the great pyramids as an example or some of the great cathedrals in the world. It takes humanity working together. "
To start with it takes quite a few "... number pushers for unnecessary corps." to design and build something on that scale that withstands the test of time.
For most jobs today (and in the past) math matters, whether it's lipstick on a mirror, scrawled on sand with a stick, or using a computer. The ancient mathematicians were necessary to make even basic agriculture work at scale in any given location.
Yeah , but it still got done didn't it.....???
Tom,
I'm not sure I'd pick either the pyramids or cathedrals as symbols of people working together. The former being the result of coerced labour by the absolute rulers of a hydraulic society, and the latter symbols of state sanctioned religious domination.
If you look back at any culture throughout history, given the choice people voted with their feet and left the world of subsistence agriculture with it's famines and hardship, for a less precarious and affluent lifestyle. Rousseau-style romanticism aside, Hobbes was right: life was "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and and short".
A return to that would mean forgoing modern medicine, modern technologies like the automobile, and most of the things we eat and use. I'm not greatly enamoured to modern technological life, but I also don't look back on the past with rose colours glasses.
You can't say that for sure...you believe the history books?...maybe people worked together to complete such things in harmony...you don't know.
If we can't know anything about the past, how can we discuss it? That's a completely tautological argument.
We can see with our own eyes what has happened in the past. How it happened we don't know, we can only speculate. But we should be able to understand that if it was done before, we can do it again or else see what was done wrong and learn from other's mistakes. Much of our technology today was developed from the past. Does it take political actions or laws for us to do it or do we just do it? We all know or should know right from wrong, and understand the golden rule.....so what 's the problem?
Tom, many necessary jobs can be done remotely. This includes many doctors, just about anyone doing software development, a lot of design and engineering work, and many other things. I’ve seen a lot of this transition over the past several years (fun fact: quicken loans started their work from home program around a decade ago when the fire Marshall said they were over occupancy in their old headquarters building). I’ve seen a HUGE increase in demand over the past few months (obviously), and have some very large projects coming up as soon as the current crisis is over. Everyone who can work from home is not “unnecessary”.
Regarding the OP’s questions, I don’t think we’ll see a long-term trend towards pandemic resistant features (copper handles, mask hooks, etc). I think that aspect of the current crisis will likely be forgotten within several years or less. That may be unfortunate, since some of these ideas would also help reduce the spread of other illnesses like the common cold and the flu.
I do think the trend towards working from home is likely to continue though. I would recommend that all new builds include network cabling in the ceiling for wireless access points in strategic locations to aid in proper WiFi coverage. Most homes can be covered with a single AP mounted on the uppermost level near the center of the home. Put wired network connections in some places (at every TV, and any desk or office). Wire everything back to a central point near the service entrance for easy networking. Make sure there is a dedicated electric circuit at that central location to power routers and network switches. For access points, I like the ubiquiti networks line, they are inexpensive and they perform very well. They can also be remotely powered through the network cabling which makes them easy to locate in ceilings where they have the best coverage.
If you want to run full multimedia cabling, don’t get the kind with integrated fiber optic cabling. The fiber included in these cables is usually OM1 (the original “FDDI grade” multimode fiber optic cable) which is pretty much obsolete and won’t support any new fiber to the home services. You want singlemode fiber, usually called SMF-28e in North America. Don’t try to terminate the fiber yourself unless you are experienced in doing so. I don’t like the so-called “non-polish” connectors since I don’t trust the optical gel to last. The usual fiber to the home services are using SC-APC connectors (green square connectors) which are trickier to hand terminate than the non-angled connectors (the blue ones).
Bill
Excellent network advice Bill. I think every home should have copious wired networking, Cat 6 in every room, maybe six or seven drops minimum. Wired is so much better than wireless, but most people don't even know it's an option, or what it is exactly. And as you noted, having proper wireless APs installed in ceilings is a big win for Wi-Fi coverage, reliability, and bandwidth.
I think Ubiquiti is overpriced though. I like what I've seen with TP-Link's APs recently, the EAP-245 especially.
Fiber should be pervasive too, though most people have no control or choice when it comes to what kind of fiber runs to their homes, so I'm not sure how they would act on your advice there.
The trends toward pandemic-resistant features can happen even if we've mostly forgotten about it in a few years. Here's how: Builders offer these features before we've forgotten about it, like later this year and 2021 and so forth. Things like copper door knobs, for instance. Then people start expecting those features even after they're no longer thinking about pandemics, simply because they became pervasive in new builds during a 1-2 year window. That of course depends on them becoming pervasive in that window, which is far from guaranteed.
Lots more home offices are probably here to stay, as you said.
Wow, that's fabulous advice Bill. Thanks for that! Per the conversation about extending wifi coverage, is there a good product for extending this to the outdoors? Like an ethernet cable I could bury and a exterior access point? So I could have WIFI in my shop or while mowing the lawn? (Headphones and podcasts turned a childhood chore into a dream escape!)
I think (am hoping) hvac systems could see a trend here towards better indoor air quality through better filtration and ventilation. I also imagine there will be an uptick in UVC germicidal lamps in ductwork, although that one concerns me due to ozone production, and it's not really necessary in single residential homes.
Multifamily homes will continue the current trend towards compartmentalization of units and systems, the importance of which has been underscored by this pandemic, even if it hasn't been well publicized.
Ethan
Ethan,
There are outdoor access points in pretty much all the commercial wireless access point lines. For example, this one from TP-Link:
https://www.tp-link.com/us/business-networking/ceiling-mount-access-point/eap225-outdoor/
Keep in mind this is an access point only, no router integrated into it, so you need that as well.
That's the ticket, thanks!
I like the ubiquiti line, since I’m most familiar with it (I’ve hundreds installed commercially). I used to use Cisco, but got tired of paying the premium for stylized bridge logos. Anyway, I’d recommend this: https://unifi-mesh.ui.com/#home for outdoor use, along with some of their “tough cable” which can be direct buried. These can be remotely powered through the cable too. Max cable length is 328 feet, so don’t exceed that (that’s the rule for Ethernet cabling). I’d use a good surge protector on the cable in your house, and I’d ground the shield of the cable too.
Bluesolar, all fiber services providing home connectivity from a service provider are using singlemode fiber, and that is unlikely to change. SMF28e is the most common fiber type in the world. All of the fancier cables (LEAF, metrocor, certain specialty fibers) are primarily used in intercity (hundreds of miles or more links, except for metrocor), and undersea systems.
Fiber optic cable isn’t like copper cable where there are new standards every few years. The original singlemode cable (SMF28), still supports pretty much any optical technology except for some really exotic stuff. SMF28e (“e” for “enhanced”) has a reduced absorption peak due to hydrogen and allows for more CWDM wavelengths to be carried in the range around 1400nm or so. Normal fiber to the home systems use 1310nm, 1550nm, and sometimes third wavelength, but work fine on e or even not-e SMF28 fiber. If you install SMF28e in your home, you’re safe for decades. SMF28e can support, even with current off the shelf technology, 16Tb/s. I’ve designed all kinds of systems with it, and even some spurs off of LEAF systems.
You don’t need to control the fiber the carrier uses, since the carriers all use pretty much the same thing. The names I’ve used are all for Corning products, but there are global ITU standards that codify these cable types into generic spec numbers made by all kinds of manufacturers that are interchangeable with one another.
BTW, a germicidal lamp in a duct isn’t likely to create any significant amount of ozone. My bigger concern with such a system is people thinking they’re safe even when they don’t replace the lamp on schedule. I maintain a water well with a UV sterilizer and the lamp life is surprisingly short.
Bill
Well I would love to know how you can provide clean water, clothing, shelter and food by working at home on your computer.
Thanks Bill. How did I not know about mesh networks? Things I love about being young: still so much to learn! Things I hate about being young: still so much to learn!
You’ll get better network performance using cables and running those “mesh” APs as “regular” APs and not relying on the mesh part to tie things back to your main AP. The mesh functionality makes it easy to extend coverage without cabling, but I find that since I usually would have to run a power cable anyway, I might as well run a network cable and do both.
Bill
Bill, not a personal attack but it seems you are giving technology and do dads priority, or more importance over humanity. Realize if we don't take care of our physical and mental health first, then we will not have the means to create such things.
No, I’m just giving some practical answers to the OPs question. We can’t build for mental health (well, maybe, windows do help with that :-), but we can easily add some things to help to allow for easier telecommuting. I would say there aren’t really achievements in the past that couldn’t be duplicated today. Malcolm correctly pointed out that the pyramids were essentially created through the use of slave labor. I remember the line from one of those “demotivatator” posters with a picture of the great pyramids: “there is nothing you can achieve with vision, determination, and an endless supply of expendable labor”. Many miserable people involved though, so not exactly the pinnacle of human achievement in terms of quality of life.
As a more recent concern, think about the lockdown orders. Here in Michigan, even “essential personnel” (which includes me as a telecom industry guy) are supposed to carry letters on letter head authorizing our travel. Sounds reasonable right? But let’s take a different perspective: my wife and many friends of mine grew up in former soviet satellite states or Russia. That letter looks like “travel papers” to them and is scary. They worked their butts off to get away from that. To the point of your human misery concern, how much can be accepted in the name of safety before the result of the “safety” is worse than what you’re trying to be safe from?
I don’t mean to sound political, but only to address your admittedly valid concern. I would argue that some of the policies often advocated in the name of human welfare border on the tyrannical, and knowing many people who grew up under such systems I have good reason to fear where those ideas could lead.
The big issue I think you may be missing is that throughout history, all technology and achievements aside, human nature has always remained the same. That includes certain unfortunate tendencies of people to often act in ways that may ultimately be detrimental to their own well-being and happiness. History has also shown that supposedly well meaning “leaders”, while trying to improve upon the general population’s well being and happiness, ultimately cause misery. Some of this is probably arrogance (another part of human nature) on the part of those leaders, and other times could be well meaning but misguided (perhaps due to ignorance) efforts.
I think one of the biggest issues is that often the people who seek power are not exactly well meaning people, since many well meaning people don’t want to do the things necessary to achieve positions of power. I had a professor in college who liked to say “history has shown that the best leader is a benevolent dictator, but history has also shown that such a leader does not exist”.
Bill
I'll repeat my other reply, you are relying on history from those who wrote it, we do not know if it is true.. Why would a society of people who out number their enslavers comply over thousands of years..? We are at that point today in a country that is only a couple of hundred years old...
If there are enough sources saying pretty much the same thing, we can assume it to be true, or at least close to the truth. For my current example, if I ask one friend from a soviet state “did you keep your personal life private for fear of the wrong people hearing”, and they say “yes”, can I say that was true everywhere? Not necessarily. But if I ask multiple people, from different areas, none of whom know each other, and they all say essentially the same thing but in their own words, then I CAN assume that that is how it actually was. This is how you verify information (and everyone does actually say that about those old states, BTW, and I have asked).
If you only have one history book by one author, then you would have a point; but we don’t — we have many different histories from different peoples. They all show similar trends throughout history. Egypt or South America, the way the civilizations operated was similar. Both built pyramids, both exploited labor. This is fact. Some will always seek to dominate others, it is part of human nature.
How do people come to allow themselves to be dominated by others? Usually by fear. Everyone fears for their own self interest, so no one wants to be the first one to challenge those in power. If things get bad enough, enough people act that you have strength in numbers and can overthrow those in power. The people in power then need to keep things good enough that enough people won’t act in concert to pose a real threat. The people in power make examples of anyone who tries to overpower them so that others will be too fearful to attempt to try again.
This isn’t anything new, it’s been going on since the beginning of civilization. It’s also true that many people won’t do any work themselves if they don’t see that it will benefit them personally. This is why collectivist economies fail. Some people will always work towards future goals regardless of their own personal reward, but not enough to maintain a civilization.
I would argue that you are trying to advocate for an improbable future by denying the realities of the past.
Bill
At how many check points do you have to produce your travel papers between the time you leave for work and return? Sheesch. I had to apply for travel papers when I was 16 before I was allowed to drive a car. I carry them in my wallet to this day. The issue is less the number of laws, but how and under what circumstances they are enforced. No one is arrested for not wiring a house to code. However, you need the code to assign responsibility to the negligent party should the house burn down.
To a child. a parents edict not to play with guns unsupervised, appears tyrannical, but his rage at the restriction demonstrates he does not yet have the judgment to be allowed such activity.
The biggest topic of conversation lately is why this or that activity should or should not be allowed. It's a valid discussion, but we don't know what activities can be preformed safely. The electricians say they work apart form one another and keep to their own spaces, but later the plumbers arrive and do their jobs in those same spaces. Everybody complains that they can't use those big open parks, but what about kids clambering over playground equipment? Maybe our governor's restrictions are too strict, but here, a half mile from Beaumont Hospital, the sirens, all night, every night, give me pause. We know enough about the disease's transmission to develop a set of rules that can keep us over 99% safe. Unfortunately, we would all starve in our hovels. It is an extraordinarily difficult process for our officials to figure out how we can live safely. It is an awesome responsibility deciding what activities are essential, knowing that some workers and their kin will die. The Michigan Legislature would prefer to hammer out each restriction, taking input from all interested parties, especially monied parties, and perhaps the hundreds of armed, unmasked interested parties crowded shoulder to shoulder as they stormed the capitol building this week, before implementation. With this approach I don't think I'd get any sleep for the sirens. It makes more sense for a leader to impose sweeping restrictions and then, guided mainly by science (including the dismal science), hammer out how each should be lifted.
Bill, like I said we have to look at our past and determine what went wrong in order to fix it. And believing that we cannot have a better future only enforces the idea..... it's not improbable.....Same goes for subjects presented here in the building industry, if something fails time and time again, do we still implement the methods in the future or do we rectify the problem and make it better.
And the governor leaving lotto sales going as “essential” is not for any other reason that caving into “monied parties” because the state profits from those sales? Or claiming to be “guided by science” when they obviously don’t understand it (statewide orders when the vast majority of cases is in a fairly localized area)?
The issue with creeping authoritarianism is based in human nature, not political parties. It is fallacy to think that any political party is immune.
A drivers license says you met some minimum standard to know basic road rules and how to operate (hopefully safely) a vehicle. Travel papers in the sense I’m using them meant the government authorized you to actually go somewhere. A big example now could be a passport and international border. Note that you can leave the country without that, but reentry is difficult. We don’t have EXITS visa here. Soviet states did — you weren’t allowed to LEAVE without authorization.
What I’m saying is that the tendency to want to control more and more eventually leads to misery. People thinking they know better and making others do as they say always gets out of hand eventually.
Tom, I agree with you completely that we should try to learn from the past to improve the future. You were implying that we can’t know what happened in the past due to historians with agendas though. What I tend to have issue with is when people push failed ideas from the past that were rooted in misunderstandings about human nature and think “things will be different this time” because human nature is one thing that has not changed throughout history.
Bill
The song/saying comes to mind....teach your children well.....golden rule should rule.
As a crazy Canadian, Mud rooms are such a quality of life improvement. I'm in downtown Toronto and there is just no room for that here. But I've seen lots of homes on bigger lots do an exterior addition at the front door to create a mud room. I think its most useful for families, it's simply closests, coat hooks and benches to be able to don and doff all your and your kids stuff.
Install a modified fire sprinkler system to spray disinfectant while you're in there and you can now call it a decon room.
Otherwise, very cool thought process and discussion. I do all my design work from my home office. And I like to design live/work spaces with what I've built (and plenty of cat6 and POE AP's to boot). I think working from home for knowledge workers and home entrepreneurship is where society is heading (sorry Tom, I believe in knowledge work).
For years I saw companies resist workers working from home thinking they'll just pet the dog, well, turns out most people in offices do that half the day anyway (so do many physical workers on jobsites too). I raised an eyebrow a few years ago when a friend was telling me his office prefers workers work from home and they save on infrastructure by having a much smaller office, with some perminent offices and some temp work stations for when a home worker needs to come in. It's an interesting shift.
From an HVAC standpoint, I'd like to see more home monitoring/automation come into play. For instance I have cat6 and 18/2 run to the middle of every ceiling in every room in my current build. I was thinking maybe one day (which means never) I could figure out an air quality monitoring system, with little sensors in the rooms and a rasberry Pi program on a wall mounted tablet monitoring and reporting the air quality. It would be even cooler if that was tied to and controlled the ventilation system. I think I've recently seen a few newer ventilation systems that aim to achieve this.
Jamie, I agree, there are some jobs, the ones you call knowledgeable, that can be done in the comfort or your own home that are necessary in order to get things done. But eventually one has to venture outside the home in order to implement the knowledge that has been applied. As a mechanical engineer, i understand that, but also being licensed in plg, htg and gas I have to physically apply those engineering principles in a hands on way.
My beef is with those types of computer related jobs that do no contribute to getting physical, necessary things done.
As far as monitoring things, yes monitoring systems in order to determine functionality is one thing, monitoring, tracking and controlling people in the same way is some what dystopian. Investigate this whole 6 ft thing. Is it to keep us safe from a virus or is it more along the lines of how military tracks it's soldiers, if they are to close together they cannot discern who is who....so just like most things, it's a double edged sword.
> Other trends I expect to see are antimicrobial surfaces, door handles, and so forth.
If such a thing takes off, it won't be because the evidence based science says it should.
You should wash your hands when you come home, when you use the bathroom, do other 'dirty' things, and when you prepare food. That's absolutely true.
The fact that some people have focused on surface and fomite disinfection as a protection against a respiratory virus whose primary transmission is through airborne droplets just goes to show that society sensationalizes science, rather than grasps it.
Every disease has a different threat model, but I find it unlikely that we're going to be hit by something where the "survivors" are the ones with copper door handles. Sure, it provides some benefit, but likely not as much as just washing your hands a whole bunch.
Follow @bugcounter (Donald Schaffner) on Twitter for a more elaborate take on this. He's a Distinguished Professor at Rutgers specializing in food safety. He does what folks here like: try to quantify the trade offs we are all confronted with every day. Spoiler alert: wash your hands, cover you face, and don't attempt to disinfect every item that comes in your home.
Patrick, the novel coronavirus survives for several days on most surfaces. Summary here: https://www.goodrx.com/blog/how-long-coronavirus-lives-surfaces-like-food-clothes-wood-glass-steel/
I can't tell if you were disputing that or not, based on your statement about airborne droplets. The fact that its reported primary means of transmission is through airborne droplets doesn't conflict with it surviving on surfaces. We would probably still want to care about surfaces, since it survives so long on them.
Whether things like copper door knobs will make any difference in our net risk of infection, for coronavirus or anything else, is an interesting question. I don't know. If the "viral load" theory is sound, then maybe.
A few years a go, after the tornadoes around Moore, OK and Rockwall, TX, almost everyone of my clients would ask for a FEMA approved room. A house I'm designing in Northcentral CA, they want fire rated assemblies now. This goes on for awhile until people start getting comfortable again, and then, all those options are first to go away due to costs... the big red knob ranges becomes priority again.
I hope we see better HVAC system designs, with MERVs 13+, but hopefully folks realize their HVAC system needs to be designed for them, and I've read studies that claim the inefficiency of UV lights on HVAC system, since the air velocity is to high for the light to be effective.
I expect a lot of good IAQ product innovation for our industry, but I'm also expecting to see a lot of "bubble-wrap insulation" or "radiant paint" type of products sold on the market promising the moon. I hope I'm wrong!
Armando,
Imagine what it was like up here trying to convince people to include some seismic resistance into their structure when the earthquakes come every 300 years. It had to be mandated in the code before anyone did anything about it.
I hear bamboo foundations are the rage in South America and the Pacific Rim... A few moons a go, growing up down south (way south), we used bamboo to make smoke pipes, and we experimented with a bunch of fruit tree leaves and grasses... True story.... Multi-use material ;-))
I’ve seen pictures of bamboo scaffolding up 20+ stories on high rise buildings in Asia. Bamboo is apparently a pretty strong building material when used correctly, although those picture still make me nervous :-)
Bill
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