Todd's Story

Greenhouse designed and built By Todd at nearly 9000 feet elevation in Woodland Park, Colorado. Greenhouse is designed to have passive solar heating, and is equipped with a ground to air heating and cooling system, which pumps air through an underground tunnel system to help stabilize the temperature in the greenhouse, keeping it warm in the winter and cool in the summer. Greenhouse is home to fig and citrus trees all year round, and needs minimal heating.

 

                                             Todd's Story

Hello, my name is Todd Gossage, and I am the owner and founder of GeoDesignz LLC, as well as the designer and maker of all of the it’s products. If you would have told me 15 years ago that I would be on the path that I am on now, I wouldn't have believed you, as what I was doing before was completely different to what I am doing now, insomuch that at this point it almost feels like some sort of distant past life.

What I did before, as you might have gathered, was play professional baseball. This was the obvious career choice for me growing up, seeing as who my dad is, and coupling this with the fact that I had extreme passion for the game myself, and was an absolute baseball nut from an early age. This passion was also fostered into becoming a skilled player early on, as I, along with my two older brothers, were at the ballpark every day during the summer. It was quite the childhood having the opportunity to be on the field everyday during batting practice "shagging" fly balls alongside some of the world's greatest players, which list includes Nolan Ryan, Rafael Palmeiro, Pudge Rodriguez, Juan Gonzalez (Texas Rangers), Mark McGwire, Jose Canseco (the bash brothers :), Ricky Henderson, Harold Baines, Dennis Eckersley (Oakland A's), Ken Griffey Jr., Alex Rodriguez (rookie year) and Randy Johnson (the big unit :))(Seattle Mariners) who were all my dad's teammates during the latter part of his career, when he played with the Rangers, Oakland A's, and Seattle Mariners to finish off his career. 

Baseball was second nature, and it's what I knew, what I loved, and when it came time to get a little more serious, was naturally what I wanted to pursue as a career. Now while it is nice to have something that you are passionate about as your career pursuit, it can also come with it's downside. For me, since I was around it so much growing up, and because playing a sport at a high level takes such immense energy and focus, I kind of got tunnel vision at some point, where my whole self worth was tied up in whether I could  be a successful baseball player or not. Now while I didn't ever make it to the big leagues, and because there was that added stress of always feeling like I wasn't where I imagined I should be at any given point in my career, I think it's all relative, because there are plenty of super famous athletes that report looking back on their career, and say that it wasn't ever enough, and they were constantly under immense pressure to do more, and under the immense strain to perform at such a high level night in night out. This is all the while looking to the outside world that they are extremely fulfilled, content, happy people, when a lot of times, in fact, they aren't. 

Taking that into account, I don't think it innately has to be that way, and at this point in my life I feel like I would do perfectly fine if I could do it all over again with the perspective I have now. The irony of life is that it doesn't work that way, because the perspective you have now is because of all the lessons you learned, and lessons you learned are through failure much of the time. In my instance, it was clear that baseball wasn't destined to be for me, but was instead a learning event that allowed many more doors to open. 

When I had mentioned the tunnel vision thing before, it was as if baseball had become a monster, and an idol, and a death struggle. When it ended, there was, of course, some sense of loss and failure, but more so there was also an extreme sense of a burden being lifted off. Along with this burden being lifted off, the tunnel vision also left, and I could then exist where  everything didn't have to be tied back to my solitary life and death struggle of whether I would, "make it" or not.

It also meant that all that time I was playing baseball there was not one ounce of energy or mind power that could go to anything else. When it ended, however, it made me realize that there were all sorts of other things that I was interested in, some of which dated back to my childhood. When I was a child, I loved building things. This was perhaps what you would call my first love, instead of baseball, and I was what you call a Lego maniac. I would sit for hours on the floor on my knees with my feet splayed to the side (couldn't even attempt sitting like that now) playing with my Legos. I learned later on that there are two types of people in this world. People that saved every Lego kit they ever built and proudly displayed it on a shelf in their room, forever, and the type that disassembled their past Lego kit and added those to the heaping mass of the conglomerate of those kits. I was definitely the latter, and while I would have fun admiring and playing with it for a while, after the novelty wore off I would disassemble it and throw it all back in the pile, because after all, I needed the parts!. From there, I could build anything my imagination wanted, and my mother recalls marvelling, and I marvel as well at kids ability in general to do this, because I sure as heck couldn't do it now, but how I would sit playing for hours and hours uninterrupted, and also how I would search and search as long as it took for one minute  tiny piece until I found it. Somehow I knew exactly what I was looking for, and what direction the build was going in. 

It makes sense then that later on I would regain an interest in building things. After baseball immediately ended there was a phase where I just worked odd jobs just trying to find something that stuck but it all changed in a moment of inspiration when I stumbled across a documentary on YouTube called Garbage Warrior.This is where everything changed, and I knew from that moment on this is what I wanted to do in life. In the documentary it documents the life and journey of natural builder Mike Reynolds, who invented, “Earthships”, which is a type of house that is totally self subsistent, totally off grid, and which helps its occupants catch water, grow food, and stay warm. Earthships have a cult sort of following, and I definitely get it, as when I first watched Garbage Warrior, I was totally enthralled, and while this wasn’t exactly a career, I had no doubt that this was the direction I was going to go in.

In conjunction with watching Garbage Warrior, another inspirational thing happened shortly thereafter, when I saw the work of Raphael Guastavino for the first time. Raphael Gustavino, is a Spanish architect who moved to the U.S. at the turn of the last century, and introduced us in the U.S. to the world of architecture that has existed over in Europe for centuries, perhaps millenia, which is comprised of structures built with masonry arches, domes, and vaults as their actual support structure. Now while I was at least vaguely familiar with structures, such as the great cathedrals of the world, being built with masonry domes and arches, nothing inside me said, “oh that’s something I just have to do”. This is for the obvious reason that they are of mind boggling proportions, and many of these works were constructed over the span of hundreds of years, each block being hewn out of fine stone by master masons. 

Guastavino’s work, on the other hand, just like Earthships, hit me like a ton of bricks where something inside me said, I have to do this. The reason for this is that while Guastavino and his Spanish contemporaries, such as Gaudi, are absolute masters, and built massive structures I could never dream of building, their work seemed more approachable, and the reason for this is because one major element was added to the mix in this “new age” of building, which is metal. The reason metal was such a game changer is because it adds what we would now refer to reinforcement to the masonry structure, and this then enabled all of the thrust, which is the force of any dome or arch pushing outward, to be contained. Whereas before, where they had to build massively complicated, and just plain massive, “flying buttresses” to contain the outward thrust of these massive structures, a large metal tension ring embedded inside the structure could now serve the same purpose. In addition, this added strength made it possible to build the roofs much thinner, so now instead of massively heavy roofs, that needed a massive buttress system, there is an extremely thin shelled roof (thinner than an eggshell in terms of scale), with very normal sized exterior walls to go with it. 

So how does this relate to coffee tables then? Simple. I needed a wooden formwork to build these domes, and in order to build a wooden formwork, I needed connect the pieces of wood together, and seeing as the pieces of wood would be connected in a dome shape, they would have very unique and complicated angles, and to figure these angles out I needed to know math, and once I knew the math I would need a computer program to crunch all of the numbers, and to know how to run a computer program, as well as do all the math, I needed to go to college, so that’s what I did. 

Well, that’s a bit of a stretch actually. Going to school happened a bit by accident, actually, because once I had this bolt of inspiration of what I wanted to do, I was still a long way off from actually making it happen. So what I did after the inspirational moment, and knowing that I needed to know how to build Earthships, is sign up for the Earthship academy, which is a 5 week course in Taos with the man himself, Mike Reynolds, that teaches people how to build Earthships. The Earthship academy didn’t bring in any money for me, and it actually cost me money, $500 to be exact, but it got the ball rolling in the right direction.

After the Earthship Academy was over, I realized that in order to make the dream, which was still a long way off, a reality, I would still have to get the skills and experience required in doing construction, and the best way to do that was to get a trade, which I still wasn’t super excited about, but was going to do anyway. So I decided I was going to become an electrician, because if you are an electrician, you can probably figure out how to do the plumbing in your house halfway decent, and even if you fail, nobody is going to die. But if you’re a plumber, you wouldn’t dare try to do the electrical work, as it’s more complicated to begin with, and you can’t be wrong, or else someone may very well end up dead. So I called some hotline about how to become an electrician, and a lady answered, and we started talking, and then she asked me if I wanted to be an electrical engineer instead. When she said that, I immediately had a spark of interest, but then immediately wondered if that were even possible, as I knew engineering was a serious degree, and I had average marks at best when I went to college, and my incomplete college degree was in history anyway. 

It turned out that I could in fact attend a local college in my home town of Colorado Springs, and this made me MUCH more excited, as this filled that engineering creative part of my brain, and electrical engineering was perfect for a later pursuit into off-grid living, as solar panels and energy generation is a huge factor in off-grid living, and one that holds a lot of people back when attempting to go off grid.

When I started attending college, I was still chomping at the bit to do something related to the thing that I was so interested in, and it worked out perfectly, because CTU (Colorado Technical University) had classes available at night, so that meant that I could work during the day, and it turned out that my parents needed a firewood shelter. Actually, maybe I asked them if they needed A firewood shelter, and followed that up with, are you SURE you don’t need a firewood shelter. Anyway, they apparently did need a firewood shelter, because it still serves it’s purpose up until today, but I used the firewood shelter to as my first experimental project to take me in the direction of my dream, and I built it in Guastavino type fashion, where I didn’t even have a formwork, and built daringly out into space with the first row of tiles, and then would add another layer of mortar and tile, and then stand on what I had built the day before, and built out into space until the two ends met, and man was that exciting when that finally happened. It was an extremely difficult project, even though it was quite small, but it gave me valuable skill when I tackled my latest masonry project, which is the masonry greenhouse, which was a VERY BIG project for one man to undertake. But due to the skills I had acquired on the very first job ever, that got me ready and gave me the confidence to tackle the big one, and that big one isn’t the end goal big one, but it is the big one as far as what I would ever tackle on my own.

So after the completion of the firewood shelter, I went to my parents again, and said, ya know, you guys really have a nice deck out there, but gee is it sunny. Wouldn’t it be great if you had some sort of patio covering out there? They humored me once again, because they’re lovely people, and I began my second project in the direction of my dream, a patio covering on my parents deck. This project was in a different direction, but which would eventually tie in with the end goal of full scale masonry domes, as  the patio covering would be made out of wood just like the formworks would be in the future. 

The project once again turned out great, thankfully, and now I had something to show customers, and from there I went out and got some paying gigs, which eventually led to greenhouses, which are pretty much these wooden structures with polycarbonate panels on the top and sides, and some fancy technological devices to control fans and things from my electrical engineering degree. 

Now finally onto coffee tables!!! After the greenhouses, but before the masonry greenhouse, I decided to do a coffee table. I wanted to develop a different triangle pattern that was a little more tight, as the other pattern had big holes in it, which was fine for greenhouses, but I thought that this one had more potential for the long haul. By now also, I was fully up and running with my computer mathematics program, and so I designed the first coffee table, which is actually the proof of concept scaled down version of a future dome, and while it took a VERY long time to design and build, and while there were a few minor things I would fix on the next one, it is a very unique and rare piece of furniture that turned out very well. Also, after that I designed and built the convex coffee table, which also turned out very well, and I thought they would be immensely popular, but unfortunately they didn’t sell, and then I went and took the latest job of the masonry greenhouse, which is the crown jewel of all my large projects so far. It is fully functional as a greenhouse in a winter environment, and I couldn’t have been happier with it. It was not always fun building it, as it was a beast of a project with many many challenges. On top of it the learning curve was steep, and I will never take on a project of that size again.

At the moment I have put my energy toward the overall notching abilities of design, as in the latest coffee tables there are no screws or hardware needed to hold it together, and the notches are very precise, and fit together very perfectly, and I am also thankfully very pleased with these as well. Also, I will be taking this notching ability that I have learned and will be applying it to the structures and coffee tables that I build, as it is very appealing to me to build things out of wood and not have one single screw, or at least very few, on the whole project. So that is where I am now, and if you have read all the way to the end I really appreciate it, and I really hope you like the tables, and all of the other stuff I have built as well. 

Thank you for stopping by, and feel free to write me with any questions or comments, I would love to interact with all of you out there!

Thanks again,

Todd Gossage