Basalt House
Site Persists is concerned with buildings that endure — their materials, their structures, their landscapes, and the long work of keeping them whole. What matters here is not what a building looks like when it is new, but what it becomes over time.
Basalt House
600-millimeter basalt aggregate walls, turf roof, geothermal integration. Extreme thermal mass designed for centuries of use in a landscape that splits lesser materials within a decade.
Salt Meadow Archive
Reclaimed timber and copper cladding on a raised foundation at the edge of a salt marsh. Built for flood resilience and the slow oxidation of coastal air.
Ridgeline Station
Steel frame and rammed earth on an exposed ridgeline. Photovoltaic skin, panoramic siting, and the particular silence of elevation.
Maintenance
The rhythm of seasonal attention. Reading surfaces for early signs of change, the difference between repair and replacement, and the quiet accumulation of care across years.
Longevity
What makes a building last — not material strength alone, but legibility, redundancy, and the capacity to be understood and repaired across generations.
Dissolution
What happens when a building is beyond repair. The threshold between maintenance and ending, the careful work of taking apart, and what the site becomes afterward.
Rammed Earth Construction
Compacted earth as structural wall — thermal mass, color stratification, and what happens to the surface over forty years of weather.
Lime Mortar
A binder that breathes, flexes, and reabsorbs the carbon it released in firing. The mortar returns to stone.
Timber Frame Construction
Large sections, visible joinery, and a structural system that reveals exactly how it carries its load. What is legible can be tended.
Stone in Architecture
Mass, permanence, and the geology beneath the building expressed in the building itself. What stone offers and what it demands.
Concrete
Calcium silicate hydrate bound around aggregate. A synthetic stone that begins as powder and water, crosses an irreversible chemical threshold, and continues reacting for decades.
Reclaimed Wood in Architecture
The structural and aesthetic case for timber that has already lived one life. Provenance, grading, and what age does to grain.
Straw Bale Construction
Exceptional thermal resistance from an agricultural byproduct. What compressed straw can and cannot do, and what it asks in return.
Living Roofs
Vegetated roof assemblies that insulate, absorb stormwater, and change with the seasons. What grows on top of a building, and what the building must do to support it.
Earth Sheltering
The ground itself as thermal envelope — stable temperature, massive insulation, and the membrane between building and soil that makes it all work.
Vernacular Construction
Adobe, timber, thatch, stone. Material traditions shaped by climate and geology, observed working across centuries — not primitive but precisely adapted.
Material Cycles
Whether a material can return to its starting state — through biological decomposition, technical reformation, or not at all. The chemistry of closed loops and irreversible bonds.
Embodied Energy
The energy a material carries into service from extraction, processing, and transport — invisible but permanent, justified only by what the material does next.