Sort
of a treehouse that doesn't hurt the forest
By
Susan Reines Special to A.M. Costa Rica
Platform rises from the floor
of the rainforest and is ready for the construction
of a new dwelling. A.M. Costa Rica photos/Susan
Reines |
It's not every day
you hear a developer say the country's biggest problem
is construction. But that's what Grant Bonsib
said, one hand on the steering wheel of his SUV and
the other gesturing out the window at places where the
afternoon's rainshowers were turning stripped brown
hillside into muddy waterfalls.
"The biggest
problem, I think, Costa Rica faces is all the construction
that's going to go on in the next 20 years," the
Denver, Colorado, native said. "You can see the
rivers turn brown every time it rains. There's destruction
in the ocean from all this dirt."
Bonsib is not, however,
an activist for halting development in Costa Rica. Rather,
he is an advocate of what he called his "cool new
way" of building. He is constructing 15 cabins
in the rainforest on the edge of Uvita without clearing
a single tree.
The cabins, four
of which are built, perch about 30 feet off the ground
and above the rainforest canopy on 70,000-pound stalks
of concrete and steel. Aerial sidewalks connect them
and a small parking area on an adjacent hill.
The cabins are supported
by technology an American company had been selling to
homeowners as underground foundation stabilizers. Bonsib
learned about the support systems while he was constructing
his home in Dominical three years ago.
"I'm not an
engineer, but I'm a builder," said Bonsib, who
got his start in construction as a teenager and owned
his own framing business by the time he was 19. "Through
their experience, builders know what will hold and what
will not hold. . . . When I came to Costa Rica to build
my house, I realized there was no way to support it.
I did some research in the U.S. and found that the Ram
Jack Co. had technology I could bring to use here."
Grant Bonsib poses beneath
one of the aerial sidewalks still under construction.
A.M. Costa Rica photos/Susan Reines |
Bonsib installed
Ram Jacks underneath his house, which was the career
remodeler's third from-scratch project. He did that
to protect the structure from soil movement. Bonsib
said he realized the same technology could be used to
build stable, above-ground structures. He talked to
the management at Ram Jack in the United States, which
has been doing foundation repair since the 1960s, and
he and his wife now run Ram Jack de Costa Rica.
The Ram Jack supports
that hold the cabins in the air look like enormous camera
tripods, though they have five legs instead of three.
The legs are 40-foot long, 2.8-inch circumference steel
screws that are twisted into the ground to 3,100 pounds
of pressure. The bodies of the tripod-like structures
are 20 to 30 foot steel and concrete stalks that rise
between the trees. Grant Bonsib poses beneath one of
the aerial sidewalks still under construction.
On their tops, where
a camera would sit on a tripod, are the cabins. "What
my intention was was to build something that didn't
destroy anything in its process," Bonsib said.
"I won't even
take one tree out," he added, pointing to a young
tree in the middle of the small parking area, which
had already been cleared of all except that lone tree
when Bonsib bought the land. Bonsib's builders had carefully
surrounded the tree, in its original soil, with a concrete
wall so it would not be disturbed by the construction
going on around it.
Bonsib said he had
calculated that Ram Jacks could hold 160,000 lbs, double
the weight of the concrete structure and cabin combined,
and should be virtually invulnerable to earthquakes
because of the helical screws in the ground. His experiment,
which he named the Ram Shacks, got its first test in
November 2004. A 6.2 magnitude earthquake centered at
Isla Damas, about 65 kms. away, killed eight people
and damaged over 500 buildings, according to U.S. Geological
Survey data, but Bonsib said the three Ram Shacks built
at the time suffered no damage, and his house in Dominical
had only one broken window.
Bonsib is selling
the cabins for $70,000 plus comissions to buyers who will be able to
rent them out for the majority of the year and will
receive a share of the rental profit. He plans to have
the complex function like a hotel that will rent cabins
for $50 per night in the December to April high tourism
season and $35 per night during the rainy season. Seven
of the 15 have already sold, he said.
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