Ecohouse A Design Guide

Abstract

The first question to answer should be: what is an ecohouse? Eco-architecture sees buildings as part of the larger ecology of the planet and the building as part of a living habitat. This contrasts with the more common notions of many architects, who see a building as a work of art, perhaps on exhibition in a settlement or as ‘frozen music’ in the people-less pictures of glossy magazines. Some architects see the process of design as a production line with the building as a product to be deposited on a site, regardless of its particular environment or qualities. You will see from the case studies at the end of the book that ecohouses are closely connected to their site, society, climate, region and the planet. Why bother making buildings connect in this way? Because the alternative is not acceptable and ‘modern buildings’ are literally destroying the planet. It does not help that the numbers of people on the planet are growing so rapidly (5.3 billion in 1990; 8.1 billion by 2020; 10.7 billion in the 2080s) or that we have increasingly sophisticated technologies to exploit the Earth’s natural resources. But it should be widely known that buildings are the single most damaging polluters on the planet, consuming over half of all the energy used in developed countries and producing over half of all climate-change gases. The shift towards green design began in the 1970s and was a pragmatic response to higher oil prices. It was then that the first of the oil shocks, in 1973, sent fossil fuel prices sky high and the ‘futurologists’ began to look at the life history of fossil fuels on the planet and make claims about how much oil and gas were left. Their predictions were alarming and, 30 years on, we appear still to have abundant oil. However, their calculations on total reserves were fairly accurate and many of their predictions have yet to be proved wrong. From the features on gas, oil and coal below you can see that it is now estimated that we have left around 40 years