Mobilizing the Green Imagination by Anthony Weston

Author:Anthony Weston [Weston, Anthony]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Future Studies, Self-Help, Green Lifestyle, House & Home, Sustainable Living, General
ISBN: 9781550925043
Google: 65KJ3ihD8V8C
Publisher: New Society Publishers
Published: 2012-05-01T03:59:58+00:00

Reimagining the house

I have lived most of my adult life in two houses. Neither came to us with storm windows or screens. One even had its windows painted shut long ago. The only option was processed air every day of the year, always cooled or heated to the same temperature — these houses were climatological fortresses, symbols as well as mechanisms of separation.

Yet both were perfect buildings for cross-ventilation. We patiently freed up all the windows, built or bought screens and storm windows. Now we keep them open three or four months a year, and hear the owls at night and cardinals on spring mornings with their liquid mating calls, the winds rising and the distant thunder, the chickens cackling over their latest eggs. It is a simple thing and yet profound: even the soundscape and the breezes on our skin signal that we belong to a world far bigger than the merely human, a world alive all around us. We know, so deeply that it does not even need to be said, that we live in a more-than-human world. It is a comfort and a delight, an endless source of richness and surprise.

From local architectural historians we have also learned something of the old ways of building in these parts, how the traditional craftspeople built houses that stayed cool in Carolina’s hot summer days. Breezeways between rooms, welcoming and amplifying the perpetual draughts. Large corner shafts that use rising columns of warmer air to get air moving throughout the building. Half-buried first floors that use the cooler temperatures of the ground to cool the air moved around. Cheap air-conditioning made us forget — but now the old ways are coming back. Some of our friends sleep in lovely but simple outdoor rooms, eight or ten months a year. We’re working on it ourselves. Why not all of us?

Next, radical openness to light. Homes can be built with light everywhere: windows, skylights, translucent roofing. The philosopher-architect Christopher Alexander tells us that every room of a house should have light on at least two sides, thus making the outside more than one-dimensional, giving it some sense of depth: a “surround,” in his exact phrase, rather than a picture.

Build around courtyards, Alexander says, bringing in both light and plants. Pay attention to the orientation of light as well: where the rising sun strikes first (feng shui suggests it should be the bedrooms); where the setting sun strikes last; how the angle of the sun over the year shapes how much light enters the house (overhangs that shade out the high sun of summer but allow in the low sun of winter). Passive solar heating is essentially an attentive openness to sun. In the northern hemisphere, the south face of a building in particular should open to the outdoors, according to Alexander, and the most important rooms should lie along the south edge, both to fill the house with light and to tempt us outside in the most inviting direction.

Frank Lloyd Wright used

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