y 9216's List: Environment

• "TreeHugger keeps away from big single family houses these days."
• It can mask a more serious aspect of the challenge: the diminished sustainability of low-density, residential subdivisions in suburbia where most free-standing houses of the future are likely to be situated.
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• No matter how green individual homes are, suburban sprawl is intrinsically anti-green. It generates infrastructure inefficiency; car dependency and rising fossil fuel demand; carbon-emitting, time-wasting road congestion; and, despite availability of inexpensive land at ever-greater distances from jobs, escalating development, construction and public service costs.
• I think the biggest, and most interesting design challenges will be found in metropolitan suburbs, where the task will be retrofitting the entire urban landscape — working in transit, figuring out how to make car-oriented spaces walkable, and learning how best to add density in places that weren’t designed for it.

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• The house was built with maximum regard for the environment and by reciprocation   gives us a unique opportunity to live close to nature.
• Building from natural materials does away with producers profits and the   cocktail of carcinogenic poisons that fill most modern buildings.
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• Some key points of the design and construction:

   
   
  • Dug into hillside for low visual impact and shelter
   
  • Stone and mud from diggings used for retaining walls, foundations etc.  
   
  • Frame of oak thinnings (spare wood) from surrounding woodland
   
  • Reciprocal roof rafters are structurally and aesthaetically fantastic   and very easy to do
   
  • Straw bales in floor, walls and roof for super-insulation and easy   building
   
  • Plastic sheet and mud/turf roof for low impact and ease
   
  • Lime plaster on walls is breathable and low energy to manufacture (compared   to cement)
   
  • Reclaimed (scrap) wood for floors and fittings
   
  • Anything you could possibly want is in a rubbish pile somewhere (windows,   burner, plumbing, wiring...)
   
  • Woodburner for heating - renewable and locally plentiful
   
  • Flue goes through big stone/plaster lump to retain and slowly release   heat
   
  • Fridge is cooled by air coming underground through foundations
   
  • Skylight in roof lets in natural feeling light
   
  • Solar panels for lighting, music and computing
   
  • Water by gravity from nearby spring
   
  • Compost toilet
   
  • Roof water collects in pond for garden etc.
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• This building is one part of a low-impact or permaculture approach to life.   This sort of life is about living in harmony with both the natural world   and ourselves, doing things simply and using appropriate levels of technology.
• These sort of low cost, natural buildings have a place not only in their   own sustainability, but also in their potential to provide affordable housing   which allows people access to land and the opportunity to lead more simple,   sustainable lives. For example this house was made to house our family whilst   we worked in the woodland surrounding the house doing ecological woodland   management and setting up a forest garden, things that would have been impossible   had we had to pay a regular rent or mortgage.
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