Q&A with Andrew Frederick: Transforming the Construction Industry Using Natural Materials

This article is part of The Rooftop, a blog and multimedia series from New America’s Future of Land and Housing program. Featuring insights from experts across diverse fields, the series is a home for bold ideas to improve housing in the United States and globally.

New America’s Sabiha Zainulbhai chatted with architect and designer Andrew Frederick of Croft on how to combine natural materials, climate action, and high performance construction. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Sabiha: Hi, welcome to The Rooftop. My name is Sabiha Zainulbhai and I’m the Deputy Director of New America’s Future of Land and Housing program. Our program hosts a housing blog and multimedia series shaped entirely by its contributors called The Rooftop. It’s a forum for people to share innovative ideas to address the housing crisis—be it ideas big or small, public or private, well-trodden or experimental. Today, we are lucky to be joined by Andrew Frederick of design and build firm, Croft.

Croft is a company co-founded by Andrew in Maine that combines healthy materials, climate action, and high performance construction amidst an industry that otherwise tends to be slow to adopt change. Croft has delivered commercial, residential, and urban infill projects of all sizes across the country and has been called the North Star of the construction industry. To find out why, let’s dive in. 

So Andrew, Croft is half design firm, half manufacturing powerhouse, and fully committed to transforming the construction industry. This seems as good a place to start as any. Can you start by telling us what motivated you to develop Croft, and what were some of the core challenges within the construction industry that you were hoping to address?

Andrew: Yeah, great question. I mean, I think to really sort of start in on why Croft was created, I think you have to zoom out a little bit on the construction industry in general. So we have an industry that, you know, buildings, just buildings in the world, the operation and repair and construction of them is 40 percent of humanity’s carbon and climate impact every year. That is an astonishing number. It’s a little bit grim for those of us who are working in the industry, but it does mean that if you can sort of fix buildings, you’re sort of halfway to addressing these massive climate challenges we’re seeing. 

So buildings have been sort of steadily improving for a couple of generations now. And “green building” has largely been focused on making buildings that are more efficient, which is important and we should do that. But we’ve sort of cracked that nut. Like we know how to make buildings that use 90 percent less energy than they did just a generation ago. And there’s a litany of high performance, high efficiency building standards that you can use to accomplish those goals. But meanwhile, we sort of overlooked the elephant in the room or the lion’s share of the problem—and that’s the stuff that we make the buildings out of. 

The raw materials have to be harvested from the wilds of earth and then processed and manufactured into products, and then we take those products and we make buildings out of them, right? And it turns out that has an enormous environmental cost and we just weren’t calculating it. We were just totally ignoring it. So when you look at those numbers, there’s a term for that now—we call it embodied carbon, and that refers to that climate and carbon impact of making the stuff itself. 

So now we know about embodied carbon. This really is due to a very friendly and brilliant Canadian named Chris Magwood. He published his PhD thesis in 2019 and it kind of shook the industry, particularly those of us who were focused on green building. And, you know, a lot of this stuff, when you start looking at the emissions numbers for various materials, it’s fairly predictable. Like you look at something that takes a lot of energy to produce and is made entirely from petroleum, something like foam, and it has a very high embodied carbon number. So it can be really challenging to utilize those materials and still make a straight face claim that you are participating in green building. But there’s actually this incredible way to short circuit the problem entirely, and it’s utilized natural materials. 

And for a long time, we sort of looked at natural materials as inferior. But suddenly the entire industry is looking at things like wood fiber and sheep’s wool and hemp crete and all these sort of strange, slightly exotic materials that aren’t just less bad, but they are actually actively pulling carbon out of the atmosphere while these materials grow—these plant-based materials and then locking it up in the biomass. So if you take those things and you sort of shove it inside the walls of your building and keep it warm and dry and keep it from decaying, then you actually have inverted this issue of the construction industry being the greatest climate villain there is to now being a bit of a climate savior. You have utilized buildings or leveraged buildings as a carbon storage medium. 

And there’s one material in particular that turns out to be just an absolute superstar. And that is straw. Straw is incredibly pest resistant, flame resistant, resistant to decay. And we’re just growing so much of it across the world for wheat and barley and oat and rice production. The leftover bit of those plants is straw. So if we take that stuff and we stuff it into our buildings, we really start seeing these carbon benefits in a pretty impressive way. 

So I came across this information in 2020. And it was pretty apparent even at this conference, surrounded by hundreds of people all learning this information at the same time, it was pretty clear that not any one entity in the industry was really set up to deliver on this promise. All of a sudden we have this great new information, we’ve collected the data, we should be acting on it. But most of these entities in our industry, whether it’s a structural engineering firm or an architecture firm or even a well-established design build firm, those are big ships to steer. And I think I had a bit of a luxury in that I could be incredibly agile and respond to this new input into the industry. So it has been six years of fairly intense work, but Croft has sort of grown from doing just one or two houses a year to now having 20,000 square feet of production space and a whole bunch of employees and having developed an entire panelized prefab system dedicated entirely to utilizing these really climate friendly materials that we now obviously should be using in the industry.

Sabiha: Yeah, thank you so much. Super interesting. You talk a little bit about the way that the construction industry operates and has tended to operate for a long time here. And I’m wondering if you could talk a little bit about home building in the U.S. and how that differs from international contexts and maybe how that’s influenced the way that Croft operates.

Andrew: Sure. Yeah, we’re a bit of an outlier really when it comes to—I don’t know what the term we want to use is, developed nations, I don’t know—but in places, for example, like Sweden and Japan, they have very mature industries for prefabricated buildings, and they’re able to deliver exceptionally high quality, quite quickly with very tight dimensional tolerances. So these buildings, they’re just nice buildings. And they’re built off site in a factory and then delivered on a job site and sort of clicked together like a bunch of giant legos. And I had helped other companies launch start prefab programs and already had that experience under my belt. 

One of the interesting things that came out of that experience was in the dialogue with clients who you’re making these buildings for, I came to the realization that, wow, none of these people care what’s inside their walls. At all. They don’t care how the building is made, and they don’t care what it’s made of. Which actually felt in some ways kind of promising. In the same way that I don’t really care how the engine in my car works, it just works and I’ll bring it to a mechanic if it doesn’t work, right? So I can appreciate the perspective. And it also means there is a real freedom for those of us who deeply care and want to see change in this industry. You can sort of leverage that apathy into action. 

So looking at these mature developed prefab industries and in other countries, there are certain lessons that we can pull from them and import to the [United States]. But we have a really weird industry. And our industry is sort of slow and messy and inefficient, and there’s a bunch of arcane laws surrounding it. I think the allure of starting a company that can produce housing really efficiently—there’s something romantic about that notion. But at the end of the day, most of these projects hinge on relationships and dialogue more than technology. So even though we are a prefab company, I think Croft has taken a very different tack than a lot of the other folks who are leaning more heavily into automation and tech. And we’re just acknowledging that that is not the industry that we have culturally decided to have. Getting things constructed, the built environment is an emotional topic in our country. And so we’ve decided to get really good at information delivery and communication rather than technology.

Sabiha: Yeah, absolutely. Sometimes it just starts with narrative change and bringing people along for the journey. So just curious to hear a little bit more about where you think maybe the construction industry is headed in the next 5, 10, 15 years? And what aspects of Croft’s current model do you think could be effectively scaled or grown?

Andrew: Sure. I would love to see the industry be flooded with a whole new generation of builders and carpenters and CNC machinists and even people leveraging the tech that’s out there is an important aspect of this work. In 10 to 15 years, my genuine hope is that a company like Croft, which right now I think is being held up as the compass north direction for where to go in terms of biomaterials and climate friendly building and high performance building and even building technology in terms of the prefabrication aspect of our company—it to me feels like I actually want that to become unremarkable.

I want it to be relatively boring that a company is utilizing natural materials that are keeping both the workers healthier and the eventual occupants of that building healthier. I want it to be unremarkable that you would make a building that is rooted deeply in building science and therefore you’re not going to see things like mold and mildew and decay that we see, and let’s be honest, 47 percent of new construction in the US is seeing mold problems within the first year. Like that’s just an unforgivable waste of resources and lack of care for the public, frankly. So I think there’s a lot of things that I would love to see change about our industry, but I think it really starts with that sense of stewardship and care that you place at the forefront of making any new building on Earth, or at least in our country, that sort of valuing of the lives that are going to occur within that building, rather than, you know, focusing on some magazine cover type architecture.

Sabiha: Yeah, thanks for that reflection. Well, this is really just the tip of the iceberg in terms of what we could chat about today, but I think this is a great introduction for people to Croft and the work that you do. So thank you so much for taking the time to be with us and explain the method to Croft’s madness. It’s been a pleasure. And thank you to everyone for listening.

Andrew: Ditto.

Editor’s note: The views expressed in the articles on The Rooftop are those of the authors alone and do not necessarily reflect the opinions or policy positions of New America.