DAMASCUS, PA — In 2023-24, Greg Swartz and Tannis Kowalchuk, co-owners of Willow Wisp Organic Farm, worked with Jeffrey McMahon of Jeffrey McMahon Design + Build to bring to life a new barn containing a shared workspace for the farm as well as offering a permanent home for the education and performance programs of Farm Arts Collective (FAC, Farm Arts).

Farm Arts is a nonprofit that Tannis founded in 2018 with a mission to intersect farming, art, food and ecology to uplift and celebrate rural life.  

The new building is an impressive modern design, 127 feet long, and built with sustainability at the forefront of everyone’s mind. 

The building includes a spacious kitchen (Tannis cooks a farm lunch every day for the Willow Wisp crew), a shop for maintenance of farm equipment, lockers and a lunchroom for the farm team.  

The other half of the barn is an AGRI-Cultural space for Farm Arts Collective. It includes a 40-foot-by 40-foot venue for performances and education classes, a dressing room, storage, a tech booth and an administrative office for the company. 

The building had its ribbon cutting on June 2, 2024, and Tannis is currently leading a capital campaign to outfit the Farm Arts Collective side of the space to be a fully equipped education and performance venue with lights, sound, A/V, curtains and a flexible seating system. So far, the collective has raised $128,000 with a goal of $250,000.  

Tannis sat down with designer Jeffrey and posed some questions.

Tannis:  As you were conceiving the design for the new barn at Willow Wisp Organic Farm, how did designing a multi-use facility for a solar-powered organic farm influence your choices? 

Jeffrey: Thanks for the great question. I’ll try to explain the complexity of a large scale design and build project like this as simply as possible!

Willow Wisp Organic Farm sets a high bar for what it means to do things consciously with regards to sustainability and earth-friendly practices. Ensuring that the new building works, actively works, within the daily and seasonal functional aspects of the farm influenced several key design strategies that I organized under the slogan, “Reduce, Re-use, Recycle.”

Small and sleek big building. Buildings can be too big, and when you look at what’s needed, and focus on providing the most efficient space for those needs, then you avoid the wastefulness of excess for excess sake. This aligns with Reduce.

There are materials we chose because of their high recycled content, but we also did the legwork to find material that was previously used: two examples are the post-industrial polyisoprene insulation panels and shipping pallet wood. I found a person in western New York who had taken down thousands of square feet of four-inch-thick polyisoprene insulation from a building. We were able to use a very high efficiency insulation material without the embodied energy and environmental impact of new production. 

In a small town north of Allentown, PA I found a carpenter who spends their extra time taking apart found shipping pallets and de-nailing the boards. We gained from their efforts to have a beautiful wood interior cladding without taking down one tree. Re-use!

As in nature, sometimes the destruction or decomposition of one thing can lead to new growth. Making sure the humans that inhabit the barn have access to composting and recycling is as important as practicing those behaviors during the construction. Wood cut-offs and scraps? Use them in the wood stove and keep a house warm. Digging up some dirt for a foundation? Make sure it’s stored so other farm-based soil needs have it for a resource. Extra materials left over? Build a lean-to for the germination greenhouse. Recycle!

Tannis: And what unique considerations did you give when conceiving the Farm Arts Collective education and performance space?  It’s such a multi-use space.

Jeffrey: I built my first home in the area in 2008; I made a hilltop mid-century-inspired structure packed full of sustainable features. It was my first time looking at what sustainability means, in this specific context, these Sullivan County lands. I think that laid the groundwork for me tackling your project almost 16 years later. What does the Farm mean for context? What can the Farm Arts Collective gain from a more considered approach to sustainable architecture?

The first of many strategies is best described using the metaphor of a sailboat. Build a sailboat and not a motorboat; use skill and not strength.

Passive cooling and heating was primary to achieve the functionality similar to a sailboat, in a 140-foot barn. The Farm Arts educational and performance space straddles the southern gable end of the barn, half on the open patio and half in the primary gathering space; both are 40-foot squares. The 12-foot extension of roof and side walls extending over the patio provides passive solar gain in the winter for the interior, and passive shading/cooling in the summer months when the sun is high in the sky.

Like sails, the building can adjust to have air move through it. There is a center corridor of around 8 feet that not only functions as the primary navigation route for farm staff and FAC members alike, but also has doors at each end allowing the building to be open at two specific locations for air flow to effectively move through and replace stale air with fresh air. This can reduce the energy needs for cooling when we have those cooler evenings and mornings, letting the building cool down before the midday heat. Then the building’s internal thermal inertia benefits from the high R value recycled insulation.

There are also active components like fans at each gable end because, like most sailboats, if the wind is low you need a little boost.

There are other components to the Farm Arts space that further assist the passive heating and cooling, and were designed specifically for a facility that at times might have just a few humans, and at times might have a bunch more! The concrete floors, with their dense thermal mass, are an excellent heat sink for the winter sun. The windows are positioned to provide tons of light during the day and therefore reduce the need for electric lighting in the daytime. We also ensured that each material chosen to make this structure has some sustainable legacy, including reclaimed wood, low-VOC paint, cement board cladding with high recycled content, etc.

I think the barn, and our project working together to make your space, Tannis, is an example of how smart design starts with a conversation. You and Greg wanted to not just have a space that fit in at the farm, that provided the facilities for dynamic performances and farm production, but to do that with a head towards positive impact on the local and global environment. And I think that’s what I think of when I hear the word sustainable.

Tannis: Both Willow Wisp Organic Farm and Farm Arts Collective are really thrilled with what the new sustainable barn space offers—a welcoming and efficient workspace for the activities of farming, art, food and ecology. It is an elegant and practical building that serves our community and the farm to be enjoyed by many for years to come.