Buildings, not cars, are the major damagers of the Earth. Pollution from the heating and cooling of buildings exceeds that from cars, even in America. We just don't see it, except maybe from the chimneys of an older city on a cold Winter day. It happens at the power plant, and where the materials are made.
After agriculture, building is the second largest industry in the world. The manufacture of building materials consumes enormous energy, and exhaustible resources. To its credit, the building industry also uses the most renewables, i.e. lumber, but not without processing them to the nth degree, and usually without protecting them against degradation.
We are surrounded by technical innovations - in our cars, our communications, and our computers. Yet our largest lifetime purchase, our house, is built essentially the same as it was eighty years ago. The home that will literally define our lives for twenty, thirty, forty years into the future, is not future oriented.
Fortunately, this is about to change - the result of the emerging new practice of Environmental (sometimes called Sustainable) Architecture. Architecture must look into the future. We can't always get it right of course, but we can use "open channel" architecture to make it easy to add new, even unforeseen technology, and handle climate changes decades down the road. A house built to 1995 standards is obsolete before it is finished - how will it protect and comfort its occupants in 2025? Housebuilding, now an archaic laborious task at best, needs to be taken into the Twenty-First century and looked at by the ecologist, scientist, architect and engineer on a clean sheet of paper.
The basic goal of Environmental Architecture is simple: attractive, comfortable, affordable shelter that does no harm to the Earth in its manufacture, or its use. In practice this means:
1. Maximum use of renewable
building materials. Obviously this is wood - already accepted,
even cherished, for its beauty, workability, energy-efficiency, and now
renewability. It should be used as close as possible to its natural state,
but not untouched, as modern science can alter wood so that it will not
rot, burn, or become food for insects. Wood is solar energy transformed by
photosynthesis into building material. Enough wood grows every day in just
the Southern US forests, to build 2000 homes. You don't get more sustainable
than that.
2. Minimum use of non-renewable, energy-intensive building
materials like steel, brick, vinyl, aluminum and insulation.
3. Catch the energy falling on the house,
and latch on to the Geothermal Reserve in the Earth just beneath it.
Use the excess heat from cooking, washing, and human activity in Winter,
and design to get rid of it in Summer. Go with Nature instead of
fighting, or isolating from it.
4. Design and build for long useful service life. This
makes housing affordable, as the cost is spread over many generations.
In Europe the typical design life of a home is 300 years.
5. The house must be sturdy, disaster resistant. Bullet-proof.
6. No life-threatening or building threatening dependencies on electricity
- as in power out = freezing temperatures = burst pipes = a flooded
basement. No power dependent air-to-air exchangers. No brownout/blackout
sensitive cooling, as in a summer heat wave.
7, The house must be Futureproof, with access channels
all around the structure to easily upgrade and add future technology.
Making it convenient to run new cables, pipes and wires.
8. Capable of being "stand-alone" without connection
to the gas mains, or electric utility grid. Even if street power is used
at first, all homes must
be designed this way. Solar electricity will be used eventually, within
the design life of any quality structure built today.
9. Buildings must be low-maintenance, and forgiving
if repairs are put off. No hidden cavities that might deteriorate from
the inside out when a leak isn't fixed right away. No "crawl spaces" where
damage could go on for months without inspection.
10. If parts of the house can be made in a factory with quality-control
and economy-of-scale, do it. If it can be offered in Do-It-Yourself Kit
form, it will be more affordable, and more will be built.
11. The Environmental house must be more comfortable
and less costly than the conventional house to make
a significant dent in the housing market. Each 20% reduction in the cost
doubles the number of families who can build it. Yet it is incredible what
an Ecological dent even one environmental house makes, preventing
half-a-million pounds of pollution over thirty years. As few as 30,000 fuel-free
homes can displace a Nuclear Plant. The goal, of course, is that every
home be an Environmental home, reducing pollution to pre-industrial levels.
Actually, this is more attainable than you might think, and won't take
long, because the average conventional home isn't built to last and will
soon need to be replaced!
Want to know more? Check the Source List
for some of the sources consulted in design of the Enertia® Building
System.
© 1995 by Enertia
Building Systems, Inc.