SYSTEM HOME: FIRST YEAR STUDENT ESSAYS FROM THE WORLD HOUSE PROJECT
A house that expands and contracts.
A house that acts as a plant.
A house that folds together.
A house that connects to the street.
A house that can greet you.
A house on wheels.
A house with continual open space.
A house without a footprint.
A house that is shared.
A house that displays its consumption.
A house that is a garden.
A house that creates wealth.
A house with sensors.
A hosue that inflates.
A house that creates energy.
A house with components.
A house that connects to the sky.
A house that is made of components.
A house that is easily reassembled.
A house that heals.
A house whose inside becomes outside.
A house that is recyclable.
A house that is portable.
A house that is collapsible.
A house that communicates.
A house that takes any shape.
A house that works with nature.
A house that harnesses storm water.
A house as a receptor.
A house that forms to your needs.
A house that grows.
A house that is shared.
A house that has tracks.
A house that links the earth to the sky.
A house that is inclusive.
A house that embraces sun and wind.
A floating house.
A house made of earth.
A house where Waste is its structure.
An underground house.
A house that promotes circulation.
A house that acts as a lung.
A house that uses ground source heating.
A wrapped house.
A house that is a hub.
A house that follows the sun.
A house made of scraps.
A house as a battery pack.
A house defined by nature.
SYSTEM HOME: FIRST YEAR STUDENT ESSAYS FROM THE WORLD HOUSE PROJECT.
Edited by Liz Huntly-Cooke Designed by Heidi Nelson System Sections: Large photos taken by Evelyne Au-Navioz and Heidi Nelson except where otherwise specified All rights reserved to Institute without Boundaries, World House Project Copyright © June 2007 School of Design COLLABORATIVE AUTHORS: How do we want to live?
Perin Ruttonsha
Our Voices
Liz Huntly-Cooke
A Home’s 12 Systems
Liz Huntly-Cooke
Connect – Economy
Jennifer Lee, Jane Weber, and Heidi Nelson
Communication
Heidi Nelson
Mobility
Garth Tweedie
Finance
Sarah Tranum
Nourish – Terrain
Carmen Irene Paz Rivera and Perin Ruttonsha
Water Summary
Kar Yan Cheung
Water In-Depth
Richard MacIntosh
Food
Perin Ruttonsha
Waste
Gary Moloney
Shelter – Climate
Gavin Baxter
Energy
Richard MacIntosh
Air Handling Summary
Richard MacIntosh and Liz Huntly-Cooke
Air Handling In-Depth
Richard MacIntosh
Construction
Reema Kanwar and Liz Huntly-Cooke
Express – Culture
Giorgiana Penon and Jennifer Lee
Identity
Jennifer Lee
Spatial
Evelyne Au-Navioz
Social
Thomas Lommee
Politics
Liz Huntly-Cooke
World House Project Year Timeline
Photos: Heidi Nelson
Un-referenced quotes are collective IwB ideals.
SPECIAL THANKS TO: Gary Moloney Luigi Ferrara John Pylypczak Justin Aitcheson Lorraine Gauthier Printed in Canada Neenah Paper, Environment FSC Certified (Forest Stewardship Council) Made with 20% FSC Certified Virgin Fiber and 80% Post-Consumer Fiber White (90 brightness), 80lb text and cover
SYSTEM HOME: FIRST YEAR STUDENT ESSAYS FROM THE WORLD HOUSE PROJECT EDITED BY LIZ HUNTLY-COOKE DESIGNED BY HEIDI NELSON
FIND YOUR WAY
How do we want to live?
7
Our Voices
11
A Home’s 12 Systems
15
CONNECT – ECONOMY
19
Communication
27
Mobility
37
Finance
47
NOURISH – TERRAIN
57
Water
65
Food
83
Waste
91
SHELTER – CLIMATE
101
Energy
113
Air Handling
141
Construction
155
EXPRESS – CULTURE
167
Identity
175
Spatial
183
Social
193
POLITICS
209
World House Project Year Timeline
223
How do we want to live?
This question was first posed by ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle, and continues to confound and inspire us: because how we choose to live is, in part, a demonstration of our beliefs on the meaning of life. This year the Institute without Boundaries did not uncover the mysteries of our existence, but it has attempted to unfold the complexities of habitation. Home is a place of security and protection, nourishment, love and expression. It provides us with shelter, comfort and warmth. It is a place of refuge, and a harbor for our most intimate secrets and greatest ambitions. Houses are as individual as their occupants, often reflecting both spiritual and practical values. If we think simply of the variety of natural materials that exist on the planet – from the hard shell of an armadillo, to the silky web of a black widow, to the absorbent fibers of a sponge – that starts to give us a small sense of how many options we have when choosing how to inhabit the earth as a human species. But of course our choices must also reach far beyond any technical considerations. Living is about interaction. We interact with each other, with the weather, with the land, and with other life forms. We construct networks – social, political, and business – to make living more enjoyable, and to avoid tackling life’s technical struggles alone. SYSTEM HOME: FIRST YEAR STUDENT ESSAYS FROM THE WORLD HOUSE PROJECT 7
Our ambition is not to change the world. Our ambition is to build hope around the world, so that people can build change themselves.
PHOTO - Toronto, Ontario, Canada by Heidi Nelson
STUDENTS
Environment Design and Well Being Studies
Carmen Irene Paz Rivera carmenpazrivera@gmail.com
Integrated Design Process and Food System Studies
Perin Ruttonsha perin_r@hotmail.com
Development Strategist and Identity System Studies
Jennifer Lee worldhouseproject@hotmail.com
Mechanical Engineer and Energy Systems Studies
Richard MacIntosh richmacintosh@gmail.com
Communication Visionary and Systems Studies
Heidi Nelson skycollaborative@gmail.com
Historic Timeline and Social Systems Studies
Thomas Lommee thomas@sub-net.be
Holistic Visionary and Finance Systems Studies
Sarah Tranum s@sarahtranum.com
Architecture and Construction Systems Studies
Reema Kanwar raminderkanwar@gmail.com
Multi-disciplinary Design and Spatial Systems Studies
FACULTY
Director
Evelyne Au-Navioz e.aunavioz@gmail.com
Luigi Ferrara lferrara@georgebrown.ca
Creative Expression and Mobility Systems Studies
Project Manager
Garth Tweedie garth@gcpro.ca
Silvio Ciarlandini silviociarlandini@worldhouse.ca
Site Analysis and Community Planning
Studio Manager
Critical Analyst and Political Systems Studies
Design Builder
Liz Huntly-Cooke liz_huntly@hotmail.com
Rohan Walters spacesbyrohan@sympatico.ca
Structural Engineer and Waste Systems Studies
Industrial Design
Gary Moloney moloney.gary@gmail.com
Dianne Croteau innova@bellnet.ca
Biological Focus and Historic Timeline
Architect
Kar Yan Cheung cheungkaryan@hotmail.com
Daniel Karpinski dkarpinski@omniplangroup.com
Observationalist and International Relations
Social Entrepreneur
Gavin Baxter gavin.baxter@gmail.com
Giorgiana Penon giorgiana.penon@gmail.com
Chalo Barrueta chalo.barrueta@gmail.com
Chris Lowry clowry@greenenterprise.net
Our Voices
The Institute without Boundaries (IwB) is a multidisciplinary program which brings together students and faculty from diverse professional and personal backgrounds. This year’s class includes architects, engineers and designers; a biologist, a political scientist and a reflexologist. Students came from five countries around the world, from both rural and urban experiences, each bringing a different perspective on how to observe the world and design for change. Students and faculty have collaborated throughout the year, and research has been greatly influenced by exposure to mentors and experts in a wide range of fields. Individuals have attended lectures all over Toronto, and engaged in conferences and research opportunities in Chicago, Montreal, New Orleans, Scotland and Hong Kong. While we have taught each other and worked together, we have maintained our own personal areas of expertise over the course of the year. This book reflects the 15 distinct voices of the 2006/07 IwB class. Each chapter, based on specific areas of research chosen by each student, expresses a unique voice. SYSTEM HOME: FIRST YEAR STUDENT ESSAYS FROM THE WORLD HOUSE PROJECT 11
Connection causes transformation.
PHOTO - La Paz, Bolivia by Tyson Gillard
12 SYSTEMS COMMUNICATION – A puff of smoke exiting
ENERGY – Energy courses through our dwellings
the top of a teepee or chimneystack indicates that someone is home. What do our houses say to us? In its intimate spaces, knowledge is shared, language is passed from generation to generation and culture is practiced.
making light possible in darkness, heat possible in cool climates, and bringing animation to mechanical tools and toys.
AIR HANDLING –Moving, replenishing, MOBILITY – Mobility allows for the flow and
interchange of people and goods to and from the home. Mobility can be both psychological and physical, framing what is possible within our social and spatial systems.
moderating and maintaining air quality within and around a home is fundamental to the health and well being of its occupants, and is often referred to as Heating, Ventilation and Air Conditioning (HVAC).
CONSTRUCTION – Materials, their means of FINANCE – The finance systems related to the
home have spurned fields of study from home economics, to innovative tools and mortgage innovations that have increased and made housing available to all.
WATER – Water makes life possible, and no
organism can survive long without it. Water flows down the roofs of our dwellings and up through the earth into our sinks and baths. It creates delight in our gardens, soothing us with its sounds and nourishing the food we eat.
FOOD – The system that causes food to move from field to table is one of the most complex social constructs that we have created. It is globalized in its distribution, mechanized its production, biotechnological in its design, culturally diversified in its preparation methods and media driven in its consumption.
WASTE – Waste is the by-product of life. In the
past, the mistreatment of waste has caused ruin to many civilizations, polluting waters, fostering disease, and consuming and destroying land.
extraction and fabrication into building elements, integrated with the knowledge of craftsmanship and labour processes, results in a system that delivers shelter for human habitation.
IDENTITY – Home is where the heart is – a popular phrase that captures the role that place plays in defining personal belonging. Our sense of self, our cultural patterns, and our relationship to society are embodied in dwellings.
SPATIAL – People inhabit space. It has depth, breadth and height. Yet space is the invisible conjured by the interplay of light, shadow and form.
SOCIAL – We live in houses not only to shelter
us from the elements but also to support the actions and intentions of our lives. A home allows us to rest, play, work and learn as part of our familial life. It becomes a container for our
Systems Design
In the first weeks of the World House Project, we began by researching and evaluating homes from around the world. We looked at examples of dwellings originating early in the history of human habitation – the igloo, the adobe, the Bedouin tent. We studied prototype homes that aim to create a new future for housing – a state-of-the-art live-in research centre in the arctic, a ‘smart house’ at the Pratt School of Engineering in North Carolina, USA. We examined a wide selection of shelters from around the world – built or only just imagined – that helped us develop a cross-section of housing throughout human history. While the homes varied in shape, size, aesthetics, utility and permanence, they exemplified commonalities in their aim to provide shelter and nourishment, and represent the connections and expressions of their inhabitants. In breaking down these four broad themes, we were able to identify twelve systems (listed to the left) that we see as integral to every home. By dissecting shelter into its component parts, we remove the home from the presuppositions dictated by global economy and market values. The systems approach allows us to see what is necessary for human survival and cultural growth, and opens the door to an emerging method for housing design that integrates these systems in a variety of ways. We are not building just one ‘World House’, but a multitude of world houses, adaptable to the diversity of climates, topographies, cultures and economies that exist in the world. SYSTEM HOME: FIRST YEAR STUDENT ESSAYS FROM THE WORLD HOUSE PROJECT 15
A house is floors and walls, a home is dreams.
PHOTO - Cambodia by Jennifer Lee
CONNECT
Economy
The word economy originates from the Greek oikonomia, meaning ‘household management’. Eco – ‘oikos’ or ‘house’, also describes the word origin of ecology – “the branch of biology concerned with the relations of organisms to one another and their physical surroundings” (The Oxford American Dictionary and Thesaurus, 2nd ed., s.v. “Economy”). This would suggest an intrinsic connection between our reliance upon the natural world to provide resources to maintain our human economic system, and the elements of that system engaged within our homes to ensure survival and physical comfort.
SYSTEM HOME: FIRST YEAR STUDENT ESSAYS FROM THE WORLD HOUSE PROJECT 19
For the World House Project, economy is also defined by the communication, mobility and finance systems. These systems endow arms, legs and brainpower to an economy, allowing it to become globally influential, transportable and translatable. For instance, the cellular phone clearly embodies both the communication and mobility system. This technology allows for increased communication with friends and family as we move around outside the home. On the contrary, this solitary communication device can also isolate individuals by extinguishing the need to leave one’s home to reach others. The finance system is also affected by the advent of cellular phones – from favelas in Brazil to shantytowns in Africa, portable handheld phones are commonly seen in the streets. The accessibility and convenience of bypassing the complicated infrastructure required by a landline telephone allows everyone to buy, sell, plan and communicate. Overall, the underscoring theme of ownership links economy to individual and collective sentiments of home. Economy affects our way of living yesterday, today and tomorrow.
The Evolution of Economy
Historically, as we evolved from nomads, to agrarian, to industrialized peoples, sentiments around ownership and personal property also transformed. We developed new mechanisms to measure ownership and value, which are still commonly represented through barter or monetary systems. The idea of banking was established as early as 2000 BC. In Babylonia, the temples and palaces offered safe houses for the storage of valuables. During the Roman Empire, Caesar reformed the monetary and taxation system to a recognizable contemporary form. He issued gold and silver coins and imposed sales tax, land tax and flat-rate poll tax. The construction of the Royal Exchange, in England in 1566, signalled the permanent importance of banking (Wikipedia, History of Banking - Earliest Banks). Since these early adoptions, the traditional notion of economy has been imprinted into the minds of the public. What new notions will arise in the era of the Communication Revolution? The Industrial Revolution allowed a class of farmers to move up the social and economic ladder with the introduction of the tractor-trailer; what could the advents of communication technology do for the lower income bracket of our time? A significant portion of the world’s population is too poor to buy from discount, big box retailers like Wal-Mart, whom, by North American standards, provide the answer to economical living. Could we use globalization and the networks of existing large scale corporations to create and promote an entirely new line of products targeted to the disadvantaged? The economy can be channelled to impart upward mobility and provide a space and market in which everyone may engage.
Economy and Ecology
Using our natural environment to guide development is not a new concept. Greek philosophers such as Aristotle saw “the imitation of nature” as the key to understanding all life (Kovarik). However, in this century, human development has been financially fueled and emphasis has been towards maximizing nature for profitable gain as opposed to imitating it. In the context of a globally linked economy, our domineering attitude towards nature has increased our impact exponentially. While the severity of the message is controversial, it is undeniable that our economic prowess has driven the ecological systems of the world into disarray.
Faced with the predicament of unsustainable lifestyle choices, several industry leaders are trying to create products that operate under a new economic model. What if we could create a system where the proliferation and expansion of a product or company healed and nurtured the planet, as opposed to harmed and destroyed it? In 2001, an influential book, entitled Cradle to Cradle, examined the possibility of this question. Authors William McDonough and Michael Braungart cover several instances where industrious activity actually improves the environment rather than damages it. For example, the biomass of all the ants in the world is greater than that of all humans, yet ants enrich the biosphere rather than detract from it. Ants produce no waste and operate in a model that replenishes their surroundings, unlike humans. Can we find ways to reverse the myth that the right environmental decision is often the wrong financial decision? Biomimcry and neobiological technology offer examples of such initiatives.
Economy and Home
The idea of ownership can span a large scale: in your home it can filter down to the most inconsequential product and up to the structure of the home itself. A dwelling must provide fundamental needs to ensure physical survival. Basic protection from the elements can be derived from nature at little cost to the inhabitant. However, the variables in our natural world and the influences of human development have resulted in many definitions of a dwelling that go beyond simple shelter to establish criteria for physical comfort and survival – most importantly, accessibility to water and heat, either very close to, or within the home itself. The most extreme examples of additional criteria lay in the developed world: the home now provides its inhabitants with a multitude of amenities, the majority of which rely on costly modern technology to maintain. Fortunately, the majority of the world does not employ this type of lifestyle. Unfortunately, the global majority lacks the essential resources for physical comfort, health, and in some instances, survival itself. Ellen Swallow Richards, the first woman to study at MIT, coined the term “euthenics” for improvement of the environment, both in and out of the household. She also used the term “ecology” in a broader sense and began the practice of “home ecology”, which eventually became the “home economics” movement. Home economics further evolved into the term “municipal housekeeping,” a direct extension of Richards’ vision of the new role for women in public affairs. Within a generation, Richards’ vision became widely accepted. Women’s clubs and civic improvement groups of the Progressive era contributed immense effort to the cause of environmental conservation, with long-lasting effects (Kovarik).
Invisible Economy
“A Love Economy values the work of production, reproduction, and caring for human life alongside the natural world as the foundation on which the rest of the economy functions.” – from Women & the Economy, a project of United Nations Platform for Action Committee (UNPAC) Traditionally, the notion of the underground economy brings to surface the imagery of the black market and informal trade. But what about the Love Economy, one of the less visible components of the traditional economy?
SYSTEM HOME: FIRST YEAR STUDENT ESSAYS FROM THE WORLD HOUSE PROJECT 21
Critical to the functioning of an economy is the non-monetary exchanges based on relationships and the intrinsic value of the goods and services we need and desire. The informal network of support that passes from one person to another is not measured by the GDP (Gross Domestic Product) of a country. The evaluative tool currently utilized that best indicates the elements of the love economy is the Human Development Index. Hazel Henderson uses a layer cake as a metaphor to describe the importance of a hidden economy: the icing on the top is the private sector, which rests on the layer below, the public sector‌ there are two lower layers that are non-monetized and invisible to economists but which are really supporting the whole thing. These include the Love Economy and mother nature (Mau, 136). In order for the market economy to survive, we must have the Love Economy, which is defined as unpaid productive work such as raising children and maintaining the household, do-it-yourself housing, rehabilitation and serving on the school board (Mau, 136).
Conclusion
Technology affects what we live in, where and how we live; furthermore, technology has been redefining social behaviour inside and outside the home since the inception of the printing press, radio and television. Intrinsically tied into our modern economic systems, the structure of life in the home has changed drastically since the Industrial Revolution due to evolutions in employment trends, migration patterns, immigration and housing types. In response to the modifications that rapid industrialization has caused to housing systems over the past century, finance systems have evolved more supportive and humanitarian approaches to champion the needs of populations who require universal housing that does not discriminate by income. Technology combined with traditional building techniques and materials can further the potential for more affordable and ecologically sustainable housing.
GLOSSARY TERMS
Biomimicry – word origin from bios,
meaning life, and mimesis, meaning to imitate. A design discipline that studies nature’s best ideas and then imitates these designs and processes to solve human problems (Biomimicry Institute). Neobiological Industry – Beyond
working with nature to invoke positive change, the neobiological industry endeavours to work as nature. Examples include bioutilization and bio-assistance (Steffen, 109). Bio-utilization – the use of parts
of organisms as raw materials. For instance, plant oils are being used to form biodegradable plastics.
Bio-assistance – the domestication and use of organisms, often using biotechnology. For instance, growing a virus for the purpose of building a battery (Steffen, 110). Human Development Index – The Human Development Index (HDI) is a comparative measure of life expectancy, literacy, education, and standard of living for countries worldwide. It is a standard means of measuring well-being, especially child welfare. It is used to determine and indicate whether a country is a developed, developing, or underdeveloped country and also to measure the impact of economic policies on quality of life (Wikipedia, Human Development).
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Biomimicry Institute. Biomimicry: Nature as Model, Measure and Mentor; Introduction to Biomimicry. Biomimicry Institute. www.biomimicry.net /biomimicryintroduction.htm (accessed June 11, 2007). Kovarik, William. “Environmental History Timeline.” Environmental History Timeline. www.environmentalhistory.org (May 29, 2007). Mau, Bruce, Jennifer Leonard and the Institute without Boundaries. Massive Change. New York: Phaidon, 2004. Steffen, Alex, ed. World Changing: A User’s Guide for the 21st Century. Forward by Al Gore. New York: Abrams, 2006. Wikipedia. History of Banking- Earliest Banks. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ History_of_banking#Earliest_banks (on history of banking; accessed May 28, 2007). Wikipedia. Human Development Index. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human _Development_Index (on Human Development Index; accessed June 11, 2007).
PHOTO - NASA, City Lights, http://visibleearth.nasa.gov/view_rec.php?id=1438 (Credit Data courtesy Marc Imhoff of NASA GSFC and Christopher Elvidge of NOAA NGDC. Image by Craig Mayhew and Robert Simmon, NASA GSFC.) SYSTEM HOME: FIRST YEAR STUDENT ESSAYS FROM THE WORLD HOUSE PROJECT 23
COMMUNICATION
And that is why the great challenge for our time will be to absorb these changes in ways that do not overwhelm people or leave them behind. None of this will be easy. But this is our task. —Thomas L. Friedman
What is the communication system?
You hear the front door squeak while grasping the loose handle. Greeted by the soft mewing of your cats, you smell the winter cold leaving your jacket. This is one of many experiences upon entering a home that inspires a feeling of safety and familiarity. Such experiences are comprised of the interactions and exchanges that create the home environment.
SYSTEM HOME: FIRST YEAR STUDENT ESSAYS FROM THE WORLD HOUSE PROJECT 27
The dictionary defines communication as: 1. a means of connecting different places, such as a door, passage, road, or railroad; or 2. the science and practice of transmitting information especially by electronic or mechanical means (The Oxford American Dictionary and Thesaurus, 2nd., s.v. “Communication”). To interact with physical spaces, objects and each other we must use our senses of touch, sound, smell, taste and sight. These interactions influenced by social conditioning, cultural norms, body language, and our experiences of the past allow us to interpret the present. For example, your childhood memories likely play a strong role in your experience of home as an adult. Speaking Chinese or French might be more comfortable than English, or you might choose to email rather than speak on the phone. We each gravitate towards a style of communication that suits us best, affected by our age, cultural background, and personal interests.
Historical Analysis
Means of communicating have been transformed throughout history by influential technologies. These technological developments have stemmed from the necessity of social control or changes in the physical mobility of information. By 3,000 BC the Egyptian empire expanded over a large area of landmass, necessitating the development of carrier pigeons for the distribution of power (Wikipedia, Carrier Pigeons). The expanse of the Roman Empire created a highly organized road system to impose control across continents. At the fall of the empire 53,000 miles of roadway spanned the area (Wikipedia, Roman Roads). These empires created paradigmatic shifts which continue to impact society. Highway systems and elaborate mail delivery options around the globe are similar concepts, and are often used to execute similar means. Even road signs – one of the most universal communication systems – convey political power through pictographs, shapes and symbolic colours. The printing press was a key turning point in the mobility and accessibility of information. Invented by the Chinese in the 11th century, the press was modified for speed by Johann Gensfleisch zum Gutenburg in the 15th century (Meggs, 65). The press allowed static information (books, flyers, magazines and newspapers) to be distributed across physical and social boundaries. Literate citizens now had a greater opportunity to educate themselves through reading and writing. This enabled a greater number of people to interpret and discuss religion, politics and education systems, and led to the creation of public libraries and schools, unions and civil rights movements. Today our homes are filled with numerous communication technologies that have created virtual space and blurred the line between private and public, creating new forms of interaction and access to the world’s information. Through these changes we have reconfigured the physical architecture of our houses, and altered our notions of home. The radio was the first popular example of digital information entering into the domestic realm. It became an important platform for national communication of news, politics, stories and commercials. The radio became so significant in the scope of family life that we created a space within our homes to accommodate the technology. Instead of sitting around the hearth, families began to sit around the radio. The radio was supplanted by the advent of TV and the TV room around the 1940s (Ash, 52-55). Because TVs
stimulate on multiple sensory levels, exciting our emotions through vision and sound, it became the ultimate platform for commercialization. We are drawn in by jeering news, colourful game shows, speedy five-second commercials and cutesy cartoons. Consumer ideals were able to penetrate the walls of our homes, influencing our husbands, wives and children, and shifting family and community dynamics.
Forward Trends
TVs, movies, computers, iPods and cell phones have propagated our increasing need for virtual communication. These technological developments have improved our ability to carry, share, distribute and develop
information, but, for some, it is an inaccessible platform. These developments leave behind many behind, due to issues of finance, education and technical literacy. Irving Biederman, a psychologist on visual perception, has studied the time it takes to understand new objects. Thirty thousand objects would require learning an average of 4.5 objects per day, every day for 18 years…The impressive visual recognition competence of a 6-year-old child, would require the learning of 13.5 objects per day, or about one per waking hour (Biederman, 126-127). In The Design of Everyday Things, author Donald A. Norman, conducts a similar investigation. “Suppose that each everyday things takes only one minute to learn: learning 20,000 of them occupies 20,000 minutes—333 hours or about 8 forty-hour work weeks.” (Norman, 12)
These studies of simple daily objects, like paper clips, staplers, door handles and stairs broaden our understanding of the incredible amount of time it takes to learn new technologies, software and networks (Table 1). COMMUNICATION DEVICES THAT AFFECT HOW WE LIVE, WORK AND PLAY.
Conversation
BlackBerrys, Cell phones, Emails, Text Messaging
Transportation
Cars, Trucks, Motorcycles, Bikes, Boats, Public (trains, subways and planes)
Socialization
Podcasts, Blogs, Message Boards, Vlogs, Open Source
Entertainment
Televisions, Radios, Nintendos, Theatres, Digital Camcorders & Cameras, Movies, iPods
Narration
Newspapers, Weeklies, Tabloids, Magazines / Journals, Books, Zines / Comics
Adaptation
Laptops, External Hard Drives, DVDs, CDs, USBs, PDAs, GPS
Consumption
Brands, Copyrights
Table 1
SYSTEM HOME: FIRST YEAR STUDENT ESSAYS FROM THE WORLD HOUSE PROJECT 29
The financial obstacles faced in developing countries around the world is described by the company 100 Dollar Laptop: Children are consigned to poverty and isolation – just like their parents – never knowing what the light of learning could mean in their lives. At the same time, governments and small industry struggle to survive in a rapidly evolving, global information economy, burdened by a vast, and increasingly urban, underclass that cannot support itself, much less contribute to the commonwealth, because it lacks the tools to do so (One Laptop Per Child). On the other end of the spectrum the popularity of the Internet has created the infrastructure for a “flat world.” (For further discussion, see Friedman, The World is Flat.) David Friedman describes the flat world as the globalized trade that brings countries to an even market level, increasing opportunities for interaction and exchange on a global scale. Walk into your closet, pick up a piece of clothing, find the tag, look at the fine print to see where it was made. Most likely what is listed there is not a factory from around the corner.
Interaction within the Home
The objects and products we bring into our homes are enormously influential in our daily life. They can facilitate efficiency, comfort and ease in our communication systems, or be the cause of frustration and misunderstanding. In an increasingly digital world, communication technologies can often feel impersonal, causing a sense of isolation among users. In adapting to technology, is it possible we might actually compromise our mental health. After observing a digital home, design critic Natalia Ilyin states “…you believe you [want] to spend your life being entertained, receiving messages, responding with your wallet, monitoring your kids, checking your messages from the dinning-room console.” (Ilyin, 51-53) She goes on to tell a story about a man who spent his days watching television and surfing the internet, never leaving his home. His was mentally consumed by the technology, and suffered from a lack of social connection. The challenge for new technology is to create opportunities for human interaction that enhance, rather than degrade, our relationships. We are currently seeing a new shift in family dynamics. Utilization of computers, TVs, car controls, and hand held devices is rapidly increasing. This change is manifested in the physical structure of our homes. We now have office spaces, computer rooms, desks in our bedrooms and kitchens with wireless connections. We can connect and communicate with the outside world from anywhere within our home. Families often interact through the comfort of email and cell phones – siblings in the same house might chat by instant-messaging each other; children can call their parents’ cell phone from down the hall. Are our homes becoming a platform for communication technologies? Could our physical space become smaller because we develop large virtual spaces? We are only beginning to see these questions come into play. Finding answers will have significant impact on the spatial setup of our homes, our social dynamics and our familial relationships.
We must consider the implications of communication systems in approaching the design of our homes. Technology has had a significant impact on housing in the past, and will continue to play a significant role in the future. We can break down the elements of the communication system in order to understand its affects on a daily basis, and offer some critique on current propositions (Table 2). QUESTIONS IN STRUCTURING OUR HOME TODAY AND IN THE FUTURE: Work at Home
People are increasingly working part-time or full-time from home, necessitating home office spaces. We are able to communicate through Blackberries, laptops, cell phones and video conferencing. We can send files to be printed or produced thousand of miles away. How will we define divisions between workspace, and living space?
Technology for Everyone
Our next challenge in development is making information platforms affordable, usable and accessible, in order to truly enhance our way of living. How can we improve a lifetime with technology without taking our life to learn them?
Enhance Our Lives
With the growing rate of available technology our homes are becoming more digital. We have technology to automate, communicate and interact with objects and each other. How can we utilize this to make our homes better environments?
Entertainment
We can now carry entertainment with us everywhere we go. Will we create interfaces that interact with our mobile technology? Can we create an interactive environment that can help us enhance our experience of our city, town or home?
Socialization
It is now possible to communicate faster with someone in India than you might with your neighbour. We can find old friends and make new ones through interactive networking sites like Facebook and myspace. These networks can expand or deflate our current ways of socializing. Where and how will we create our social networks?
Create Comfort
Contemporary home design often revolves around an open kitchen. These kitchens create feelings of comfort and safety through the sharing of food, exchange of stories and cultural differences. How will we ensure access to healthy foods and the preservation of cultureal cuisine on which these events depend?
Future Home
Younger generations are interacting through games, Second Life, instant messaging and cell phones. Will they want a physical home that can adapt as easily as the virtual world?
Table 2
SYSTEM HOME: FIRST YEAR STUDENT ESSAYS FROM THE WORLD HOUSE PROJECT 31
INTERPRETATION & EMOTION
SIGHT
HEARING
SMELL
TASTE & SPEECH
TOUCH
You choose your home products based on human senses. Try this excersize to better understand your desicions:
1. Find a partner 2. Pick a simple object (examples: a rock, key, bouncy ball, bike light, toy, etc.) 3. Silently examine the object 4. From the senses listed above, explain to your partner what this object does for each one. 5. End by intrepretating the object from an emotional perspective. Explain your relation to the object through stories or past experiences. 6. Allow your partner to share his or her thoughts. 7. Discuss.
GLOSSARY TERMS
BlackBerry – a wireless handheld device that supports e-mail, mobile phone, text messaging, internet faxing and web browsing. Geons – In psychology, Geons are geometrical primitives out of which everyday objects can be represented, as suggested by psychologist Irving Biederman (Wikipedia, Geons).
goods, products, resources and technical conclusions or advice. Participants in such a culture are able to modify the collective outcomes and share them with the community (Wikipedia, Open Source). PDA (Personal Digital Assistant) – a lightweight, handheld
GPS (Global Positioning System) – is utilized in many situations;
computer, typically employing a touch-sensitive screen rather than a keyboard, generally used for storing information such as addresses or schedules.
navigation worldwide, tool for map-making and land surveying.
USB (Universal Serial Bus) – standardized interface socket,
Information Age – The information age is a term applied to the
allowing devices to connect and disconnect without rebooting a computer.
period where information rapidly propagated, more narrowly applying to the 1980s onward (Wikipedia, Information Age).
Virtual Communication – Communication that happens through
Open Source – Open source is a set of principles and practices that promote access to the production and design process for various
technology and requires people to understand, manipulate and interact with these platforms.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Ash, Russell. Whitaker’s World of Facts. London: A & C Black Publishers, 2005. Biederman, Irving. “Recognition-by-Components: A Theory of Human Image Understanding,” Psychological Review 94, no. 2 (1987): 126-127. Buchanan, Richard. “Design Research and the New Learning.” Design Issues 17, no. 4 (2001): 3-23 Das, Lalit Kumar. “Culture as the Designer.” Design Issues 21, no. 4 (2005): 41 Friedman, Thomas L. The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, April 5, 2005. Hunt, Wayne. Environmental Graphics Projects and Process. New York: Collins Design, 2004 Ilyin, Natalia. Chasing the Perfect: Thoughts on Modernist Design in Our Time. New York: Metropolis Books, 2006. Kester, Grant H. Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art, 1st ed. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004 Meggs, Philip B. The History of Graphic Design, 3rd ed. New York: John Wiley, 1998. Moggridge, Bill. Designing Interactions. Boston: MIT Press, 2006 Niedderer, Kristina. “Designing Mindful Interaction: The Category of Performative Object.” Design Issues 23, no.1 (2007): 3-17 Norman, Donald A. The Design of Everyday Things. Reprint, New York: Basic Books, 2002. One Labtop Per Child. “Mission.” OLPC. http://laptop.org/en/vision/mission/index.shtml (accessed April 17, 2007). Sarmast, Shahriar. “An Interview with Morteza Momayez.” Design Issues 21, no. 1 (2005): 18-23 Siu, Kin Wai Michael. “Culture and Design: A New Burial Concept in a Densely Populated Metropolitan Area.” Design Issues 21, no. 2 (2005): 79-89 Sterling, Bruce. Tomorrow Now: Envisioning the Next 50 Years. Reprint, New York: Random House, 2003. Wikipedia. Carrier Pigeons. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Carrier_pigeons (on carrier pigeons; accessed March 17, 2007). Wikipedia. Geons. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geons (on Geons; accessed June 11, 2007). Wikipedia. Information Age. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_age (on Information Age; accessed June 11, 2007). Wikipedia. Roman Roads. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_roads (on Roman roads; accessed March 17, 2007). Wikipedia. Open Source. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source (on Open Source; accessed June 17, 2007). Zafiroglu, Alexandra. “Sideways Glances: Thinking Laterally and Holistically About Technology Placement in the Innovation Process.” Intel® Technology Journal 11, no. 1 (February 15, 2007): 1-10.
SYSTEM HOME: FIRST YEAR STUDENT ESSAYS FROM THE WORLD HOUSE PROJECT 33
MOBILITY
Life these days is all about mobility and flexibility. Of course, that doesn’t mean you need to have a car of your own. —Mobility® CarSharing
What is the mobility system?
Mobility can be defined simply as ‘the ability to move or be moved freely and easily.’ Mobility as a system in the home is fundamental to the physical structure of the building, and necessary in meeting the needs of the inhabitants. The massive influx of home decorating and remodeling television programs over the last decade alone illustrates homeowners’ growing desire to alter and personalize their living spaces. Home designs that consider the full scope of the mobility system allow inhabitants to move from place to place, and permit the form to adapt to changing needs.
SYSTEM HOME: FIRST YEAR STUDENT ESSAYS FROM THE WORLD HOUSE PROJECT 37
Historical Analysis
In our nomadic roots, mobility was tantamount to survival; home followed food, water, and weather. As permanent residences evolved, mobility was superseded in its role of dominance. In the transition to a sedentary lifestyle the pursuit of food was replaced with localized production and distribution systems. Subsequently the agrarian era manifested itself as a new living model and a modified working schedule. Where huntergatherers had followed work over vast areas, farming societies harvested the relatively small acreage they lived on. The move to permanent residences was coupled with a shift to generational housing: parents now had the ability to pass homes down to their children, altering attitudes towards ownership. The advent of the industrial era caused a second shift as families began moving to urban centers seeking work, subsequently leaving behind their ancestral land and agrarian lifestyle. This opened the doors for a new manifestation of working and living, changing where and how people lived in order to work the way they desired. People sought a life which offered them choices in defining themselves, starting a new homestead and individual identity separate from that of their parents. In conjunction with this new working and living model, the attachment of a family to their home became circumstantial. Homes could be bought, sold, and traded as necessity dictated; relocating became an option because life itself had become more mobile. Post-WWII and post-depression eras fostered a second shift in mobility. Society moved into an accelerated rate of development. Productivity was high and opportunity abounded; technology was taking monumental steps with the advent of computers; the civil rights movement was in full swing towards its most critical phase, forever changing social attitudes; and the arrival of effective birth control created a change in the family dynamic, both in its size and parental influence. For the people living in this era, the reality of free choice began to truly materialize. Homebuyers were presented with a variety of options: you could live where you chose to, within relative proximity to work or an effective means of transportation. Many families left the urban centers and relocated in new suburban developments, originally pitched as a way of reconnecting with the natural world. This created a separation between work and home, facilitated by progressive developments in mobility systems. Highways and Interstates, buses, trains, and subways connected the suburbs (a place for living) with the urban center (a place for working) and permitted homeowners to choose a specific living environment, simultaneously spurring longer and longer commuting times. Commuting and transit systems were put in place to specifically address the permissibility of choosing a separation between life and work. The mass home production that occurred in the post-war era created an influx of standardized housing stock. Today’s homeowners must attempt to retrofit those same homes to meet contemporary needs, often through quite arduous renovations. Homes built half a century ago met the needs of their first owners, and therefore the needs of the era, but were no longer intended to last as generational housing. The social dynamic of today’s culture is not that of 50 years ago, making it difficult for these homes to attract new buyers. New homes often permit a much greater range of personalization. The original buyer can place specific demands or desires in the construction process, and subsequently choose an outcome that satisfies their requirements.
Historically there has always been a relationship between home and occupant dictated by the needs, necessities, and desires of the occupants. What was once ‘work to live’ became ‘live to work’ and returned again to a ‘work to live’ (Table 1). Ultimately the relationship separated into two distinct factions of ‘live and work’ where both became disjoined choices that individually met the needs, demands, and desires of the occupant. Advancements in the increasingly wireless digital sphere have created the possibility of an entirely mobile working life. A growing number of professions are no longer restricted to the office. The invention of the laptop, PDAs, and the cellular phone has made the office a mobile unit. Work is now capable of following and being accomplished wherever life takes it, shifting us into a mode of ‘life accompanied by work’. In this climate, where work can easily be accomplished at home, the home and office can be, and in many situations is already, the same place. The live/work home must be able to adapt to and accommodate both functions. NOMADIC LIFESTYLE
Work to Live
Work dictates Life – life follows work
AGRARIAN LIFESTYLE
Live to Work
Life dictates Work – work the land you live on
INDUSTRIAL
Work to live
Life follows Work – migration to urban centers for work, no longer working the land they lived on
POST WWII
Live and Work
Work divides from Life – where you live and where you work became separate choices
MODERN
Live with Work
Work accompanies Life – work can now accompany life
Table 1
Future Trends
Society is becoming increasingly mobile, and yet our typical residences remain static and are, ultimately, impedances to mobility. The challenge for housing design is the construction of multifunctional homes that are adaptable to current and future needs. Solutions range from modular designs to fully adaptable interior spaces. One such design, the Jeriko House (www.jerikohouse.com), offers a modular approach to meeting customer needs. The Jeriko House encourages customer design. The house consists of prefab units that can be arranged in floor plans as dictated by the owner. Mobility in the home situates itself in the design and its ability to adapt to meet diverse occupant needs. As the relationship between life and work continues to evolve, the environments we create for ourselves must exhibit modularity, and the spaces we inhabit must be adaptable to our continuously changing lives.
SYSTEM HOME: FIRST YEAR STUDENT ESSAYS FROM THE WORLD HOUSE PROJECT 39
CASE STUDY
Urban Mobility
As global populations continue to grow, cities must evolve to accommodate larger volumes of people. This ensuing need has cities looking to one another across the globe for solutions set by example. Further development and implementation of sustainable mass transit systems within cities has become a necessity. In these cities terms like Smart Planning, New Mobility, and Mobile City have uniformly begun to manifest themselves within the dialogue of city planners. Despite the variation in phrasing, each of these terms represents a move in urban planning towards the implementation of sustainable ‘Urban Mobility’ infrastructures; urban transit systems designed to be sustainable and efficient in order to accommodate a large volume of travelers and alleviate traffic congestion. Toronto – already considered to have one of the most efficient transit systems in North America – is one such city looking for innovative transit solutions to further the success of its own. Toronto is on the United Nations 2001 report listing the 37 urban agglomerations expected to reach between 5 and 10 million people by the year 2015 (United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, 97, table 58). The report stated that at the turn of the millennium the population of Toronto was 4.7 million residents with an estimated 1.19% average growth rate. It predicts the population of Toronto will reach an estimated 5.4 million residents by the year 2015. The release of the 2006 census shows that Toronto had already grown to 5.1 million residents (Statistics Canada), surpassing the halfway point for the fifteen year prediction in just five years. In light of this unpredicted growth, Toronto is planning ahead for the accommodation of its ever-increasing numbers. Two organizations focus on Toronto’s future through the lens of Urban Mobility: the Toronto Transit Commission (TTC), and Moving the Economy (MtE). The TTC (www.toronto.ca/ttc) is the publicly owned organization responsible for the operation and management of Toronto’s subway, buses, and streetcar systems, and is a household name for those living in Toronto. MtE (www.movingtheeconomy.ca) is a lesser-known entity, but the fruits of its labour are already visible. In conjunction with the TTC bus system, MtE has placed bicycle racks on the buses of specific routes around Toronto. The partnership presents passengers with more options when commuting in the city. Travelers may ride a bike to a given point, use a bus to travel another distance, and then continue by bike to a given destination. MtE aims to continue to cultivate the integration of various mobility systems and partnerships. For the TTC one solution rests in a project called Transit City (www.transitcity.ca). The Transit City Proposal promotes a massive expansion to Toronto’s light rail trains (LRT), suggesting the addition of 120km of rightof-way track for electric LRT to reach across Toronto, connecting the periphery with the core. At present the TTC boasts 445 million riders annually, and, with the inclusion of the Transit City development, that number is projected to grow by another 175 million annual rides. At MtE all eyes are focused on the integration of a variety of mobile systems with the TTC. MtE proposes the integration of mobility interchanges, a development they call New Mobility Hubs, which would diversify the modes of transit available to residents and travelers in Toronto. The New Mobility Hubs would maximize
SYSTEM HOME: FIRST YEAR STUDENT ESSAYS FROM THE WORLD HOUSE PROJECT 41
the points of interchange at which various transit alternatives would be available. At a single Hub you would have access to the subway, buses, streetcars, bikeshare bicycles, bicycle parking, autoshare vehicles, pedestrian thoroughfares, clean-fuel taxis, and real-time info for train arrival and departures. Bikeshare and autoshare programs operate as community vehicles. In both cases vehicles are available for short periods of use, and eliminate the hassle of ownership and maintenance. Toronto currently offers two different car sharing entities, Autoshare (www.autoshare.com), and ZipCar (www.zipcar.com). Both companies rent vehicles by the hour that can be picked up and returned to lots scattered across the city. MtE has conducted case studies on various climatically similar cities boasting success stories of integration; cities like Bremen, Germany; Paris, France; Copenhagen, Denmark and Hong Kong, China. The integrations that achieved success in Paris and Bremen are strikingly similar, and greatly influenced MtE’s New Mobility Hub proposal. In both cases success depended on the integration of various services. Bremen implemented full integration of the city’s mobility system through hubs linking transit, taxis, cycling, and autosharing (Moving the Economy, Bremen’s Integrated Mobility). Paris integrated the various transit modes of the Régie Autonome des Transports Parisiens (RATP) – metro, buses, tram, and rail – into a single fair ticket and introduced rail-metro-bus links, bike-and-ride facilities, and park-and-ride facilities (Moving the Economy, The Paris RATP). The RATP also integrated marketing strategies offering daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly passes for use on all its services. In addition to this yearly pass, pass holders receive discounts on car rentals. The RATP has implemented further rider incentives to encourage usage, such as the Paris Visite, a special fare package for tourists that offers discounts at various destinations, and the Disneyland passport that offers travel and admission to the park. In Copenhagen, a bikeshare program consisting of 2500 bikes is available to residents and tourists. Users insert a 20 kroner coin (approx. $2.25) and a bike is released from the rack for use (Moving the Economy, Sustainable Transport Branding). The coin is reimbursed when the bike is returned to any of the empty racks around the city. Hong Kong has implemented ‘Smart Card’ technology with the Octopus Card. This single card can be to used purchase fare for over 30 mobility services (Moving the Economy, Sustainable Transport Branding). MtE’s final trajectory for the New Mobility Hub is the implementation of its own Smart Card system. The TTC currently operates with a flat rate, transferable, single trip fair for all its services, or a weekly, monthly, or yearly Metro Pass Card. MtE’s development of a Smart Card system would integrate access and availability to all forms of transport at New Mobility Hubs, giving users access to any of the Hub’s available trains, bikes, cars or other transit modes. The future of Urban Mobility rests within this type of system integration. As cities continue to grow, and environmental awareness and fuel prices rise, people will increasingly seek sustainable alternatives and viable modes of transportation. In the last few years the TTC alone has experienced a ride growth of 27 million from 2004-06; the same growth is anticipated in 2007 (Transit City). A truly mobile city must offer travelers an integration of services that facilitates the interaction of citizens and communities within the urban fabric.
GLOSSARY TERMS
PDA (Personal Digital Assistant) – a lightweight, handheld computer, typically employing a touch-sensitive screen rather than a keyboard, generally used for storing information such as addresses or schedules. Many PDAs include handwriting recognition software, some support voice recognition, and some have an internal cell phone and modem to link with other computers or networks. BIBLIOGRAPHY
City of Toronto, Ontario, Canada. “Campaign for Next Generation Transportation – Moving Ahead.” City of Toronto. http://www.toronto.ca/torontoplan/772.htm (accessed June 10, 2007). Jacobs, Jane. The Death and Life of Great American Cities. New York: Modern Library, 1969. Jeriko House (Prefabricated Modular House). www.jerikohouse.com (accessed DATE). Moving The Economy. “Case Studies / Best Practices: Bremen’s Integrated Mobility.” MtE: Innovation in Motion; Mobility. http://www.movingtheeconomy.ca/content/csPDF/ BremenCaseStudyAug2.pdf Moving The Economy. “Case Studies / Best Practices: The Evolution of Sustainable Transportation Branding; An Organization Shifts the Focus to New Mobility with Positive Results.” tE: Innovation in Motion; Mobility. http://www.movingtheeconomy.ca/content/csPDF/ NewMobilityBrandingCaseStudyAug2.pdf Moving The Economy. “Case Studies / Best Practices: The Paris RATP: Revisioning a Transit Agency into a Mobility Company Through Integration and Marketing Strategies.” MtE: Innovation in Motion; Mobility. http://www.movingtheeconomy.ca/content/csPDF/ ParisCaseStudyAug2.pdf Newman, Peter. Model Cities: Canada, Toronto and Vancouver Land Use – Transit Success Stories. Perth: Institute for Sustainability and Technology Policy, 2000. Transit City. “Toronto Transit Commission Report: Toronto Transit City – Light Rail Plan.” Toronto Transit Commission (Toronto, ON, Canada), March 12, 2007. www.transitcity.ca United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs. “Population Growth in Cities.” Chap 6 in World Urbanization Prospects: The 2001 Revision. New York: United Nations, 2002. http://www.un.org/esa/population/publications/wup2001/WUP2001report.htm Statistics Canada. “Population Counts for Census Metropolitan Areas and Census Agglomerations by Urban Core, Urban Fringe, Rural Fringe and Urban Areas, 2006 Census – 100% Data.” Statistics Canada 2006 Census, March 2007. http://www12.statcan.ca/english/ census06/data/popdwell/Table.cfm?T=207&CMA=535&S=0&O=A&RPP=25 Wikipedia. Nomadic. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nomadic (on Nomadic; accessed March 17, 2007). Wikipedia. Agrarian. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agrarian (on agrarian; accessed March 17, 2007). Wikipedia. Industrial Era. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_Era (on Industrial era; accessed March 17, 2007). Wikipedia. Suburbia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suburbia (on suburbia; accessed March 17, 2007). Wikipedia. Toronto. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/toronto (on toronto; accessed June 10, 2007).
SYSTEM HOME: FIRST YEAR STUDENT ESSAYS FROM THE WORLD HOUSE PROJECT 43
FINANCE
I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around will deprive the people of all property until their children wake-up homeless...The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people, to whom it properly belongs. —Thomas Jefferson
What is the finance system?
The financial system is one of the invisible components of a home, but is also one of the main drivers of housing. Money determines the options one has when it comes to housing; whether someone has a place to live or not, whether the home is rented or owned. Despite the power of the system of finances and its constant presence in daily life, it is a system that is little understood by most people, particularly the poorest of the poor. Billions of dollars are transacted daily, yet billions of people still live on less than $2 a day (Garson, 316). These people lack access to adequate shelter, food, health care, education and opportunity. There is power in understanding the financial system; power in learning and designing how to redirect the flow of capital into areas where the economy is stagnant or nonexistent. The ability to influence how and where money goes can create meaningful change, helping to meet the housing needs of a growing population and eliminate poverty as we know it.
SYSTEM HOME: FIRST YEAR STUDENT ESSAYS FROM THE WORLD HOUSE PROJECT 47
Historical Analysis
Traditional housing was the result of utilizing resources that could be gathered in the vicinity. Timber, earth, animal skins, and thatch, as a few examples, were resources that were readily available and appropriate for the area in which a shelter was being built. The construction was the result of local knowledge, time-tested technique and sweat equity. The occupants themselves, extended family and neighbours would be engaged to help in a home’s raising. In this system, outside financing was not necessary. Every part of the process was reliant on the labour and skills of one’s own self or those of family members and friends; an exchange based on necessity, relationships and barter. Within feudal societies, housing and landownership became a matter between nobility and peasantry. Peasants worked the land held by a lord by growing crops, harvesting resources, and crafting products. As a result, peasants supplied their own food and resources, but their primary purpose was to support the lord or lords who owned or leased the land. In exchange, the lord offered the peasantry military protection and relative stability. Housing in the feudal system was not about self-reliance but instead was part of a rigid social and economic contract with the landholding nobility. The Industrial Revolution ushered in a new era of housing and living patterns. As people left rural areas and moved to urban centers following the promise of economic prosperity from employment at new factories, housing was no longer about the connection to the land or the resources it offered. Renting was common, as was overcrowding in those areas of the cities that housed the poor working class. In reaction to the visible poverty that was exacerbated by the Great Depression, many governments of industrialized nations instigated programs that would reduce poverty though homeownership. Housing legislation was a priority in order to improve public health and safety, but was also a tool to encourage wealth accumulation. The rise of a middle class in the mid 1900s saw an increase in the number of people who could afford to buy and build their own homes. Bank mortgages, and mortgages through government programs became common means to purchase a home. Government programs continue to be used to assist potential homeowners who fall outside of a traditional bank’s criteria to buy a home. People lacking an established or positive credit history, those who are unemployed or underemployed, and those unable to afford a down payment on a house are often denied a traditional bank mortgage, but may qualify through a government backed program. Conventional mortgages are the most common way to purchase a home today. In Canada, as in many developed economies, the percentage of the population owning their own homes correlates with income level. The Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC) reports that “within the lowest income group (those earning less than $20,000 per year), only 37 percent are owners, compared with 90 percent in the highest income group (those with household incomes over $85,000)” (CMHC, Canadian Housing, 3). The average value of the homes and the percentage of monthly income directed towards housing costs as a portion of overall income also varies with income level. “For those that do own, the average value of the dwelling varies from $118,000 in the lowest income group to $227,000 in the highest” (CMHC, Canadian Housing, 3).
Those households in the lowest income bracket can spend almost half of their monthly income on housing while those in higher income brackets spend a smaller portion of their income on housing. The result is that lower income households have far less money available for other expenses and therefore cannot “fully participate in the social and economic life of communities” (CMHC, Canadian Housing, 4). One trend that does cross income levels is the level of mortgage debt to income that Canadian households are carrying. “The ratio of average mortgage debt to average aggregate after-tax income was about 30 percent in 1970. By 2005, it had reached 80 per cent, moving up from 76 percent the previous year” (CMHC, Canadian Housing, 28). The average cost of housing is also on the rise. In 2006, the average cost of a home in Toronto was $352,700. In Vancouver the average cost of housing was $509,876 (CMHC, Housing Market, 24) with average monthly costs averaging $2,322 based on a 25% down payment and 25-year amortization (Kane). Despite the significant amount of money needed to purchase a home, homeowners are often surprised by the real costs associated with buying and maintaining a home. Understanding each piece of the homeownership process is important to determining if obtaining a mortgage is financially possible and worthwhile. The down payment is a “portion of the price of the home (usually between 5% and 25%) that buyers must pay before they can apply to a bank, trust or credit union for a loan” The mortgage is a loan that is usually repaid in monthly installments over five to 25 years. “Both the amount borrowed (principle) plus the charge for borrowing the money (interest) must be repaid” (Settlement.org). Mortgage rates in Canada have moved slightly higher and are expected to rise modestly in the second half of 2007. Rising mortgage rates, combined with higher house prices will increase mortgagecarrying costs (CMHC, Housing Market, 4). Property taxes are another significant consideration for first time homebuyers. These are taxes paid to the municipal government that help finance local services such as police and fire protection, garbage and snow removal, road maintenance and public health. All property in Ontario is assessed by the Ontario Property Assessment Corporation (OPAC). If the home is a condominium, a condo fee is applied monthly for general building maintenance. Other hidden costs that should be considered are renovation costs, some of which can be quite substantial, especially if structural repairs are needed for older homes. Maintenance costs may also be significant depending on the style, size and age of the home. In addition, property appraisal fees, home inspection fees, service charges for connecting utilities, moving expenses and property insurance increase the overall cost of homeownership.
Future Trends
Though traditional bank mortgages and government programming has made homeownership a reality for many, the majority of the world’s population cannot access the capital needed to purchase their own home. The half of the world’s population – almost 3 billion people - living on less than $2 per day cannot leverage the money needed to accumulate assets like a home (Kramer, 26). Furthermore, this statistic has been criticized by some experts as an inadequate portrayal of the full scope of poverty (Reddy, 169). In the U.S. it is estimated that a family of four living at the poverty line lives on less than $11 per day. So what of the billions of people SYSTEM HOME: FIRST YEAR STUDENT ESSAYS FROM THE WORLD HOUSE PROJECT 49
who live on less than $3, $5 or less than $10 per day? They too will most likely have no opportunity to own their own home. In an attempt to overcome this gap between those who can access capital and those who cannot, several innovative programs have been implemented. The creation of microcredit was spurred by the realization that a relatively small amount of money can have a tremendous impact on a person’s ability to house and feed herself and her family. Microfinance programs offer small loans, technical assistance and support to low income people to help them start businesses. The mission of programs like the Grameen Bank and ACCION, which began in some of the poorest areas and are now operating throughout the world, is to help individuals self-sufficiently create wealth and move out of poverty. Since the 1970’s, when microfinance first began to take root, other organizations and individuals have built from the original idea, founding programs intended to create economic opportunity for the world’s poorest. Microinsurance programs help individuals who lack health, life and liability insurance to pool their premiums together to create a safety net for businesses, homes and families. Individual development account programs promote the accumulation of wealth by helping low income people establish savings accounts. These savings are often matched with small grants that can be used towards starting a business or buying a home. While microfinance and savings programs have helped many individuals realize their goals of establishing credit history, owning their own homes and starting their own businesses, these programs function around a powerful banking system that institutionally excludes the poor. The next and most powerful trend in the world of global finance will be those initiatives that push dramatic changes in the banking system or create real alternatives to this handful of global banks that transact the majority of the world’s capital. Alternatives include innovative cooperative ownership schemes, where people can pool their capital and lend and invest in each other, instead of paying interest and fees to a bank that is making a relatively small number of wealthy people even wealthier. While mortgages are the staple for homeowners in most developed nations, it is not the only, nor the best model. There is much room for the implementation of innovative, equitable financial tools that create opportunity but also bring real wealth to a broader range of people. Another alternative to the current banking system is the emergence of dynamic partnerships between global business and underdeveloped areas. The incentive to develop new untapped markets will create the shift needed to forever change the Global South and inevitably, the Global North with it. There is tremendous wealth to be made by corporations who are able to unleash the capital potential in those areas of the world where money is scarce but the population is large, and growing everyday. There is swelling demand for the broad range of products and services available in developed economies. While globalization has brought the taste for commercial products and some very real negative side effects, can the inroads globalization has made also contribute to positive change? Can the increased presence and power of multi-national corporations in developing countries be capitalized on and redirected to create economic opportunity for the poorest of the poor living in the areas that need it most desperately? What is needed are more grass-roots solutions grounded in a sound understanding of the realities faced by the world’s poor and a keen eye for opportunities that can attract and sustain capital. Top-down development approaches used by governments and institutions like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund seldom instill the changes that are intended. Bureaucratic, inflexible and out of touch with the actuality of those in dire poverty, these programs have failed and, in many cases, created additional obstacles. However,
SAMPLE HOMES
Malay House
The traditional Malay house is an example of a home constructed from available materials and built by the dwellers themselves. Constructed of wooden or bamboo walls and a thatched roof, these houses are most often set in rural areas where the main economic activities of the people are farming and fishing. As a result, during the off-season when prime fishing and farming has passed, the focus shifts to homebuilding. Additions are made to an existing shelter as a family accumulates savings or as the family’s needs grow. This traditional addition system allows the house to meet the changing needs of the homeowners according to their financial resources and does not create heavy financial burden (Lim, 85). Suburban Home
The common suburban subdivision home is an example of a popular way to build and finance a home in many developed countries. Designed, sourced and built by a team of professionals, contractors and subcontractors, the materials used are fairly standardized, often sourced from outside of the local area. Financed primarily through bank mortgages, the homeowners will pay the principal and interest on this mortgage for an average of 15 to 25 years or longer. Shack/Slum Dwellers International
Shack/Slum Dwellers International (SDI), an organization of individuals, primarily women, who live in some of the world’s most prominent slums, have created saving and credit circles. The members of these circles make daily deposits into a shared savings pool. From this, small loans are made for income generating activities. In some areas, the accumulated savings were enough to allow the participating women to obtain land and build housing for themselves and others in the community. Frustrated by shelters that are designed and built by governments, international NGOs and other outside parties for those living in slum areas, members of SDI have begun to design and build housing for themselves. With a clear understanding of the needs and wants of people living in these areas, they are creating homes using available materials, financed through pooled savings programs, and built by local contractors and by the home’s new owners. Thousands of homes throughout the slum areas in Africa, India and Southeast Asia have been built through this community design/build process (Shack).
SYSTEM HOME: FIRST YEAR STUDENT ESSAYS FROM THE WORLD HOUSE PROJECT 51
initiatives that come from those living and working with and within the areas needing change are more likely to get to the heart of problem if given the resources and the opportunity. Financial mechanisms that emerge as a result of opportunities in the marketplace are those that can be sustained and have the most meaningful impact. Examples of such initiatives impacting both the Global North and South are peer-to-peer lending models such as Kiva (www.kiva.org), which connects potential lenders with small business owners from the developing world. Using the Internet as a means of communication and a transparent lending platform, Kiva is able to facilitate one-on-one lending schemes that would otherwise be impossible. Other peer lending sites can be found online linking would be lenders with those looking for loans ranging in size and purpose – from small to large, from college tuition to the cost of a home. These models emerged from the failure of the current banking system to meet the credit needs of many varied lenders and borrowers. In doing so they are creating wealth and opportunity outside of the regulation and transaction costs of the traditional system. The increasing economic and social interconnectedness of the Global North and South cannot be ignored. The changes that occur and the needed change that does not take place will impact both the developed and developing economies of the world. There is tremendous wealth held by a relatively few powerful corporations and individuals. The test of society’s ability to find a more equitable circulation of this wealth between rich and poor will not be a forced redistribution but will be the innovative use of the marketplace to redirect the flow of capital. Using the same understanding of the power of the markets and the pull of capital that has created a great of deal of wealth for the wealthy can be used to create prosperity for the poor. The need for this kind of thinking is evident in the Global South, in areas where there is insufficient capital to obtain the resources required to build a safe, functional home. It shows itself in another context in the Global North where an over consumption of resources produce monster houses that, in turn, strain its owners financially. In this scenario, banks own the homes and control the homeowners’ ability to manage the rest of their wealth. What is needed is an alternative that falls somewhere in between these two extremes. The answer lies in the innovative design of homes that offer a new financial model. A home built with renewable materials that uses alternative energy sources is not truly sustainable if its cost leaves the homeowner financially strained over the next 25 years. Worse still, the cost of this ‘sustainable’ home often precludes those making anything less than $100,000 from owning it. Likewise a mobile, prefabricated shelter that is built in North America and shipped for use in a slum area of Africa may provide better housing than what is locally available, but what of the environmental costs of its transport and lost opportunities for local labour and materials? Housing design and the economic mechanism that make a structure a reality must be fundamentally intertwined. This can happen using the best of old building knowledge like the Malay House and those of other traditional cultures in combination with new technology like rapid prototyping, nanotechnology and those not yet discovered. Old and new knowledge combined with an understanding of the economic realities of the global community will allow for the development of a new breed of housing. Housing that is affordable, healthy, scalable, expandable, universal and financially dynamic whether it is on a site in a North American suburb or an informal settlement in Africa. The current prevailing financial model is too exclusive and is often a great burden even to those it does include, stifling the potential for greater wealth for a greater number of people. In the meantime, tremendous economic and social potential is being wasted away. The home is the base from which advancements in health, education, entrepreneurialism, social consciousness and all things good can grow. Without adequate shelter there is economic and social stagnation. A redesign of the whole system of housing could be the beginning of a more equitable, healthier, wealthier world.
GLOSSARY TERMS
ACCION – “The mission of ACCION International
is to give people the tools they need to work their way out of poverty. By providing “micro” loans and business training to poor women and men who start their own businesses, ACCION’s partner lending organizations help people work their own way up the economic ladder, with dignity and pride. With capital, people can grow their own businesses. They can earn enough to afford basics like running water, better food and schooling for their children” (ACCION).
the risks they face. Suggested by the name, most transactions involve small amounts of money, frequently less than 100 USD. Grameen Bank - is a microfinance organization
and community development bank started in Bangladesh that makes small loans (known as microcredit) to the impoverished without requiring collateral. The system is based on the idea that the poor have skills that are under-utilized. The bank also accepts deposits, provides other services, and runs several development-oriented businesses Microfinance - is a term for the practice of including fabric, telephone and energy companies. providing financial services, such as microcredit, The organization and its founder, Muhammad microsavings or microinsurance to poor people. By Yunus, were jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize helping them to accumulate usably large sums of in 2006. money, this expands their choices and reduces BIBLIOGRAPHY
ACCION International. About ACCION: Our Mission. ACCION International, 2005. http://www.accion .org/about_our_mission.asp Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation. Housing Market Outlook: Canada Edition (First Quarter 2007). Ottawa: CMHC, 2007. Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation. Canadian Housing Observer 2006. Ottawa: CMHC, 2006. Counts, A. Give Us Credit. New York: Times Books Random House, 1996. Garson, B. Money Makes the World Go Around. New York: Penguin Books, 2001. Kane, Michael. “Average mortgage costs $2,322 per month: Vancouver area close to levels last reached before previous downturns.” Vancouver Sun, September 13, 2006. http://www.canada.com/ vancouversun/news/ story.html?id=f4afa1ea-4411-4f57-aace-6bdb08d6a719&k=4428 Kramer, M. Dispossessed: Life in Our World’s Urban Slums. New York: Orbis Books, 2006. Lim, J. Y. The Malay House: Rediscovering Malaysia’s Indigenous Shelter System. Pulau Pinang: Institute Masyarakat, 1987. Reddy, S. G. “Counting the Poor: The Truth about the World Poverty Statistics.” The Socialist Register (London: Merlin, 2006): 169-176. Settlement.Org, “What does it cost to buy a house?” http://www.settlement.org/sys/faqs_detail .asp?faq_id=4000314 *Shack / Slum Dwellers International. “Report 4: Face to Face; A Comprehensive Detailed Discussion of the Ideas, Practices, and Results of Horizontal or Community-to-Communcity Exchanges within the SDI Network.” South Africa: SDI. http://www.sdinet.org/reports/r4.htm Whitney P., Steelcase, and R. C. Pew. “Designing for the Base of the Pyramid.” Design Management Journal (Fall 2004): 41-48. Yunus, Muhammad. “New Type of Capitalism Can Help Eradicate Poverty.” Nobel Lecture. Oslo. December 10, 2006. http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/2006/yunus-lecture-en.html Yunus, M. Banker to the Poor: Microlending and the Battle Against World Poverty. New York: PublicAffairs, 1999.
SYSTEM HOME: FIRST YEAR STUDENT ESSAYS FROM THE WORLD HOUSE PROJECT 53
Well, look at it. Every piece of it is there because the house needs it – and for no other reason. You see it from here as it is inside. The rooms in which you’ll live made the shape. The relation of masses was determined by the distribution of space within...Your house is made by its own needs. —Ayn Rand
PHOTO - Mathare, Nairobi, Africa by Melanie MacDonald (The rooftops of
Mathare Valley, the second largest slum in Nairobi, Kenya.)
NOURISH
Terrain
“Humans are the only species that take from the soil vast quantities of nutrients needed for biological processes but rarely puts them back in a usable form. Our systems are no longer designed to return nutrients in this way, except on small, local levels.” —William McDonough and Michael Braungart
SYSTEM HOME: FIRST YEAR STUDENT ESSAYS FROM THE WORLD HOUSE PROJECT 57
Every aspect of the natural world can be depicted as a cycle. For centuries, societies understood that their lifecycle was part of the larger ecological cycle. In ancient civilizations rain, bountiful harvests and fertile soil were celebrated as gifts from the gods. Today, we are less connected to this understanding, and move further away from nature’s cycles as if it were the most normal thing. Modern consumption and lifestyle patterns have changed the way we eat, build, design, learn and live; and how we interact with water and food resources. In pre-industrial societies, land was used to meet a family’s needs, and surplus produce was sold in local markets. Specialized goods were available only on specified days, in locations such as the town square. Products were made from natural materials, and as a result, were completely biodegradable. Melting and recycling metals was common practice. The use and reuse of natural materials maintained a reciprocal relationship between nature and mankind, and frugality was honoured. The Industrial Revolution had a major impact on the social, economic, cultural and technological conditions of the 18th century. The shift from manual labour to mechanized factory work boosted cities’ production capacity. Advances in medicine and sanitation led to an increase in population and life expectancy. Steam engines, canals, railways, and internal combustion engines appeared, as well as the capitalist economic system. The transfer of information across these channels resulted in rapid adoption of new ideas. In spite of these positive evolutions, products were increasingly manufactured using environmentally destructive processes, and in such a way that they could not return to the earth at the end of their lifecycle. This is a particularly crucial detail, since the industrial era also marked the beginning of design for obsolescence. Due to globalized trade, low-wage labour markets and cheap fuel, it is now often cheaper for consumers to buy new products rather than repair old ones. “Out with the old and in with the new” is the motto. Industries design products with an expiration date, and consumers are encouraged to keep up with technology and trends. The Industrial Revolution also resulted in mechanical farming equipment, artificial fertilizers, pesticides, genetically modified seeds, and mass monoculture production. This last point means that many regions are now required to import foreign produce, since arable land is occupied mainly by crops which must be processed before they are edible. As a result, respect for land as the provider of food has diminished. As well, the fastpaced lifestyle of the industrialized world has generated a preference for convenience foods. Supercentres have taken over from farmers’ markets for food distribution, and prepackaged foods often replace fresh produce on dinner tables.
Dissecting the Message
“In a culture like ours, long accustomed to splitting and dividing all things as a means of control, it is sometimes a bit of a shock to be reminded that, in operational and practical fact, the medium is the message. This is merely to say that the personal and social consequences of any medium - that is, of any extension of ourselves - result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology” (McLuhan, 7). In Understanding Media Marshall McLuhan predicted that the era of electronic communication and mass media would change human consciousness, erase national borders, decentralize traditional social structures and create a global village. Was McLuhan right? We cannot deny the great influence that mass media has on modern society. It is well known that marketing campaigns and media information often misinform consumers to serve the interests of manufacturers and service industries. As consumers, we should look beyond these messages. We should question where and how our food is produced, where our water comes from and how our waste is disposed of. As a society we need to understand that in order to alleviate stresses on the environment, change needs to start from within – within our household, within ourselves. There are several drivers that have impacted ecosystems and human lifestyles in recent years. The changes are, at first, unnoticeable, until one realizes that within our closed-loop cycle, a stressed element creates a ripple effect that will eventually cause all parts to suffer. Theses drivers are as follows:
• Population growth increases demand for food and water. Consequently, waste increases.
• Income growth improves standards of living, which results in increased domestic water use, as well as
increased overall consumption. Again, waste increases.
• Fast-paced, industrialized societies create a dependence on the consumption of unhealthy fast food and
frozen convenience foods. The manufacturing of packaging for these products, and the energy required to freeze them accounts for 70% to 80% of the food industry’s overall emissions (Jancovici). This packaging is most often non-recyclable (Jancovici).
Interest in the Non-Obvious
The Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro was claimed to be a historical event in human history. The message was clear: nothing less than a transformation of our attitudes and behavior would bring about the necessary changes…poverty as well as excessive consumption by affluent populations place damaging stress on the environment (UNCED).
SYSTEM HOME: FIRST YEAR STUDENT ESSAYS FROM THE WORLD HOUSE PROJECT 59
People from around the globe listened, and were engaged in the process. Nations joined together to take action and commit to sustainable practices. Governments agreed that the integration of environment and development concerns will lead to the fulfillment of basic needs, improved standards for all, better protected and better managed ecosystems and a safer and a more prosperous future. No nation can achieve this on its own. Together we can — in a global partnership for sustainable development (UNCED). Transnational alliances and sustainable strategies that are shared around the world will help ensure prosperity for generations to come. Now that we are connected virtually, we need to repeat the transfer of information and implementation of innovative practices that occurred during the Industrial Revolution. In order to maintain similarly high production rates without placing stress on the environment, we need to understand the lifecycle stages of food, water and waste. By practicing sustainable extraction, harvesting, processing, manufacturing, distribution, use and reuse, we will find that available resources multiply. Eco-efficiency is a term that was coined by the World Business Council for Sustainable Development
(WBCSD) in 1992, and introduced at the Earth Summit of Rio de Janeiro that same year. The concept claims that we can create more goods and services with fewer resources, resulting in less waste and pollution, and without harming the economy. Look to nature for answers. Look beyond the obvious. Ask yourself ‘on what kind of planet do I want to live?’ and take responsibility for creating that place.
GLOSSARY TERMS
Global Village – Marshall McLuhan
used this term in his book The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962). McLuhan describes how electronic media will replace visual culture, and allow humans to interact with each other globally, forming an interconnected tribe. Earth Summit – The United Nations
Conference on Environment and Development held in Rio de Janeiro from June 3 – 14, 1992. Achievements include: Agreement on the Climate Change Convention and the Convention for Biological Diversity.
Eco-Efficiency – As defined by the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD), “ecoefficiency is achieved by the delivery of competitively priced goods and services that satisfy human needs and bring quality of life, while progressively reducing ecological impacts and resource intensity throughout the lifecycle to a level at least in line with the Earth’s estimated carrying capacity” (WBCSD).
BIBLIOGRAPHY
International Water Management Institute. “World Water and Climate Atlas”. http://www.iwmi.cgiar.org/WAtlas/atlas.htm. (accessed March 13, 2007). Jancovici, Jean-Marc. ¨How Much Greenhouse Gases in [sic.] Our Plate?¨ www .manicore.com/anglais/documentation_a/greenhouse/plate.html (accessed February 12, 2007). McDonough, William, and Michael Braungart. Cradle to Cradle – Remaking the Way We Make Things. New York: North Point Press, 2002. McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. London: Routledge Classics, 2003. Meadows, Donella. “Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System.” Hartland, Vermont: Sustainability Institute, 1999. New York Times, ¨Rachel Carson Dies of Cancer: ‘Silent Spring’ Author was 56,¨ Obituary, April 25, 1964. http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/ bday/0527.html (accessed March 13, 2007). Soloman, Debra. ¨The Edible City.¨ Culiblog, February 26, 2007. http://www .culiblog.org/2007/02/the-edible-city/ (accessed March 6, 2006). United Nations Conference on Environment and Development. ¨UN Conference on Environment and Development (1992): Earth Summit Briefing Notes.” http:// www.un.org/geninfo/bp/enviro.html (accessed February 22, 2007). United Nations Environment Programme. Geo Yearbook 2006: An Overview of Our Changing Environment. CITY: UNEP, 2006. World Business Council for Sustainable Development. ¨Eco-efficiency Learning Module.¨ WBCSD, January 30, 2006. http://www.wbcsd.org/plugins/DocSearch/details .asp?txtDocTitle=eco%20efficiency%20%20learning%20module&txtDocText=eco%20efficiency%20%2 0learning%20module&DocTypeId=-1&ObjectId=MTc5OTI&URLBack=result%2Easp%3FtxtDocTitle%3D eco+efficiency++learning+module%26txtDocText%3Deco+efficiency++learning+module%26DocTypeId %3D%2D1%26SortOrder%3D%26CurPage%3D1 (accessed
March 13, 2007).
World Water Council. “Water and Nature” http://www.worldwatercouncil.org/ index.php?id=21 (accessed March 13, 2007). PHOTO - NASA, Terrain of Glacier Bay, http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsroom/NewImages/images.php3?img_id=16383 SYSTEM HOME: FIRST YEAR STUDENT ESSAYS FROM THE WORLD HOUSE PROJECT 61
WATER
Nothing on earth is so weak and yielding as water, but for breaking down the firm and strong it has no equal. —Lao-Tsze
What is the water system?
Where there is water, there is life. Water plays the key role in cleansing our bodies, producing the food we ingest and removing the waste we excrete. Water flows down from the roofs of our dwellings and up from the earth into our sinks and baths. We use it daily in our homes, often with little awareness or regard to where it comes from, where it goes, or what happens to it in between. Those who have it, often take it for granted, conserving little and wasting lots. Those who don’t could only dream of having such a luxury.
SYSTEM HOME: FIRST YEAR STUDENT ESSAYS FROM THE WORLD HOUSE PROJECT 65
Historical Analysis
Only when water supplies are adequate can life thrive and civilizations emerge. Early peoples settled where water was available and moved on when resources went dry. Water was viewed as a sacred life-giving gift from the gods, unpredictable and mysterious. The first major civilizations in the Fertile Crescent, India and China all emerged around rivers, which brought nourishment to their inhabitants and carried away waste. Over time, water was artificially rerouted to meet the needs of burgeoning populations. Irrigation systems increased the capacity of arable land, aquaducts and pipes were created as man-made extensions of rivers and sewer systems moved water through impermeable urban landscapes. As people began to realize the potential for water to power mechanics, it became widely utilized as an energy source. Industrial activity in the 1700s exploited and relied heavily on the capacity of water and the steam engine to power mass industry and transportation (Thurston). This forever changed the way people lived and worked. The increase in factory industry created a physical divide between work life and home life. As people raced to the cities for employment in the Industrial Revolution, population density rose, and contagious diseases spread easily. With the invention of the microscope, it was discovered that unclean water could carry the increasingly common illnesses (UCLA). The movement to increase sanitation and water services to home spurred the creation of water treatment plants and delivery standards that affect every home in cities and towns to this day.
Future Trends
We are now faced with the treatment of water as a commodity. Mass bottling and efforts to privatize water sources has changed the way people and homes access water. How will we treat water in the future? As a commodity? As a service? As a right? The next section will further examine issues and potential solutions for water use in an increasingly droughtridden world.
SAMPLE HOMES
Traditional Roman Atrium House
Water was a focus for much of daily life in Roman culture. Celebratory fountains concluded the journey of water to cities by way of large aqueducts. Baths provided a social gathering place for citizens, and fountains and basins dedicated to the gods of water were prominent features of the upper class. In the traditional Roman atrium house rainwater was collected in an impluvium, a small basin located at the center of the atrium. Underground cisterns would store any excess water to be used for household chores. The impluvium had a cooling effect, as water evaporated from the pool on hot days, conditioning the air in the atrium and home. The impluvium was also the first artifice people encountered upon entering the home (Paloheimo).
Toronto Healthy Home
In the Toronto Healthy Home, all water enters the home from a cistern that collects rainwater, rather than the usual municipal pipeline. Through a series of integrated treatment systems including a UV filter, septic tank and Waterloo Biofilter, the Toronto Healthy Home treats and recycles all used water from sinks, toilets and laundry facilities and redistributes it appropriately. All sinks in the bathroom and kitchen, including the dishwasher, dispense safe, clean drinking water. Toilets and showers use grey water or water that has been recycled from previous usage that is not required to meet potable standards. Through conservation and reuse, the amount of water used in the home does not exceed the amount of water harvested from rainfall (Illustrated History). Innovations
Tippy Tap – For many developing nations, water accessibility and sanitation are prominent issues that almost every household deals with. Hand washing is an integral step in keeping individuals safe from disease and epidemics at bay. However, when water is scarce or inaccessible, hand washing can often seem like an afterthought, or even a waste. Tippy taps, with an easy do-it-yourself design, dispense just enough water for people to clean their hands with friction instead of typical soap and copious amounts of water, thereby changing our perception of proper hygiene and disease control (United States Centres for Disease Control). Waterloo Biofilter – Septic tanks are a common way to purify water for many households in North America. Wastewater from the home is treated in tanks dependant on bacteria to digest and ferment organic waste. The Waterloo Biofilter ads one more step into this process, purifying water to an almost potable standard. As water passes through the sponge-like medium that contains organic biomasses, organic material is oxidized and ammonia is denitrified (Waterloo Biofilter). UV Waterworks – UV waterworks uses what many ancient civilizations discovered as method of water purification – the sun. Radiation from the sun kills pathogens, making water clean and drinkable. Though large particles have to be removed first, usually through filtration, UV radiation is capable of killing 90 percent of the harmful, disease-causing pathogens found in water, without the use of chemical additives such as chlorine. It is safe, relatively inexpensive, and can be installed into the home using little space or resources (Paloheimo). Eco-Machines – In the Ocean Ark, biologist and innovator John Todd uses water alongside plants to treat waste, thereby combining the water and waste system in an ecosystem setting. In his self-contained eco-machines, Todd has been able to grow and harvest vegetables, mushrooms and fish (Todd, 77-92).
SYSTEM HOME: FIRST YEAR STUDENT ESSAYS FROM THE WORLD HOUSE PROJECT 67
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Illustrated History of the Roman Empire. The Roman House. http://www .roman-empire.net/society/soc-house.html (accessed June 11, 2007). Paloheimo, Rolf and Bob LeCrew. “Reusing Treated Wastewater in Domestic Housing: The Toronto Healthy Home.” Paper presented at the Disposal Trenches, Pre-treatment and Re-Use of Waste Water Conference, Waterloo Centre for Groundwater Research and the University of Waterloo, May 13, 1996. http://mha-net.org/msb/html/ papers-n/palo01/wastewa.htm (accessed June 11, 2007). Thurston, Robert H. A History of the Growth of the Steam-Engine. http://www.history.rochester.edu/steam/thurston/1878/Chapter1.html (accessed June 11, 2007). Todd, Nancy Jack. A Safe and Sustainable World. Washington DC: Island Press, 2005. UCLA Department of Epidemiology School of Public Health. Broad Street Pump Outbreak. http://www.ph.ucla.edu/epi/snow/broadstreetpump .html (accessed June 11, 2007). United States Centres for Disease Control and Prevention. Tippy Taps: A Design for Simple, Economical, and Effective Handwashing Stations. CDC http://www.cdc.gov/safewater/publications_pages/tippy-tap.pdf (accessed June 11, 2007). Waterloo Biofilter. http://www.cdc.gov/safewater/publications_pages/tippy -tap.pdf (accessed June 11, 2007).
WATER IN DEPTH
Water Sources
There is a finite quantity of water in the earth and atmosphere as it circulates through the hydrological cycle (Figure 1) (Stein, 859, fig.20.4a). As shown, over 99% of the earth’s water is contained in either saltwater or glaciers and, although they are abundant water resources, both are currently considered “inaccessible” sources for drinking water.
Glaciers and polar ice caps: 29,200 stored
Atmosphere: 13 stored Daily precipitation: 160
Daily runoff: 100
Daily precipitation: 775
Daily evaporation: 260
Daily evaporation: 875
Daily transfer by winds: 100
Soil Moisture: 67 stored Freshwater lakes and rivers: 126 stored
Oceans, seas, saline lakes: 1,320,100 stored
Groundwater: 8350 stored
Fig. 1 Hydrological cycle – Water supply in KM 3
Given the cost and complexities involved in extracting and treating water from the oceans or glaciers, rainwater harvesting becomes an ideal candidate, as it is considered a water source with low impurity levels. Runoff streams provide another promising source as the concentrated flow allows for easy capture, but typically accumulates contaminants along the way. Figure 2 provides an illustration of the water quality within the hydrological cycle (Stein, 859, fig.20.4b).
Fresh
Pure Precipitation - increases acidity - decreases organic content - water becomes “soft” (pH LESS THAN 7) Fresh Runoff - increases organic content - increases temperature, affects colour Evaporation purifies
Fresh Percolation - increases mineral content - decreases organic content - water becomes “hard” (pH MORE THAN 7)
Salty
Fig. 2 Hydrological cycle – Water quality
SYSTEM HOME: FIRST YEAR STUDENT ESSAYS FROM THE WORLD HOUSE PROJECT 69
Water Quality
A long history of water related diseases and deaths have lead to high levels of water disinfection and treatment. In North America, and most other developed countries, water quality standards and treatment regulations are in place to ensure that every drop of water entering a home is potable. Water treatment processes rely on tremendous energy and chemical inputs (typically chlorine) to adhere to the high quality standards. In order to reduce the load and energy inputs on a water treatment facility, designers should meet the intended use of the water and consider that potable drinking water is not needed to carry out low-grade functions within the home. Typically, water quality is described by four major characteristics: physical, chemical, biological and radiological. The following table summarizes these characteristics, their cause, their negative impact and potential treatments to improve the quality (Stein, 894-896). BAD EFFECT
CAUSE
TREATMENT
Physical Characteristics – Most noticeable aspect of water quality, typically affects roof runoff, streams, rivers, lakes and ponds Turbidity
Opaque. Less of a health concern, more of an aesthetic issue
Suspended clay, silt or inorganic/organic materials
Filtration
Colour
Typically not health related but can discolour fixtures and cloths
Iron, manganese and dissolved organics
Chlorination or ozonation and fine filtration
Taste & Odor
Unpleasant
Organic matter, dissolved salts or gases
Requires chemical analysis. Filtration through activated carbon; aeration
Chemical Characteristics – Typically affects ground water Alkalinity
Inhibits ability to neutralize against acids
Bicarbonate, carbonate or hydroxide components
Varies depending on cause
Hardness
Clogging of pipes. Impacts effectiveness of soaps and detergents and decreases heating efficiency
Calcium and magnesium salts from underground flow
Ion exchange, typically can’t be removed by heating
pH
Impacts corrosiveness and health of marine life
Dissolved carbon dioxide and effluent
Neutralizing chemical treatment
Toxic substances
Exposure to unhealthy chemicals – arsenic, lead, cadmium, mercury, pesticides, copper
Unsecured chemical waste dumps, effluent discharge*
Biological Characteristics – Typically impacts surface water Biological pollution
Disease
Contamination of organic matter or sewage
Chlorination or ozonation. Dark and low temperature storage
Radiological Characteristics – Water supplies close to radioactive mining or power plants Radioactive pollution
Deadly health risks
Power plant effluent, landfill leakage or mining
*The U.S. EPA estimates that 75% of chemical waste dumps are leaking into ground water tables and soil – some chemicals linked to 5-20% of cancer caused in the U.S. (Stein, 896). Table 1: Water quality and treatments
Water Quality Facts Water quality is easily jeopardized when in contact with common toxic industrial substances. The following table provides an indication of the contamination capability of various substances and their respective impact on a water source (Environment Canada). CONTAMINANT
WATER QUALITY IMPACT
1 drop of petroleum oil
25L of water unfit for drinking
1g of 2,4-D*
10 million litres of drinking water contaminated
1g of PCB (polychlorinated biphenyls)
1 billion litres of water unsuitable for freshwater aquatic life
1g of lead
20,000 litres of water unfit for drinking (a concern in older homes with lead plumbing)
Soft water
Linked to increases in cardiovascular diseases
*2,4-Dichlorophenoxyacetic acid is the most widely used herbicide in the world.
Table 2: Water quality facts
Water Filtration
Filtration is typically the first form of treatment in a water cleaning process, as it is one of the oldest and simplest methods for removing suspended particles, some bacteria and taste and odors. Although numerous techniques are available, in principle, particles are removed by passing water through a permeable fabric or porous membrane. The following list provides a brief description of several separating processes, ranging in cost, effectiveness and complexity (Stein, 897-899). • Sedimentation – Before entering a filter, this process utilizes time and gravity to separate the heavy and
light particles in a basin. It provides a cost effective and low-maintenance process that separates and removes heavier particulates.
• Coagulation and flocculation – A chemical such as alum (hydrated aluminum sulfate) is added to turbulent
water and allowed to mix evenly throughout. The water is then allowed to settle. Settled particles will combine and group with the alum. These heavy particles can then be removed in a similar method to sedimentation.
• Slow sand filtration – Although not suitable for highly turbid water, slow sand filtration provides an effective
means to separate particles through a natural filtration process. Slow sand filters are low maintenance, easily constructed and only require cleaning as often as the turbid water demands. This simple method cleans by removing the top inch layer of the sand, which can either be washed and re-introduced or discarded. The water should not be chlorinated prior to entering the sand filter, as it will interfere with the biological separation. These filters are able to remove up to 99.9% of Giardia cysts and, combined with an effective disinfection process, provide a low-cost and low maintenance water treatment. A potential drawback is that sand filters require slow flow rates in order to be effective; 40 to 140 gallons per day per square foot of filter bed surface are needed, and water cannot be stored outside if freezing temperatures are expected.
SYSTEM HOME: FIRST YEAR STUDENT ESSAYS FROM THE WORLD HOUSE PROJECT 71
Membrane filtration – This rapidly developing technique can remove bacteria, Giardia and some viruses, as water at high pressures is passed through a hollow fiber or spiral-wrapped membranes. Filters are able to remove all particles greater than 0.2 micron and do not require any chemical pre-treatment.
Water Disinfection
Water disinfection is the most important health related water treatment as it destroys microorganisms that cause disease in humans. The disinfection process consists of a primary and a secondary application, where the primary treatment kills or inactivates the microorganisms, while the secondary treatment maintains disinfection and prevents re-growth in the water. Chlorination is the standard and universal disinfection method, as it is highly effective and acts as both a primary and secondary means to inactivate or kill bacteria and pathogens (Stein, 899). However, chlorination presents design constraints and health issues, as it is an extremely corrosive agent and is considered deadly in high concentrations. Due to health concerns related to chlorination, many countries attempt to minimize the amount of chlorine required, relying on other effective primary disinfection treatments and, if required, using chlorine as the secondary treatment. Table 3 provides a brief summary of pros and cons of the more common water disinfection methods (Stein, 900-901). TREATMENT
Chlorination
Ozonation
PROS
CONS
Primary and secondary water disinfection method
Highly corrosive
Highly effective at inactivating pathogens and bacteria
Chlorine gas is highly toxic
Considered a low-energy and low-cost treatment
Chlorine taste or odor is present with higher dosage
No toxins introduced, as ozone is formed by passing dry air (or oxygen) through high voltage electrodes.
Only provides primary disinfection, still requires secondary treatment (typically chlorine)
Powerful oxidizing and disinfecting agent that kills most bacteria, viruses and pathogens
Electricity accounts for 26-43% of operating costs (for a small system)
Requires less contact time and dosage than chlorine
High operational and maintenance costs
Leaves no chlorine taste or odors Unused ozone quickly decays to oxygen
Ultraviolet Radiation
Nanofiltration
Special UV lamps or the sun is used to deactivate microorganisms
Requires secondary water treatment to prevent regrowth
Effective primary treatment against bacteria and viruses without the addition of harmful chemicals
Ineffective against Giardia and cryptosporidium cist
Requires short contact time
Ineffective in water with high turbidity or solid content
Less than 1 nanometer pore size, capable of removing bacteria, viruses, pesticides and organic materials.
Requires high water pressure to pass through pores
Highly effective primary water treatment with no added chemicals
Filter requires periodic cleaning to remove deposits Secondary treatment required
Seawater occupies over 97% of the total water supply on earth - an abundant water resource.
Tremendous energy demand to thermally or physically separating the dissolved salt from the water
Effective primary treatment
High operating costs
Desalination*
More expensive than building a storm water or water recycling plant Produces heavily concentrated brine, which is usually dumped back to sea or deposited in landfill/well Requires secondary treatment
* Source: Texas Water Development Board
Table 3: Water Disinfection Methods
Water Usage
Water is an essential resource for both human health and life. It provides nourishment for our daily existence, plays a key role in industry and agriculture, and is a major influence on both the sanitation and hygiene within a community. However, high levels of water usage can lead to significant environmental and economic problems. As water consumption increases, so too does the extraction rate from rivers, ground water, lakes and aquifers, thereby increasing the stress on the particular source and the polluted effluent that is discharged back to the ecosystem. Higher consumption rates also inflate the demand and load on water treatment and sewage facilities, increasing both the energy and chemicals needed to purify the water. A comparative study of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries was carried out in 2000 to understand the usage and dependence of water in the developed countries. The results shows that Canada ranks 28th of 29 nations, second only to the United States as the greatest water consuming country per capita. An average Canadian uses 1600m3 of water per year; twice as much as an average person living in France, more than three times as much as an average German and more than eight times as much as the average Dane. Since 1980, the overall water usage in Canada has increased by 25.7%, five times higher than the overall OECD increase of 4.5%. In contrast, nine OECD nations have decreased their consumption since 1980, including Sweden, Netherlands, the United States, the United Kingdom, the Czech Republic, Luxembourg, Poland, Finland and Denmark (Boyd). One major contributing factor to poor water management in Canada is the lack of appreciation for the precious resource due to the minimal cost of home-delivery. A 1998 survey compared the normalized cost and usage of water in many of the developed countries. The results are shown in Figures 3 and 4, and confirm that on average, Canada offers the lowest cost per cubic meter of water (Environment Canada). It is therefore not surprising that such an inexpensive, yet precious resource is managed and used so carelessly. “The poor pay much more for water…[and] use much less – often contaminated” (World Water Council).
SYSTEM HOME: FIRST YEAR STUDENT ESSAYS FROM THE WORLD HOUSE PROJECT 73
Germany Belgium France United Kingdom Netherlands Finland Italy Sweden Ireland Spain United States Canada 0.00
0.50
1.00
1.50
2.00
300
400
2.50
Normalize Cost ($ / m3) Fig. 3: Water cost for OECD Countries (World Water Council)
Israel France Italy Sweden United States Canada 0
100
200
Average Daily Domestic Use (L/person/day) Fig. 4: Water consumption comparison (World Water Council)
Industrial Usage Although not related to the direct water consumption of a home, attention to both the construction material and energy usage of a home can have a significant impact on water consumption. A Canadian survey was carried out in 1996 to understand the water usage per sector. Results are summarized in Figure 5 (Environment Canada). 64% Thermal power generation 14% Manufacturing 12% Municipal 9% Agricultural 1% Mining Fig. 5: Water usage per sector
Typical power plants operate at approximately 40% efficiency, meaning 40% of the fuel energy is converted to usable electricity, while the remaining 60% is wasted as heat. As shown, thermal power generation is by far the greatest water user, relying on water for steam power and cooling. As an example, the production of 1kW hour of electricity requires 140L of water for a fossil fuel plant and 205L in a nuclear power plant. Any improvement in energy conservation will therefore also have a significant impact on water conservation (Environment Canada). The construction materials we select to build our homes have a significant impact on water usage, as water is a key ingredient in many conventional building products. Attention to the water management within the home and the building products will dictate the net water consumption in the life of the house. Table 4 provides an indication of some conventional building products and the amount of water required during the production process (Stein, 860). CONSTRUCTION MATERIAL
WATER REQUIREMENT
1 ton of bricks
580 gal
1 ton of steel
43,600 gal
1 ton of plastic
348,750 gal
94lb bag of cement
6 gal
Table 4: Water usage in construction
Domestic Usage The inexpensive cost of a once abundant resource in Canada has lead to poor water management strategies as the residential sector continues to ignore both water conservation and the function of high quality water within the home. Table 5 provides an indication of how the rate of urban water usage has increased over time, as a result of increased distribution and treatment capability at bargain prices (Stein, 860). LOCATION
WATER CONSUMPTION
Imperial Rome
38
London – 1912
40
American cities before WW2
115
Los Angeles – mid 1970’s
182
(GALLONS PER PERSON PER DAY)
Table 5: Urban water consumption
For centuries, the principle role of water in the home hasn’t changed, as it is needed for nourishment and is an ideal medium for heating, cleaning and waste removal. However, the low cost of water in North America has alienated the consumer from this precious resource. Figure 6 provides an illustration of the domestic water usage of an average American. As shown, the amount of pure (potable) water that is actually needed for drinking and cooking is very small, comprising of only 3 gallons of water per person per day (1.8% of the total domestic water consumed) (Stein, 856-857).
SYSTEM HOME: FIRST YEAR STUDENT ESSAYS FROM THE WORLD HOUSE PROJECT 75
1.8%
Consumption
8.4%
Clothes and dishes –14g/cd
12.6% Bathing and hygiene –21g/cd 19.2% Toilet flushing – 32g/cd 58%
Outdoor use
Fig. 6: Domestic water usage
Rainwater Harvesting
There are many similarities between rainwater and solar energy, as neither have been effectively utilized in the majority of modern architecture. For centuries, homes were built to harness both solar energy and rainwater to supply seasonal needs for heating and domestic water. Only in recent decades has this trend been neglected, becoming less inherent in design as pure and plentiful supplies of centrally treated water and concentrated, externally controlled energy became “abundant” with mass distribution and mechanized production and treatment facilities (Stein, 866). Given that only 3 gallons of drinking water are required per person per day in the U.S., a tremendous opportunity exists to harness rainwater for lower grade domestic functions. 58% of the domestic water consumed in the U.S. is used for outdoor functions such as watering lawns or plants, washing cars and hosing down driveways. An additional 19% is used to flush toilets. With minimal plumbing considerations, rainwater can carry out more than three quarters of the domestic functions without any form of treatment or purification. There exists “no more flagrant mismatch in architecture than the high-grade resource of pure water being used for the low-grade task of carrying away a cigarette butt” (Stein, 857). Although rainwater is considered a high quality source, when municipally treated potable water is available rainwater is not typically recommended as a potable drinking source due to potential contamination and poor quality control. However, given sufficient precipitation, adequate storage capacity and minimal filtration, rainwater can provide up to 95% of the domestic water needs. Rainwater Catchment and Storage For every inch of annual rainfall, it is generally possible to collect 600 gallons of water for every 1,000ft 2 roof area (Boedken, 2). Rainwater collection is best suited for new home applications or community developments where cisterns (water storage devices) can be installed during the beginning stages of the construction process. In existing homes effective, low-cost rain barrel collectors can be placed at the base of the eaves troughs to supply or supplement outdoor water usage. The following process provides an approximation for the catchment area and cistern storage volume required to supply the water needs of a home (Stein, 861-863).
1. Determine the amount of rainwater to supply the daily household need: g/cd x population = gdp (gallons per day for the household population) 2. Determine the yearly water requirement: gdp x 365 = gal/yr 3. Determine the Design Precipitation, which is two-thirds of the average annual precipitation. Average annual precipitation statistics are available from Environment Canada or the Weather Network (www .theweathernetwork.ca): average annual rainfall x 2/3 = Design Precipitation 4. Determine the catchment area required from Figure 7 (Stein, 863, fig. 20.5a): QUANTITY OF CATCHMENT = 0.75 TOTAL PERCIPITATION Yeild of catchment area (1000gal)
150 130 110 90 70
toa To
lP
e rc
i
at pit
ion
)6 (in
0 50 40
30
50
20
30
10
10 0
2000
4000
6000
Horizontal area of catchment (ft2) Fig. 7: Rainwater catchment area
5. Roughly size the cistern storage capacity by finding the longest dry period (in days of negligible rainfall) (www.theweathernetwork.ca): cistern capacity = gpd x days of dry period 6. Convert cistern capacity to volume, using: 1ft3 stores 7.48 gal of water
Water conservation
Homes commonly use large amounts of water for very low-grade tasks. Conservation reserves high quality water for high-grade tasks and emphasizes recycling as well as diminished overall usage. The conventional domestic water usage is shown in Figure 6, with minimal attention to water conservation or the grade and quality of the water for a particular function. The introduction of low-flow appliances and faucets can achieve a 25% reduction in water required for that same function (not including nourishment). Utilizing and storing rainwater for outdoor requirements can also provide up to an additional 50% water savings (depending on the storage capacity of the cistern). Any decrease in water consumption can have a tremendous impact on both the treatment and storm water facilities and for the occupant. The simple retrofit of a low-flow shower faucet will not only reduce the amount of water consumed, but will also significantly reduce hot water requirements and decrease energy bills. In a conventional house, showers demand up to 73% of hot water, therefore any means to either recover the drain water heat or reduce the amount of water that requires heating provides an additional benefit.
SYSTEM HOME: FIRST YEAR STUDENT ESSAYS FROM THE WORLD HOUSE PROJECT 77
A strategy to improve water conservation in the home is to promote more education around water consumption, as the occupant is more likely to alter his or her patterns once aware of the implications. Providing a visual strategy for the occupant will highlight how much water is used for a specific task. This can be achieved with a simple graph (comparing household use to local average consumption) or using a sight gauge in a rainwater storage tank to monitor remaining water level. Another means to introduce water conservation is through an audible strategy as the water is flowing. By undersizing water supply pipes, the water velocity becomes audible (3m/s) so that noise level is noticed and therefore not carelessly consumed.
Appendix
Design considerations and appliances that should be considered in order to reduce domestic water consumption.
Grease trap
Hair filter
Hair filter Water
Holding-tank
heat exchanger
DHW
Water
Primary filter (setting) Secondary filter Irrigation or recycle Fig. 8: Water conservation design strategy (Stein, 1039, fig. 22.53)
Water use per flush – conventional vs. ULV toilet 18 litres
6 litres
Low-flow showerhead with shut-off button (convenient for shutting off water temporarily while soaping or shampooing)
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Boedken, Anne. “Rainwater-Harvesting Questions and Answers.” Buildings, Aug 2006. Boyd, David Richard. Canada vs. The OECD: An Environmental Comparison. Victoria, B.C: University of Victoria, 2001. http://www .environmentalindicators.com/htdocs/ indicators/6wate.htm/ (accessed April 1, 2007). Also available as a pdf file for download. Environment Canada: The Management of Water: Water Use. Environment Canada. http://www.ec.gc.ca/water/ en/manage/use/e_use.htm/ (accessed April 1, 2007). Stein, Benjamin, John S. Reynolds, Walter T. Grondzik, and Alison G. Kwok. Mechanical and Electrical Equipment for Buildings. New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons, 2006. Texas Water Development Board. Desalination: Frequently Asked Questions. TWDB. http://www.twdb.state.tx.us/Desalination/Desal/Frequently%20a sked%20questions.asp (accessed March 28, 2007). Venolia, Carol, and Kelly Lerner. Natural Remodeling: For the Not So Green House. New York: Larks Books, 2006. World Water Council. An International Multi-Stakeholder Platform for a Water Secure World. World Water Council. http://www .worldwatercouncil.org/ (accessed April 1, 2007).
SYSTEM HOME: FIRST YEAR STUDENT ESSAYS FROM THE WORLD HOUSE PROJECT 79
FOOD
To feed our future, our only option is to eat with greater interest, curiosity, and intelligence. That is the recipe for hope. —Heintzman
What is the food system?
Picture this: a crackling hearth, brewing cider, freshly baked bread and good company. What better exemplifies relaxation and comfort? Complete nourishment – physical, emotional and spiritual – is fundamental to feeling secure and ‘at home’. Our relationship with food in the house is both functional and expressive. Food is essential to life, but it also inspires the senses, creates fond memories of place, brings loved ones together and allows us to display cultural and aesthetic preferences. Similarly, the decorative tablecloths, placemats, serving spoons and dishware that we arrange for each meal have both practical significance, and are also a ritualistic recognition of our reliance on food resources.
PHOTO - Perin Ruttonsha
SYSTEM HOME: FIRST YEAR STUDENT ESSAYS FROM THE WORLD HOUSE PROJECT 83
Historical Analysis
At one time, small communities were directly responsible, by combination of savvy, skill and hard work, for their own nutritional wellbeing – whether pursuing wild game, collecting roots or tilling land. The process was labour intensive, but ultimately fair. Today, meal preparation is increasingly hassle-free for homeowners thanks to advances in food science and kitchen technology, as well as the development of a complex production and distribution network. For example, meats can be stored in the home for months without rotting, and produce from any climactic region can be purchased throughout the year at the convenience of the buyer. The result however, is less control for the consumer in a system that is inequitable and wasteful. The world food crisis is more accurately a world democracy crisis. More and more people are cut out of decision-making about life’s essentials as control over land for farming, seeds for planting, and the means for buying and selling moves into fewer and fewer hands (Lappé, 130). When, Frances Moore Lappé began researching food scarcity in 1975, she discovered that despite widespread claims of pending global famine, there was, in fact, more than enough food to feed the world. In her recent publication Hope’s Edge: The Next Diet for a Small Planet she demonstrates that this is still the case today. One cause for the disparity between availability and access is inefficient distribution of food to the home. Edible food items, such as mislabeled tuna and over-baked crackers, are routinely shipped from supermarkets and manufacturers to landfills. In 1995 the United States generated 5.4 billion pounds of food waste (Edwards, 17). The other invisible inequity is incomplete disclosure on the by-products present in food product ingredients.
Future Trends
Communities such as the slow food movement, freegans and urban agriculturalists address the challenges of access and quality by encouraging local food production and preparation of meals from scratch. On the other hand, food scientists are attempting to answer the same concerns with genetically modified organisms (GMOs) that are claimed to result in higher crop yields, and nutraceuticals that compensate for unhealthy eating choices. For example, to counter the dangerous effects of high cholesterol, producers are now injecting fatty-food favourites with isoflavones. “It will still be easy to find bad cooking in the year 2050, but we predict that you will have to go out of your way to find food that is bad for you.” (Wilson, 52) Both solutions are designed to reach similar outcomes of health and abundance, however the former position also promotes lifestyle choices that celebrate time with family and nature. But the question remains: is this lifestyle realistic for everyone? The fact is that we no longer have to rely exclusively on our own savvy, talent and knowledge to stock our pantries – and this is a good thing. But how can we amend the food supply chain and benefit from the knowledge of food scientists to ensure that all households have equitable access to quality products? How can we design our homes and communities to highlight eating as a celebration of nature’s abundance? Likely the solution lies somewhere between tradition and progress. Really, the two positions are quite similar – the intention being, in both cases, to find simplicity in life: a paradise, as such, in whatever shape that may take.
For architect Donald Chong, it is a kitchen designed to adjust with the seasons and proudly display and preserve the harvest’s bearings. For others it may be a programmed fridge that helps a family order food, prepare meals and track their health needs. The marriage between tradition and technology in dining is demonstrated in leisure wilderness backpacking. The activity itself harks back to our nomadic existence where meal preparation involved physical exertion and a search. In this case the search is for dry firewood, or a shelter under which to light a propane fire. And today, to replace or complement a meal of wild berries and game, we can also dine on compressed, dehydrated and powdered gourmet delights that come to life with the simple addition of water.
PORTRAIT OF A KITCHEN
“The origins of the kitchen lie in the hearth. The miracle of fire brought us not only the flame for cooking, but also warmth for survival in winter.” —Johnny Grey The drawback of cooking over an open flame is that over time, it can lead to severe respiratory problems such as tuberculosis.
“From the early hunter-gatherer societies and the subsequent development of agriculture the preparation, cooking and eating of food have provided punctuation for the day; coming together to eat is an expression of man’s gregariousness.” —Johnny Grey
SYSTEM HOME: FIRST YEAR STUDENT ESSAYS FROM THE WORLD HOUSE PROJECT 85
“The return of women to the labour force en masse in the 1960s and 1970s was another landmark in the evolution of kitchens. The need to wake up toddlers at dawn, feed them quickly while packing lunches, and make it to the carpool and to work on time demanded regimented efficiency.” —Avi Freeman
Recently, homeowners have started to readopt the kitchen as the social hub of their residences. Where kitchens were once separated from living and dining areas, today’s open concept designs integrate cooking, eating, working and relaxing into one space. As well, steaming potatoes and spinning salad are no longer viewed as magic rituals only for the eyes of the chef – meal preparation is an event that dinner guests can join. With all this new activity and attention, homeowners are shaping their kitchens like a showroom with large, expensive chrome appliances.
Hydroponic, aquaponic and raised-bed gardens make home cultivation possible in dense urban areas or regions without arable land. As well, the raised bed allows easy access for those with limited mobility. “This garden [the nomadic vegetable garden] is part of a wider research programme into soil-free plant culture…Its technology could shape the urban garden of the future and bring sustainable relief to drought-stricken Third World Countries.” — L. Jones
GLOSSARY TERMS
Freeganism is an alternative lifestyle founded on principles of generosity, social concern, freedom, cooperation and waste minimization. An integral component of the subculture is to decrease demand for industrial food products by consuming food that has already been discarded by supermarkets. Isoflavones are a class of organic compounds that have
high antioxidant properties, and are believed (by some) to protect against cancer, and reduce cholesterol. Nutraceuticals (also known as functional-foods) include additives (such as antioxidants) which improve the product’s nutritional properties. For example, products may target prevalent health conditions such as heart
disease, cancer or high blood pressure, or improve cranial capacities like memory and I.Q. Slow Food began in Italy in 1986 as a response to the arrival of the first American fast food outlet. The focus of this movement is to preserve endangered food species, and food production and preparation techniques. Urban Agriculture is generally community based, and seeks to bring farming into the city on a scale that reduces reliance on imported goods; as well as generating products with high quality flavour and nutritional value. Garden projects often experiment with different cultivation technologies to take advantage of rooftops and other unused spaces.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Catterall, Claire, ed. Food: Design & Culture. London: Lawrence King / Glasgow, 1999. Chong, Donald. In discussion with the author (Donald Chong Architects). February 22, 2007. Cooper, P. The New Tech Garden. London: Octopus, 2001. Edwards, F. “Dumpster Dining.” Alternatives Journal 32, no. 3 (2006): 16-17. Freeman, J. The Making of the Modern Kitchen: A Cultural History. Oxford: Berg Publishers, 2004. Freidman, A. “A Conversation with Your Fridge.” In Room For Thought: Rethinking Home and Community Design, 32-43. Toronto: Penguin Canada, 2005. Food Share. “Food Share Garden: Urban Agriculture Program.” Food Share: Field to Table. http://www.foodshare.net/ garden01.htm (accessed April 7, 2007). Grey, J. The Art of Kitchen Design. London: Ward Lock, 1999. Horwitz, J., and Singley, P., eds. Eating Architecture. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004. Jones, L. Reinventing the Garden: Chaumon; Global Inspirations from the Loire. London: Thames and Hudson, 2003. Kappara, Karam. In discussion with the author (Karam Kappapa Design). February 22, 2007. Lappe, F.M. “Diet for a Smaller Planet: Real Sources of Abundance.” In Feeding the Future: From Fat to Famine; How to Solve the World’s Food Crisis, edited by Andrew Heintzman and Evan Solomon, PAGES. Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 2004. Lorinc, John. The New City: How the Crisis in Canada’s Urban Centres is Reshaping the Nation. Toronto: Penguin, 2006. Miller, B.L. “Gingerbread Houses: Art, Food and the Postwar Architecture of Domestic Space.” In Eating Architecture, edited by J. Horwitz and P. Singley, 131-149. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004. Mitchell, Stacy. “Setting a Slow Table.” The New Rules Journal (Fall 2000): 18. Expanded Academic ASAP. Thomson Gale. GEORGE BROWN COLLEGE. 4 Mar. 2007. Wetlands Activism Collective. “Freegan.info: A Site Dedicated to Revealing Human Over-Consumption and Waste.” Wetlands Activism Collective. http://www.freegan.info/ (April 7, 2007). Wilson, Jim. “Miracles of the Next 50 Years.” Popular Mechanics 177.2 (Feb 2000): 52. CPI.Q (Canadian Periodicals). Thomson Gale. GEORGE BROWN COLLEGE. 4 Mar. 2007. Wikipedia. Isoflavones. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isoflavones (on isoflavones; accessed April 7, 2007). Wikipedia. Nutraceuticals. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nutraceuticals (on nutraceuticals; accessed April 7, 2007).
SYSTEM HOME: FIRST YEAR STUDENT ESSAYS FROM THE WORLD HOUSE PROJECT 87
WASTE
Objects die. And while I am interested in their afterlife, the causes of death matter. When people classify something as waste they are deciding that they no longer want to be connected to it. —Gay Hawkins
What is the waste system?
Waste is inevitable. It is inherent to living, and, if more narrowly defined, to dwelling. Our most basic necessities – food for sustenance and clothing for warmth – eventually become waste. Even the physical construction of our house is ultimately a source of waste. If tasked with “taking out the garbage,” we consider the chore complete the moment our refuse has been deposited outside the walls of our dwelling. Out of sight, out of mind. All connection erased. But our association with waste is not so easily terminated. Our trash is a record of our consumption, a reflection of our values and identity. Once discarded in a landfill, our bags of rubbish are assembled with items cast aside by our neighbours, friends, relatives, co-workers and strangers. Waste decay affects the health of our bodies and our ecology. Waste management consumes our finite natural resources. We are connected to our waste through the energy, water, air, and other systems of the house. So we must endeavour to create less.
SYSTEM HOME: FIRST YEAR STUDENT ESSAYS FROM THE WORLD HOUSE PROJECT 91
Fundamentally, waste is a personal expression of value. It is the product of a decision to sever our attachment to an object (Hawkins, 75). An object that once had utility for us or to which we had an emotional tie is reclassified as waste the moment it is discarded. Waste is the result of an act of instant transformation. It is a temporal, physical and subjective statement. The act of wasting is, therefore, a firm statement that a discarded object no longer has value to me. But “waste” does not imply that the object is valueless.
Historical Analysis
Prior to industrialization, our engagement with household waste was less private and more cyclical. In urban centers of the early nineteenth century for example, waste, including household excreta, was eliminated at the boundary of the house onto the street. The street existed as a waste commons, where many discarded items, including food, were collected by scavengers. Scraps of food were consumed but other refuse was sold to dealers, who in turn sold it to farmers, manufacturers, and craftsmen (Rogers, 35). Human excrement was used to make fertilizer, rags to produce newspaper and animal bones to fashion buttons (Strasser, 112). Only when a household had extracted the maximum value from the object was it discarded, “gifted” to the street scavengers who then attached their own renewed measure of value to it. Industrial intensification changed our waste stream model. Manufactured items replaced many objects once fashioned by local artisans and trades people. An industrial economy required an intensive and reliable supply of resources, a need that street pickers could not efficiently satisfy. Enabled by new technologies and materials, industry could rapidly manufacture new products – and generate large volumes of industrial waste. The large-scale commercialization of waste and the expansion of the waste economy soon followed (Strasser, 117). Small-scale waste dealers became uncommon as local dealers expanded to become part of the new waste industry. Waste companies now submitted bids for the right to scavenge and reclaim scrap material from municipal dump sites. Overall, the demand to trade or purchase and use reclaimed goods collected directly from the streets declined. But waste generation accelerated. During the nineteenth century, the nature of work and living was transformed. Workers spent more time at the factory and had less time to repair damaged goods at home. Urban centers intensified, creating cramped living quarters and leaving little space to store used items such as scraps of fabric. Limited by time and space, useful objects were forcefully transformed into waste. Largely removed from the new waste economy, picking through household waste discarded on the street became a role held mostly by impoverished women and children (Strasser, 116). Waste had further marginalized urban populations, separating them not only by class, but also by gender and age. Independent street scavengers of the late nineteenth century traded mostly to survive. So, in the poorest areas of rapidly expanding cities, where organized household trash collection was not provided and street cleaning was left solely to scavengers, waste accumulated. Piles of debris on the street impeded mobility and slowed trade. Economics, however, was not the most compelling argument to change residential waste management practices. Improved health and sanitation for all citizens provided the greatest impetus (Rogers, 52). It transformed waste from a personal concern into a public problem. The objective was to determine how
waste could be most effectively removed. Indoor plumbing, sewage systems, door-to-door household garbage collection and landfills were the technical solutions. These systems made the acts of wasting private and began to foster the notion of “waste elimination”. Our streets and homes were clean, our waste and refuse removed from sight. If viewed from beyond our personal boundaries, however, waste does not “disappear”. It becomes part of our landscape, affecting soil, water, and air. The longevity, volume and complexity of modern waste pose new challenges for our communities: approximately 70% of the waste generated by North American households is buried in sanitary landfills (Tammemagi, 3-4). Municipal landfill sites are filled with unsorted resources. Materials once valued are discarded and abandoned. Shipments of paper and paperboard, yard wastes, metals, plastics, glass, food wastes, wood, rubber, leather, construction debris, textiles, and electronic waste such as VCRs, televisions and computers, are buried under our soil. Currently, for every ton of household waste produced, industrial processes generate seventy tons of waste (Rogers, 4). Comparatively, household waste accounts for only a fraction of all waste created. But it is not inconsequential. It is estimated that the United States spends $70 billion per year to dispose of domestic garbage in landfill sites (Rogers, 234n20). The development and operation of a new sanitary landfill is difficult and expensive, politically and financially. Opposition is fierce, although some communities, focused solely on short-term economic development, do welcome them (McGovern, 30). Residents concerned about “damage to the aesthetic environment, increased neighbourhood truck traffic, loss of community pride, [and] decrease in property values” do not want garbage dumps in their backyard (Murray, 1). To address environmental effects, domestic regulations require local soil and ground water sources to be monitored for quality throughout the operation of a landfill and after its closure. Partly motivated by the opportunity to extend the life of existing landfill sites, many local and regional governments have set up waste diversion programmes, including recycling initiatives. Modern recycling, the evolution of the systems established by scavengers hundreds of years ago, has become a common moral and cultural exercise. However, it is neither a universal solution nor the most sustaining. Many rural communities, for example, do not have the infrastructure to make recycling economically or ecologically viable (Murray, 7). Where recycling is practicable, the composition of the discarded object may limit the number of times it can enter the recycling stream. Many plastics, for example, can only be recycled once. Second-generation raw materials frequently contain contaminated or low-grade material stock, reducing the quality of the recycled material as a resource input. In fact, a material’s physical and chemical properties often degrade as a result of the material recovery process itself (Rogers, 177). The consequence is that only products of a lesser grade can be manufactured from many post-consumer recyclables. This downcycling of waste ensures that all materials will eventually be disposed in a landfill. Where advances in materials technology and industrial processes have created types of waste for which there are no markets for re-use, or produce waste that is hazardous to process or store long-term, global trade has transformed developing countries into economical dumping grounds.
SYSTEM HOME: FIRST YEAR STUDENT ESSAYS FROM THE WORLD HOUSE PROJECT 93
Glass (0.9%) Fast Food Packaging (0.4%) Diapers (1.1%)
Construction and Demolition (27.4%) Metal (8.3%)
Newspaper (3.9%)
Paper (35%)
Other (0.7%) Organic (3.7%)
Plastic (18%)
A WORLD OF WASTE
In 1985 the Garbage Project dug through sanitary landfill sites around the City Of Toronto. Its aim was to separate and classify Toronto’s garbage. If the world of today mirrored Toronto’s waste practices of 20 years ago (and, for the most part, it does), and if we were to imagine the surface area of the globe as a landfill site, our solid waste would be proportioned as shown. Notes: Distribution ignores contribution of the polar regions to the global surface area. Total global surface area, excluding polar regions, is 136 199 086 KM2. Percentage distributions are by volume and assume a garbage pile that is 1 km high. Sources: Ontario Science Centre, Waste Exhibition (visit to the Centre by the author; Toronto, April 17, 2007). United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs - Statistics Division, “Demographic Yearbook 2004,” (NY: United Nations Statistics Division - Demographic and Social Statistics Department of Economic and Social Affairs, 2004) http://unstats. un.org/unsd/demographic/products/dyb/dyb2004.htm
At a local level, it is estimated that between 50 to 70% of communities in parts of the developing world do not have organized household waste collection and disposal services (Hardoy, 78). Where these services are in place, collection is often infrequent, creating conditions similar to those that existed on the streets of the Western world a century ago. However, many health issues in the developing world today are more complex than they were for westerners four generations ago. At that time synthetic substances such as plastics were uncommon and the soup of chemicals in refuse was much more dilute. The garbage of our past was relatively benign – and completely local (Rogers, 31). Modern waste management practices include transporting waste to dump sites worldwide, compounding local disposal problems. The consequence is that both the local human population and the ecology are unhealthy. In 2002, waste exports from the United States alone generated $1 billion of revenue (Rogers, 9). We have created a culture of waste.
Future Trends
In the 21st century, our decision to waste is less mindful and more rapid. Our statements of value are more transient: incredibly, 80% of consumer goods are used once and discarded (Rogers, 6). In the hands of the modern consumer, that single use may be very brief – and perhaps unnecessary (see A Paper Cup). The modern act of wasting is often a concluding action, the final statement in, waste. Waste, however, does not disappear. The waste system touches the air we breathe and the land we live on. We may seek to disassociate ourselves from our waste but find, perhaps disagreeably, that it connects us to a broader population and the global commons. What can be done? Waste management must extend beyond reduction, reuse and recycling. We must strive to be more holistic: to consider how we are in the world and our relationship with objects (Hawkins, 73). We must seek to define a new set of values that recognize the aesthetic, ethical and economic incentives to change our waste practices. If we can only make one commitment, it should be to become more mindful of our waste practices and decisions, individually and collectively (see Some Recommendations for Change). Our actions are connected to the health of our towns and cities. They affect the energy, water, identity, financial, social, construction, air, food, spatial, and mobility systems where we dwell. According to Northrop Frye, “We must imagine the world that we want to live in.” To get there, we must first be more mindful of the decisions we make along the way.
SYSTEM HOME: FIRST YEAR STUDENT ESSAYS FROM THE WORLD HOUSE PROJECT 95
A Paper Cup
Consider a paper cup. Time is required to harvest, transport and mill lumber that is then sent to a manufacturer to produce paper cups. Once the cups leave the fabrication line they are shipped to a local grocery store (perhaps in packages of 20 cups) where they may sit on the shelf for a few days. Now imagine a consumer planning to host a family celebration, who eventually purchases a package of those cups. On the day of the event, one of those cups is filled with water. It may take fifteen minutes to consume the beverage and a few seconds to then dispose of the cup itself. The discarded object will remain in the garbage receptacle until it is picked up by a garbage truck, transported to a transfer station and finally to a landfill site, often located several hundred kilometers (and several hours of travel) away, where it will be buried, without decomposing, for many decades. (Recent excavations of Toronto landfill sites by The Garbage Project uncovered newspapers that had been buried for more than 35 years. The printed headlines, photos and articles remained completely legible (Ontario Science Centre. Waste Exhibition (visit to Centre by the author); Toronto, April 17 2007)). It is not hard to frame how disproportionately skewed the use period of an object can be (several minutes) from its production and disposal periods (several decades). It may be argued that the time allotted to the production phase is used to manufacture multiple units of a product (hundreds of cups, pencils, or plastic bags from a single harvesting and production cycle). Once an object is disposed, however, each individual unit leaves a wasting imprint. A single unit of a particular product, like a paper cup, may take decades to decompose. Discarding multiple units of the same product does not reduce the period of time for that object type to decay. The experience is ephemeral but the object is not. Some Recommendations for Change
• Shop locally.
• Purchase goods packaged in reusable containers. • Purchase products with less packaging.
• Minimize the use and purchase of low-value, rapidly consumed, single-purpose items, such as plastic bags, disposable dishes and cutlery. • Purchase only quantities of food that can be consumed before expiry. (Approximately 1/10 to 1/4 of all food purchased for household consumption is never eaten and is discarded) (Rathje, 243). • Compost food waste.
• Choose to use reclaimed building materials where possible.
• Purchase previously owned appliances, electronics and furniture when practical.
GLOSSARY TERMS
Downcycling – Using reclaimed materials to
Postconsumer Recycling – The reuse of materials
manufacture goods of lower quality than that of the source material. It acknowledges that many “recycled” goods are eventually sent to landfill (McDonough).
generated from residential and commercial waste, excluding recycling of material from industrial processes that has not reached the consumer, such as glass broken in the manufacturing process (Lund, B.25).
Dump – A site where mixed waste is indiscriminately deposited without controls or regard to the protection of the environment (Lund, B.10). Landfill – A large, outdoor area for waste disposal (Lund, B.18). Leachate – Liquid that has percolated through solid waste or another medium and has extracted, dissolved, or suspended materials from it, which may include potentially harmful materials. Leachate collection and treatment is of primary concern at municipal waste landfills (Lund, B.18).
Sanitary Landfill – A method of disposing of refuse on
land without creating nuisances or hazards to public health or safety. Careful preparation of the fill area and control of waste drainage are required to assure proper landfilling. To confine the refuse to the smallest practical area and reduce it to the smallest practical volume, heavy tractor-like equipment is used to spread, compact, and usually cover the waste daily with at least six inches of compacted soil. Modern, properly engineered sanitary landfills are lined with compacted clay or an artificial (plastic) liner; have leachate collection systems to remove the leachate for treatment and disposal; and have systems to collect and remove methane gas generated in the landfill (Lund, B.31).
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Blumberg, Louis, and Robert Gottlieb. War on Waste: Can America Win Its Battle with Garbage? Washington, DC: Island Press, 1989. Careless, Jennifer. Taking Out the Trash: A No-Nonsense Guide to Recycling. Washington, DC: Island Press, 1992. Hardoy, Jorge E., Diana Mitlin, and David Satterthwaite. Environmental Problems in an Urbanizing World. Sterling, VA: Earthscan, 2001. Hawkins, Gay. The Ethics of Waste: How We Relate to Rubbish. Lanham, Maryland: Rowan & Littlefield, 2006. Lund, Herbert F. ed. The McGraw-Hill Recycling Handbook. 2nd ed. Toronto, ON: McGraw-Hill, 2001. McDonough, William, and Michael Braungart. Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things. North Point, 2002. McGovern, Dan. The Campo Indian Landfill War: The Fight for Gold in California’s Garbage. Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press, 1995. Melosi, Martin V. Garbage in Cities: Refuse, Reform, and the Environment. rev. ed. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005. Murray, William. The Garbage Crisis: Traditional Solutions. Ottawa: Library of Parliamant, Research Branch, 1995. Onibokun, Adepoju G., ed. Managing the Monster: Urban Waste and Governance in Africa. Ottawa, ON: International Development Research Centre, 1999. Pellow, David N. Garbage Wars: The Struggle for Environmental Justice in Chicago. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002. Rathje, William, and Cullen Murphy. Rubbish! The Archaeology of Garbage. New York: Harper Collins, 1992. Reprinted with a new preface by the authors. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2001. Page references are to the 2001 edition. Rogers, Heather. Gone Tomorrow: The Hidden Life of Garbage. New York: New Press, 2005. Strasser, Susan. Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash. New York: Metropolitan Books, 1999. Tammemagi, Hans. Waste Crisis: Landfills, Incinerators, and the Search for a Sustainable Future. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. UNEP, The Basel Convention, GRID-Arendal. Vital Waste Graphics 2. Europe: The Basel Convention, UNEP, GRID-Arendal, 2006. Zimring, Carl A. Cash for Your Trash: Scrap Recycling in America. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005.
SYSTEM HOME: FIRST YEAR STUDENT ESSAYS FROM THE WORLD HOUSE PROJECT 97
We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them . —Albert Einstein
PHOTO - Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States by Heidi Nelson
SHELTER
Climate
“For our species and civilization to maintain a sustainable relationship with the earth, our activities, including our architecture, must harmonize with natural cycles, rhythms, and resources” —Sir Norman Foster
Climate, to a large extent helps to define who we are and how we live our lives. Access to clean drinking water, the ability to produce food and the formation of community have, throughout time, been directly related to local microclimates. Our ancestors accepted this relationship and used it to their advantage when they designed and built their homes, some of which still remain today. The approach they took to home construction involved a knowledgeable and responsible commitment to natural systems through integrated site analysis. While this connection between home and the natural environment is not evident in most of today’s conventional housing, practices that were once regarded as common sense – such as collecting and storing rainwater, and utilizing natural shading and passive orientation – are slowly being reintegrated into home design.
SYSTEM HOME: FIRST YEAR STUDENT ESSAYS FROM THE WORLD HOUSE PROJECT 101
Using integrated design to investigate the relationship between air handling, construction and energy will help to identify how these systems are related within our homes, giving us a greater understanding of the impact that our shelters have on natural resources and climate change.
Lessons from the Farm
Structures designed to consider the elements – earth, light, wind and water – have historically dotted our landscapes, offering us a glimpse at the creativity and quality of construction that was once the standard. This can be seen, for example, in 19th century North American farms, where original occupants of the property had an intimate understanding of site analysis and local climate conditions. The buildings and landscapes were planned through a holistic approach, paying careful attention and consideration to both nature and shelter.
Winter
Summer with shaded front
Wild vine fence
The depicted farmhouse was built in the 1880’s and bricked in 1901. It represents the traditional red brick, balloon frame four bedroom home that can be found on many farms throughout rural Ontario. The orientation of the home utilizes the sun from a south, east, and west direction, maximizing access to passive solar energy throughout the day, and season to season. Both the naturally occurring and landscaped plant growth help to maximize energy efficiency by creating wind and solar breaks. In the winter, the pine trees that line the west side of the driveway and the wild vines that grow on the fence obstruct the harsh wind blowing in from the northwest and serve as a break to keep the lane clear from drifting snow. Drooping vines cover the three Young’s Weeping Birch trees that line the south side of the home. In summer the vines are thick with foliage, providing maximum shade from the intense heat of the south sun. In winter the tree is sparse and open, allowing the low southern sun to pass through. On a cold day in January one can feel the sun’s warmth enter the south facing windows and penetrate right through the open living space. The north side of the home has only two small windows, one for a bathroom and one for visibility to the barnyard. This helps the north face to retain heat and block out the cold in the winter, while keeping the home cool in the summer.
Trees throughout the property have been planted to define space, direct and screen views, attenuate sound, stabilize soil, control water run-off and treat septic leaching beds. Natural vegetation and planting is utilized wherever possible to increase permeability of soil to air and water, control surface run-off, mitigate erosion and visually enhance the character of the site. It is essential when designing with climate in mind that local water sources are identified, managed and protected from contaminants. Managing water on-site involves planning for site drainage, utilizing natural topography and drainage patterns, while also allowing the water to permeate the ground. This process has helped to avoid erosion around steeper slopes and channel water away from building foundations where damage can be caused. Passing water is primarily treated by naturalized areas and planted catchments before returning to nature. The water systems on this site are designed to utilize a combination of passive design involving landscapes as well as active elements like rainwater collection and cistern storage. A typical cistern like the one in the basement of the farmhouse can hold over a thousand gallons of water providing storage for water to be used in irrigation, plumbing and general land maintenance. In areas where wells are the sole source of water, attention must be paid to conservation, and surface and subsurface run-off that may occur up-stream from the well. Pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizers used on lawns or crops will eventually seep down to the water table and pollute drinking water sources.
Water sources need to be managed and protected
Site drainage utilizes natural flow patterns and allows water to permiate soil
The quality and craftsmanship that went into building this traditional farmhouse and barn can be seen in the use of local materials, wood and stone that were hand cut by local trades. Foundations were constructed from field stones that were removed when farmers cleared the fields for planting, and the interior walls of the home are fixed with a layer of plaster held together with a mixture of lime and horsehair. The north side of the barn is built into the slope of a hill, utilizing the earth’s natural temperature to heat and cool the main floor where the livestock are kept, while also creating tractor access to the hayloft.
SYSTEM HOME: FIRST YEAR STUDENT ESSAYS FROM THE WORLD HOUSE PROJECT 103
Saddle Joint details from barn
The process that went into designing these buildings was a common sense approach that required less energy to sustain, used limited resources and promoted a home environment built to meet the multi-generational needs of the family.
From Local to Global
We have changed the way we seek out our basic need for shelter. In an article written for Canadian Geographic, Marilyn Simonds examines the transition from the locally inspired building of the past to the disconnected development of the present: Once settlers were settled, houses were built of brick if the soil was clay, or fieldstone or quarried stone. Where there were streams to power mills, they were made of sawn lumber. Once transportation systems developed, houses were no longer direct reflections of their surroundings (39). In this postwar transition, homes that were once designed to reflect their local microclimate were shifting to a new model dependent on transportation. When mass transportation systems began to reshape our cities and towns a new market opened up, designed to distribute resources and materials. What was once considered a ‘local’ product was now available to anyone, anywhere the transportation routes could access. With rail networks, shipping, and personal automobiles, transportation has changed the built environment. A new approach to site analysis emerged, one focused on housing design in relationship to major transportation routes such as bodies of water, railways, and streets, as opposed to the type of land occupied. A model was created which redefined community design to promote the removal of existing vegetation and the grading of land to create a slopeless landscape, where large-scale developments could be built with no consideration to orientation. Building homes with this process introduced a new dependency on resources and manipulated natural cycles to work for us, rather than with us.
The conditioning of air through heating and cooling is a perfect example of how we have utilized technology to a point where we have become complacent and removed from passive systems that have worked for centuries in many different climates around the world. This model has transformed the idea of home and community into an industry that places consumer wants before social and environmental needs. It is clear that we need to revisit the origin of shelter and its important relationship to the health of people, the environment and the economy. To make this connection we need to challenge the existing framework that defines the communities we live in today.
Reconnecting with Nature
“This situation calls for a rapid and fundamental reorientation in our thinking, particularly on the part of planners and institutions involved in the process of construction. The form of our future built environment must be based on a responsible approach to nature…” —Thomas Herzog - European Charter for Solar Energy in Architecture and Urban Planning Buckminster Fuller, one of the earlier visionary architects of the 20th century, hoped that he could help change citizens’ perceptions by making a connection between architecture, consumption, and the environment. He aimed to expose relationships between issues pertaining to population, resource distribution, energy use, distribution of wealth and the power of the political agenda. His ability to relate resource production and distribution to the disconnection between the natural and built environment can be viewed as early integrated systems analysis. The original correlation that Fuller drew between what is natural and built has become an educational tool that some would suggest was an early premonition of today’s open source technology. His designs of the Dymaxion Projection and World Game gave many people new ideas to connect with nature, enabling a universal design strategy built on access to information and education. Today, information sharing through open source technology has managed to break through language barriers, political regimes and cross-cultural boundaries, allowing design to enter into mainstream dialogue with climate related issues. Through documentaries, public inquiries, new climate protocols and the recent movement in the green building industry, citizens have started to become more environmentally aware. Systems like Wikipedia and YouTube have taken independent films, stories, research and broadcasts and made them free and accessible. This knowledge is beginning to be reflected in the design of homes and communities around the world, where designers are referencing leading projects and adopting innovative concepts to meet their local climates. Today these projects represent a very small share of the massive and continually expanding global shelter economy. However, these concepts can be designed for homes on a mass scale when we begin to take the responsibility we have as designers, architects, and planners seriously. One of the first steps in this challenge is to understand the production process and distribution of our resources, commit to harvesting renewable
SYSTEM HOME: FIRST YEAR STUDENT ESSAYS FROM THE WORLD HOUSE PROJECT 105
sources, and take responsibility for the stewardship of arable land. William McDonough demonstrated this process when his firm enrolled in a design competition in Warsaw, Poland that consisted of designing a high-rise commercial building. After McDonough’s firm was awarded the project, they made sure that the client understood the full intention of their design: I had calculated the energy costs to build the structure, and the energy costs to run and maintain it, and it worked out that 6,400 acres of new forest would need to be planted to offset the effects on climate change from the energy requirements (McDonough, 7). After some consideration McDonough’s client called him with the news that they would be awarded the project despite the increase in cost, because long-term advantages still made it feasible. This demonstrates that it is possible to design with resource efficiency in mind, while still maintaining competitiveness at a very high level. Projects like this present the next evolution of intelligent design that is responsive to the needs of the occupants and the natural environment. Progressive designers around the globe are developing projects that consider the link between shelter, climate and political agenda by presenting ideas that are still at a stage where there is opportunity to evolve the design based on how it is accepted, or applied in society. Society must harmonize urban and architectural projects with its political goals (and these should be primarily ecological at the beginning of the 21st century). And there must be no taboos in putting the good ecological sense of a project to the test…We must therefore define the technical parameters and realize them in an integrated planning and production process…what we need is no less then a revised design for society (Jaeger, 203). Designers are achieving this is through rapidly prototyping their designs at an early stage, building them and then presenting them to the public for critique. Testing concepts and ideas through an integrated design and construction approach with the public (ultimately the end user or client) will result in multiple designs stemming out of one initial concept. Incorporating public feedback from the prototype model into the revisualizing stage will help the design team to build a more inclusive concept that fits the needs and desires of both the client and the local microclimate.
The Living Model
This process has been applied during the design process for the ‘Living Model Project’ at the IwB. The concept is based on a three-season pavilion which is designed to house the stories and research that have been developed over the past ten months. During the design analysis for this ‘idea pavilion’ heavy consideration was placed on developing a construction system that was responsive design to Toronto’s local conditions.
However, the concept would also ideally be easily manipulated to reflect the needs of people in other climates primarily through the use of simple construction details and locally harvested materials. Incorporating quality craftmanship during the design and construction process would be necessary to create connection joints and details that allowed for easier assembly and continual adaptability. The design that evolved is a shell structure measuring eight feet high by eight feet wide, and 32 feet in length with a flat roof that pivots to meet the optimal seasonal slope for solar energy gain. The simple shell is based on a built up structural wood rib, each braced laterally with a combination of floor sheathing and horizontal structural siding, creating the required strength to carry the varying live, dead and dynamic loads that will be transferred from the pivoting roof system.
The roof consists of a series of panels made of two-by-four construction and sheathed with a combination of corrugated sheet steel and plastic. The pivoting element has been designed using standard roof trusses that have been inverted and connected using a plywood joint with a steel bar that spans the structural wood ribs. There is a 3/16� steel cable connected to the roof that runs continuously down to the footings where it wraps around two steel elevator spools before connecting the other end of the roof. This continuous cable creates the tension required for the user to pivot the roof with little effort, and lock the roof into the most optimal position for solar access depending on time of year.
The idea pavilion presents a concept that has been built by a combination of both skilled and unskilled labour, maintaining a sense of quality in its construction through simplicity in its design. It will be critiqued by students, faculty, professionals and community members to facilitate dialogue as to how the next evolution might bring us one step closer to the World House Living Model.
SYSTEM HOME: FIRST YEAR STUDENT ESSAYS FROM THE WORLD HOUSE PROJECT 107
One of the best ways to capitalize on the local microclimate of a new or existing site is to develop a phased design concept using an integrated site analysis. A checklist for site analysis will help to create a guide, ensuring that designs are developed based on natural flows while promoting ease of use. The first thing to do during any site analysis is to spend some time on the land taking in the sights, sounds and smells, tracking the sun and feeling the breeze. Building a connection with the site through experience will help to expose the important elements that need to be taken into consideration when planning a climate responsive approach to shelter. SITE ANALYSIS CHECKLIST Map Climatic Conditions Determine local microclimate conditions to help incorporate passive design elements.
Water Determine local watersheds.
path of sun for passive solar orientation direction of prevailing winds annual precipitation annual snowloads aquatic – wetlands, streams, brooks, rivers, ponds terrestrial – overland flow, forests, farms, lawns, driveways
Topography and Soils
natural drainage soil analysis erosion prevention hardscapes – impermeable surfaces softscapes – permeable surfaces
Trees, Vegetation and Wildlife
existing flora and fauna trees, plants and shrubs (specify type and size) native species (bird, butterflies, animals)
Sensory Qualitites
sight – specify visual screening requirements sounds – noise abatement and sound attenuation smells – masking or enhancing of existing smells
Fire Protection
urban (infrastructure) rural (water storage tanks) turning radii
Impact of Landforms and Adjacent Structure
shadow lines potential of glare
Regulations
local authority regulations and guidelines resource consent requirements available utilities and service routes heritage implications zoning
Staged Planning Approach
architectural program construction schedule future expansion
Circulation
pedestrian venice
Unversal Accesibility
barrier free design self apparent design
Access to Services Amenities
schools food services public transportation internet service libraries recreation centers
GLOSSARY TERMS
Dymaxion Projection – Patented in
1946 by R. Buckminister Fuller “Depicts spherical world as a flat surface with no visible distortion (only mathematically detectible). Poles need not be given symmetrical position because the longitude and latitude grid is developed after its great circle grid projection, which may be freely oriented upon the globe’s sphere. All openings in the stretched out earth “skin” occur in the one and continuous ocean. This allows the particular arrangement of linked together continental masses, without breaks in their contours, surrounded
by “their” oceans 14 segments can be assembled in various combinations as three dimensional-approximation of a globe” (Behling, 17). World Game – “World Game, sometimes called the World Peace Game, is an alternative to war games proposed by Buckminster Fuller. The idea was to “make the world work for 100% of humanity in the shortest possible time through spontaneous cooperation without ecological damage or disadvantage to anyone” (Wikipedia, World Game).
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Behling, Sophia and Stefan Behling. Solar Power: The Evolution of Sustainable Architecture. Forward from Sir Norman Foster, New York: Prestel Verlag, 2000. First published 1996 as “Sol Power: The Evolution of Solar Architecture”. Benson, Ted. Timberframe. Forward by Norm Abram. Newtown, CT: Taunton Press, 2001. Buckminster Fuller Institute. “The Dymaxion Projection and The World Game: A Project of the Buckminister Fuller Institute.” http://www.bfi.org/and http://www.earthscope.com/ (accessed March 16, 2007). Buurman, Marlies, and Kloos Maarten. Impact: Urban Planning in Amsterdam After 1986. ARCAM / Architectura & Nadura Press, 2005. Coenelissen, Hans, ed. Dwelling a Figure of Thought. Amsterdam: Sun Publishers, 2005. Cofaigh, Eoin O., John A. Olley, and J. Owen Lewis. The Climatic Dwelling: An Introduction to Climate; Responsive Residential Architecture. Dublin: James & James (Science Publishers), January 12, 1994. Dobson, Clive and Gregor Gilpen Beck. Watersheds. Toronto: Firefly Books, 1999. Erickson, Donna. Metro Green: Connecting Open Spaces in North American Cities. Washington: Island Press, 2006. Jaeger, Falk. “Ecology.” In Ingenhoven Overdiek und Partner: Energies, edited by Kristen Feireiss, 203-211. Berlin: Birkhauser – Publishers for Architecture, March 1, 2003. McDounough, W. Design, Ecology, Ethics and the Making of Things: A Centennial Sermon. Sermon at the Cathedral of St. John the Devine, New York, NY, February 7, 1993. Meadowcroft, James. “Building the Environmental State.” Alternatives Journal 33, no.1 (2007): 15. Simonds, Merilyn. “A Good House: What Are the Boundaries of the Place You Call Home?” Canadian Geographic, January / February, 2003. Nuclear Free News. “European Charter for Solar Energy in Architecture and Urban Planning.” Berlin 3 (1996). http://www.nuclear-free.com/english/charter.htm (accessed March 16, 2007).
PHOTO - NASA, Hurricane Gordon and Helene, http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/multimedia/hurricane_gordon_ and_helene.html
SYSTEM HOME: FIRST YEAR STUDENT ESSAYS FROM THE WORLD HOUSE PROJECT 109
ENERGY
We’ve embarked on the beginning of the last days of the age of oil. Embrace the future and recognize the growing demand for a wide range of fuels or ignore reality and slowly – but surely – be left behind. —Mike Bowlin
What is the energy system?
Energy is used to heat, cool and make things move. Like the fire around which we gather, energy courses through our dwellings, making possible the artifice of light in darkness, the animation of mechanical tools and toys, the flow of data to our screen and the mobility of our vehicles.
SYSTEM HOME: FIRST YEAR STUDENT ESSAYS FROM THE WORLD HOUSE PROJECT 113
Historical Analysis
Emerging concerns regarding environmental and occupant health have recently triggered resurgence in passive and energy efficient housing design considerations. While new technologies can provide solutions for energy conservation and generation, it is equally useful to look to lessons learned from the evolution of housing. Ancient civilizations and pre-industrial societies relied on sun, wind, renewable fuels, small scale and local power production, conservation, and a functional building envelope to satisfy domestic household energy and comfort needs. The industrial revolution brought mass distribution and large-scale energy production to the home, introducing non-renewable and inefficient energy sources to supply electricity and provide comfort and convenience within the home . Figure 1 (Stein, 29, fig. 2.6) shows the efficiencies related to the delivery of energy to the home. As a note, significant energy and additional deficiencies occur during the resource extraction process. The deficiencies summarized in Figure 1 highlight the tremendous benefit of small scale or individual power production and the need for conservation. A. Direct Combustion of Natrual Gas – 100% Transcontinental Pipeline
100% gas leaves pipeline
15% heat up chimney
5% distribution losses
80% useful heat to building 95% reaches building
B. Electric Resistance Heating – 100% Electrical Power Plant 70% waste heat 3% distribution losses 30% leaves plant
27% reaches building
27% useful heat to building
C. Electrically Driven Heat Pump – 100% Electrical Power Plant
70% waste heat
3% losses 30% leaves plant 27% reaches building
Fig. 1: Energy delivery deficiencies
44% pumped in from outside air 71% useful heat to building
Current Demand
Table 1 (Stein, 41) illustrates the ecological footprint from a number of countries, of which Canada ranks as a world leader in both resource extraction and CO2 emissions. COUNTRY
1997 POPULATION
ENERGY USEd
WATER USEe
CO2 EMISSIONSĆ’
18,550,000
5,975
1,250
16.8
Australia Austria
8,053,000
3,790
261
7.9
Bangladesh
125,898,000
145
576
0.2
Brazil
167,046,000
1,064
345
1.8
Canada
30,101,000
8,000
1,494
16.2
China
1,247,315,000
887
494
2.7
Egypt
65,445,000
695
1,013
1.7
Germany
81,845,000
4,264
572
10.2
970,230,000
514
635
1.0
268,189,000
7,921
1,682
19.8
5,892,480,000
1,631
633
6.1
India United States WORLD
Table 1: Ecological Footprint by Country d. Thousands of metric tons of oil equivalent per person per year (2001) e. Cubic meters of water withdrawals per person per year (2000) f. Thousands of metric tons of CO2 per 1000 people per year (2000)
The residential sector is a major contributor to these statistics, consuming over 26% of the energy produced in Canada, 96% of which is consumed during the day-to-day lifespan of the building and 4% of which is occupied in the construction process. In Canada, space and water heating account for over 80% of the energy consumed in the home, while lights and appliance account for 5% and 8% respectively (Harvey, 21). Attention to building materials, design envelope, the building site and size, and the natural climate can have a tremendous impact on the comfort, the long-term energy use and the affordability of the home.
Future Trends
A passive design acknowledges the cycles in nature and respects the potential benefits of harnessing and protecting the home from the elements. In order to conserve energy, improve comfort and reduce the environmental footprint of the building, a passive design will integrate insulation, thermal mass and solar absorption and design with the specific climate in mind. For harsh climates and energy generation, active and efficient systems can be integrated into the building design. Figure 2 (Kachadorian, 3) illustrates the impact of a passive solar design in comparison to a conventional home. The design methodology and implemented tools in creating an energy efficient home will be detailed in the following section. 3%
Other Electric
18%
Other Electric
34%
Hot Water
11%
Hot Water
38%
Cooling
1%
Cooling
97%
Heating
14%
Heating
44%
TOTAL
172% TOTAL Fig 2 a. Conventional house using minimum standard insulation requirements
b. Super-insulated, passive solar house
SYSTEM HOME: FIRST YEAR STUDENT ESSAYS FROM THE WORLD HOUSE PROJECT 115
SAMPLE HOMES
Yurt or Ger
Although considered little more than a tent by many, the yurt is a structurally sound and flexible housing system that is easy to assemble and dismantle. The yurt is fabricated using local, natural and available building materials, thereby reducing the overall embodied energy of the construction and transportation process. The round and compact structure is ideal for heating, cooling and air handling. The yurt also uses an external felt skin as insulation that can be layered or completely removed depending on the outdoor climate and desired heating and cooling needs. Rammed Earth: SIREwall House
Rammed earth construction is an ancient building method that has seen a recent revival in the market of low-impact, natural housing. Walls and floors are made from local earth, sand, gravel and minimal water and stabilizing cement. Once compacted, rammed earth construction provides a durable system with a low embodied energy. Rammed earth walls and floors provide the highest thermal mass properties for any building material, enabling a means to collect, store and release thermal energy slowly to the surroundings. The heat carrying capacity of rammed earth walls and floors make it an ideal building material for passive solar applications. SIREwall Inc. has evolved this ancient building methodology and incorporated a foam insert between two rammed earth wall forms, providing a wall system with an R-value ranging from R-33 to R-63. The combination of high insulation and thermal mass properties make rammed earth an ideal building material for home construction, improving both comfort and energy efficiency. The porous earth walls also provide natural air exchanges into the home, in addition to a means to regulate the relative humidity in the home between 45 and 55%. C2C PhotoStack House
In 2006, Cradle-to-Cradle hosted a design competition to appeal to sustainable and intelligent housing. The professional, first place entry was the PhotoStack prototype, which exemplified attention to occupant health and comfort, longevity, and energy efficiency. The home is built into the earth and therefore takes advantage of the thermal insulation qualities of the surrounding mass. Soy wall panels – a natural product that minimizes both heating and cooling loads – make up the insulation. The home also uses a super conductive photosynthetic plasma cell skin, based on a spinach protein that grows while harnessing solar energy. Although this technology is not yet commercially available, it has the potential to shape the future of solar energy.
ENERGY IN DEPTH: PASSIVE CONSIDERATIONS
Building Size and Orientation
Energy efficiency and conservation are achieved by designing compact buildings that are able to respond to the elements. A smaller design will not only reduce the material consumption during construction, but will also significantly decrease the annual heating and cooling loads, thereby reducing the long term operating costs of the home. The orientation of the building is critical in order to reduce the heating and cooling loads by allowing the desired natural elements into the home. Window placement along the true south axis allows for optimal solar collection, while thermal mass-absorbing materials like concrete are used to store the energy. It is recommended that the shape of the building be rectangular, to minimize the east and west walls and that the window placement be most dominant on the south wall for direct solar gain. Figure 3 (Stein, 151, fig. 6.4b) illustrates the approximate position of the sun for each season (at approximately 45° latitude). WINTER
FALL & SPRING
SUMMER
noon noon
sunset S
noon
W
W
S
W
S
sunset
sunset
sunrise N E
N E
sunrise
N E
sunrise
Figure 3
Building Envelope
The envelope and wall systems are complex transitional spaces that regulate the interaction between the outdoor and indoor conditions. Building walls are space definers, but they can also create thermal barriers, direct breezes, reflect or absorb sunlight and act as a thermal mass. Attention to wall systems and materials can result in superior comfort, reduce expenses and minimize environmental impact. Insulation – Typically, most of the heat lost in a conventional home is through conduction, followed by air leakage and thermal bridging. A well-designed building envelope will minimize these losses by using high levels of insulation. When selecting the appropriate insulation material for a project, consideration should be placed on the long-term performance of the material, overall coverage, thermal insulating value (R-value), raw materials (environmental impact of production), and the short and long-term health impact to the installer and occupant. These considerations are summarized in Appendix A, listing the advantages and disadvantages of various insulating materials. Air leakage – Two design strategies are followed to control and minimize the air leakage of a building. The more common approach is to create a building envelope that is airtight, inhibiting unwanted air to enter and interact within the wall system. In a conventional building, up to 40% of the heating requirement in cold climates results from outdoor air leaking into the building. Although airtight construction is effective and is typically recommended, this design strategy relies on mechanical intervention to ensure sufficient air
SYSTEM HOME: FIRST YEAR STUDENT ESSAYS FROM THE WORLD HOUSE PROJECT 117
exchanges within the building. The second design strategy is to create a “breathing” envelope, which allows natural air exchanges through a densely packed porous building material. Examples of this include wall systems fabricated from straw bales, concrete and earthen constructions. Thermal bridging – In a conventional two-by-four stick frame construction, frequent thermal bridging occurs as the wood studs are placed every 16”. Increasing stud spacing to 24” reduces the number of thermal bridges within the wall.
Window Selection
Despite the tremendous advances in technology, windows typically have the lowest R-value of all the building envelope components and represent a major contributor to air leakage. However, windows are a necessity in the building design as they allow natural light, air and solar energy into the home. The window design and performance should be considered in order to select the appropriate window for the intended use and climate. Factors that influence window performance include low-emittance coatings, air gaps with inert gas infill and the performance characteristics typically included on a window label. The following provides a brief explanation of the various factors contributing to window performance (Stein, 195): • A window with a low U-factor will provide a better resistance to heat flow through the window for a given
temperature difference.
• High Solar Heat Gain Coefficient (SHGC) is desirable for solar heating applications in a passive design, where
as a low SHGC is better suited for hot areas where high cooling needs are the dominant thermal issue.
• The ratio of VT and SHGC is known as the light-to-solar gain ratio (LSG) and windows with greater LSG
ratios are more suited for day lighting in hot climates.
• Low-e coatings reduce the radiant heat transfer between the glazing planes, reducing the overall heat flow
and improving the U-factor. One coating is almost as effective as adding another glazing layer. Three types of low-e coating are available and are summarized in Table 2.
COATING
APPLICATION
WINDOW*
High Transmission
Passive solar heating application. Low U-factor combined with high SHGC
7
Selective Transmission
Winter heating and summer cooling are important. Require low U-factor, low SHGC and high VT
9
Low Transmission
Sun is strong, absorption is undesirable. Low U-factor, SHGC and VT.
10
Table 2: Low-e coating characteristics * Appendix B1 provides a listing of windows with performance characteristics.
An air gap filled with an inert, low-conducting gas greatly reduces the heat transfer by convection currents between glazed surfaces, contributing to a lower U-factor. Argon and krypton are typically used – krypton provides improved performance but is more costly. A high performance window requires both low-e coatings and gas fill to prevent radiative and convection heat loss. Appendix B provides a list of various windows and their performance characteristics and should be considered when selecting the appropriate window (Stein, 1585-1586).
Thermal Control
Indoor temperature control and comfort can be achieved by balancing the insulation and passive design strategies within the building. Passive Solar Strategies Regardless of climate, a passive solar design can have a tremendous impact on both energy savings and improved comfort within the home. A passive solar home relies on the high levels of insulation and solar absorption, which together maintain and regulate an indoor and outdoor temperature balance. Mass absorbing materials are the distinguishing factor in passive solar buildings, providing a means to slowly collect, store and release the solar energy. Thermal mass functions as a thermal regulator within the building, helping dampen temperature fluctuations by absorbing and releasing heat. Although a number of passive solar strategies are available, the most utilized designs include the following strategies (summarized in Table 3). Direct Gain (DG) – In the most common systems nearly all south-facing spaces have windows. For DG spaces, the thermal mass should be widely distributed around the room to avoid over heating and allow solar penetration throughout the space. Typical mass-to-window ratio is 3:1 to 6:1, however higher mass will improve thermal stability and decrease temperature swings. Indirect Gain / Trombe Wall (TW / WW) – Trombe wall systems are considerably less common as limited natural light and view is permitted through the south facing windows. Traditionally, TW consist of a mass wall behind a glass pane and the entire wall behaves like a solar collector. The main advantage of TW systems is their thermal stability and limited temperature swings. These systems can be either vented (allowing a separation between the TW and the window) or unvented (TW against window surface). Vented systems provide a natural stack effect and deliver warm air sooner to the surrounding space. Depending on climate, consideration should be placed whether the wall is insulated or uninsulated. Water walls are the least common due to concerns about securing water in a building. Within WW containers, space should be provided to allow thermal expansion as well as a sacrificial anode or rust inhibitor. Isolated Gain / Sunspaces (SS) – This second most common design strategy creates desirable spaces in the home. A significant drawback is the very wide temperature swings within the SS that create the comfortable conditions in the nearby rooms.
SYSTEM HOME: FIRST YEAR STUDENT ESSAYS FROM THE WORLD HOUSE PROJECT 119
STRATEGIES Direct Gain (DG)
DESIGN IMPACT
HEATING BENEFIT
COOLING BENEFIT
Sun enters through south window or skylight
Fast response to sun
Cross ventilation encouraged with large south window and open floorplan
Outdoor view Access to natural light Open floor plan Light colours around window reduce glare
Thermal Storage Wall
Not much solar impact beyond 25ft of TW View and southern access discouraged Inner wall of TW free of obstacles
Tendency to overheat with large temperature swings Warmth spread throughout space with thermal mass Moveable insulation encouraged
Slow temperature swings Comfort is likely near TW or WW surface Greater effectiveness achieved with TW with translucent insulation
Shading necessary to prevent over-heating in summer
Cross ventilation discouraged by solid TW or WW Vented TW produces natural stack effect; with potential of overheating at night
No daylight through TW
SS become special places Sunspace (SS)
Similar to DG but with extreme temperature swings and accentuated radiant heat loss at night
Cross ventilation possible if common wall is penetrated
Flat or nearly flat roof is desirable
Discouraged temperature swings
Cross ventilation excellent potential
Skylight is discouraged
Steady summer and winter temperatures
Stack ventilation discouraged
Access to south encouraged View of south filtered
SS can become an effective stack
Little daylight through common wall
Roof Pond - Winter -
Plan is unrestricted Sidelighting, views and access encouraged
Winter air stratification possible
Table 3: Passive solar design strategies (Stein, 260, table 8.8)
Roof Ponds Roof ponds are considered the most promising passive solar strategy for thermal stability, yet are rarely implemented as a result of fear of water in the buidling’s architecture. Roof ponds are typically sized to nearly equal the floor area and are filled directly onto the flat roof surface or sealed in plastic bags (providing space for thermal expansion). Figure 4 illustrates the thermal benefit of a roof pond system, in addition to their functionality and adaptability to varying climates.
35
Outdoor Average Daily High
30 25
Average Room Daily Range
20 15 10
Outdoor Average Daily Low
5 0 FEB
MAR
APR
MAY
JUN
JUL
AUG
SEP
OCT
C°
Fig. 4: Thermal stability (Stein, 251, fig. 8.22g) The year long record of the outdoor temperature range and the indoor thermal stability. The residence is located in Atascadero, California.
Passive Solar Heating Benefits and Guidelines The potential benefit of a passive solar heating design in winter months can be approximated using the following process:
• Find the average January ambient air temperature (TA) and the average January daily solar radiation on a
south-facing wall (VS). These values are included in the Passive Solar Design Handbook, Vol 3, and the Canadian values are included in Appendix C1 (Stein, 1525).
• Plot these data points on each chart shown in Figure 6 to approximate the percentage contribution that
solar energy can make to your building’s winter seasonal fuel needs (SSF). VS (W/M2)
LCR 30
10
5
TA (C°) 0
-5
-10
85 75
4500
65
55 45
3000
35 25
Toronto
1500
VS (W/M2)
10
5
TA (C°) 0
-5
-10
Denver
Phoenix 4500
VS (W/M2)
Dodge City LCR 100
3000
15
4500
10
45
5
TA (C°) 0
-5
-10
35 25
Atlanta 3000
Toronto Boston 1500
1500
15
5
Toronto
PORTLAND Fig. 5: SSF benefit for DG system
Fig. 6: Direct Gain Potential (Stein, 103, fig. 4.15)
SYSTEM HOME: FIRST YEAR STUDENT ESSAYS FROM THE WORLD HOUSE PROJECT 121
The LCR100 “modestly solar” building consists of smaller south windows and is moderately well insulated. The LCR30 “seriously solar” building is well insulated with larger south windows. The term Solar Savings Fraction (SSF) is used to evaluate the building’s solar heating performance and is the extent to which solar design reduces the auxiliary heat requirement in comparison to a “reference” solar neutral building (Stein, 227). Appendix C2 provides a guideline for passive solar glazing area and the approximate SSF benefit for Canadian cities. This is represented in Figure 7, which illustrates both a standard performance and superior performance design for a number of U.S. cities. Appendix C3 provides a guide to relate the SSF to the type and amount of thermal mass required to achieve the solar benefit.
0.40 Madison
South glass & Floor area
0.20
d
Po
ad
sto Bo nd r tl a
iso
n
n
an r tl Po
Bo
sto
n
0.30
M
er nv a D e tl a nt A
0.10
De Atla Ph o e
nve
r
nt a Ph o e
nix
nix
No night insulation With R-9 night insulation
0
0.1
0.2
0.3
Standard Performance
0.4
0.5
0.6
0.7
0.8 Superior Performance
Fig. 7: DG solar heating benefit (Stein, 228, fig.8.9)
Thermal Mass The success of a passive solar design relies heavily on the glazing-to-mass ratio, to which the solar energy is collected, stored and released. The ability to collect and store this energy is dependent on the thermal storage capacity of the mass; which is the product of the specific heat, the density and thermal conductivity of the material. Ideal thermal masses should have high densities (limiting the occupied area) and high thermal capacity. Appendix C4 (Stein, 1636) provides a list of conventional thermal mass materials and their respective thermal properties.
Table 4 summarizes the time lag (time necessary for solar energy to pass through) for a variety of homogeneous wall masses. DG systems typically use a 4” to 6” thick concrete slab, while TW use 8” to 12” thick concrete walls. Materials
Thickness U-Factor b
Stone
Solid concrete
Common brick
Face brick wood
Insulating board
(in.)
(Btru/h ft2)
08 12 16 24 02 04 06 08 12 16 04 08 12 16 04 ½ 01 02 ½ 01 02 04 06
0.67 0.55 0.47 0.36 0.98 0.84 0.74 0.66 0.54 0.46 0.60 0.41 0.31 0.25 0.77 0.68 0.48 0.30 0.42 0.26 0.14 0.08 0.05
Table 4: Time lag
Time Lag (h)
5.5 8.0 10.5 15.5 1.1 2.5 3.8 5.1 7.8 10.2 2.3 5.5 8.5 12.0 2.4 0.17 0.45 1.3 0.08 0.23 0.77 2.7 5.0
Insulation
Eutectic salt bags
Dense building board
Venetian blinds
Fig. 8: PCM installation (Stein, 231, fig. 8.11)
Phase changing materials (eutectic salts) offer an alternative to space occupying thermal regulators. Figure 8 provides an illustration of a potential PCM installation, requiring minimal space and material to achieve thermal benefit. It is important that these PCM have adequate thermal conductivity so the heat can be readily absorbed and released.
Reducing Cooling Loads
The cooling load in a well-insulated home can be significantly reduced by decreasing the unwanted absorption of solar radiation into the walls and roof and reducing the transmission of solar radiation through windows. Direct Shading Shading windows from unwanted solar heat gain is a key design strategy for passive cooling and reduces the cooling loads on active HVAC systems. If correctly implemented, sun shading rejects most solar heat gain yet aids in distributing daylight deep into the building. As an approximation, effective external solar shading rejects 80% of the solar energy, whereas interior shading absorbs the heat and reradiates it to the surroundings (Stein, 198). Exterior shades or louvers should be made of light and reflective materials with low heat storage capacity. To prevent direct heat gain from the southern sun, the use of horizontal overhangs are most effective. Coolroof Design Understanding of the solar spectrum and the variation in the solar annual position can dictate both the colour and material selection for a roof design. UV light accounts for approximately 3% of the solar energy striking
SYSTEM HOME: FIRST YEAR STUDENT ESSAYS FROM THE WORLD HOUSE PROJECT 123
the earth’s surface. Visible light accounts for approximately 40%, while infrared accounts for the largest percentage of the spectrum. Infrared (IR) energy is felt as heat and when it strikes, that energy is transferred to the absorbing surface. Coolroof design is based on the premise of minimizing the heat gain through the roof surface. Roofs can be one of the least efficient components in a building envelope, leading to increased demand on cooling systems and increasing the heat island effect in dense areas. Coolroof design is described by two terms: Total Solar Reflectance (TSR) and Thermal Emittance (TE). TSR is the percentage of the solar radiation that is immediately reflected from a surface. The energy that is not reflected is absorbed into the building and is transferred to heat. TE controls the amount of heat that is re-emitted to the night sky in the form of IR wavelength. The combination of the TE and TSR dictate the surface temperature of the roof. Implementing these considerations can reduce the surface temperature of a roof by 100°F. For hot climates, high TSR and TE are desirable. For colder climates, lower TE may be desirable, however this is questionable given the reduced heat gain in winter months with snow coverings and lower sun angles and strength. Cross ventilation and stack effect ventilation – Although these passive cooling strategies provide significant energy savings and improved overall comfort, they are discussed in detail in the Air Handling chapter. Earth Tube Cooling Earth tubes provide a means to cool incoming ventilating air through earth contact before it enters the building. Tubes are buried underground at a specific depth and length, creating a passive heat exchanger between the hot intake air and the cool surrounding mass of the earth. The slower the air moves through the tubes, the greater the potential for heat transfer to colder surrounding earth. This can be either passive or fan driven to ensure sufficient air and velocity into long underground tubes (Stein, 249). The five main factors that will contribute to the effectiveness of the heat transfer are the depth and length of tube, tube diameter, rate of airflow and soil conductivity. The following figures showcase the effectiveness of earth tubes at cooling intake air. Figure 9 is set in damp, heavy soil with a constant earth temperature of 65°F, while the intake air enters at 85°F at a rate of 500fpm. Figure 10 has the same conditions as listed for Figure 9, while varying the soil conductivity (Stein, 252). Earth Tube Cooling Btu/h 200
2000
4000
6000
8000
Tube Diameter (in.)
4 6 8
12 Tube Length (ft)
16
20
10
20
40
Fig. 9: Earth tube cooling
60
80
100
6 in. Diameter Earth Tube Cooling, Btu/h 300 Soil Type: Conductivity Btu/h F ft
600
900
1200
1500
1800
1.5
Wet
1.25
Heavy Damp
0.75
1.0 Tube Length (ft) Base case
Heavy Dry, Light Damp
0.5 20
Light Dry
40
60
80
100
0.25 80
75
70
Fig. 10: Impact of soil conductivity
Daylighting Design Strategies
Studies have confirmed that access to natural light improves indoor environmental quality for occupants, influencing human behavior, health and productivity (Stein, 581). Designing with daylight in mind can improve energy efficiency by minimizing use of electric lights as well as reducing the associated heating and cooling loads for the building. One major design challenge is to balance the benefits of natural light and view with the unwanted glare. This can be achieved by selecting the appropriate window, the window placement and by introducing sun-deflecting barriers like trees, light shelves, and shading. In many locations, the ideal building orientation for natural light is achieved with an elongated and narrow plan, allowing the north and south faรงades to have maximum exposure. The southern axis is desirable as the light is relatively uniform and it is already present for passive solar heating strategies. The northern faรงade provides an ideal source of uniform and soft daylight. Sidelighting Strategies To improve natural light penetration and reduce glare, the following sidelighting strategies are recommended (Stein, 582): Adjacent walls as reflectors Interior walls become reflectors when windows are placed adjacent to them Walls should be light in colour for better reflectance
Slay the walls Light washes across a longer and rounded surface Rounded or splayed window creates more comfortable lighting Reduces potential for glare Fig. 11: Sidelighting strategies
SYSTEM HOME: FIRST YEAR STUDENT ESSAYS FROM THE WORLD HOUSE PROJECT 125
Toplighting Strategies Skylights or clerestories are suitable strategies for the top floor of a building, allowing natural light to enter the interior locations where it was otherwise unavailable. To prevent glare, toplighting should be positioned away from areas with a direct view from an occupant, or utilize an interior deflector to diffuse the daylight. Many of the design strategies for sidelighting apply to toplighting, however the following additional strategies are available:
Light pipes/tubes Collecting light either through a window opening or a heliostat and channeling it through reflective tubes Popular as it allows the transmittance of daylight from 65ft from a single light source
Splay light walls Skylight appears larger than it is because the light washes along the larger surface area and reflects diffused light into the space Reduces the potential for glare
Place high in space Allows more surface for the light to diffuse upon Works well when the sky light is above the field of view
Fig. 12: Toplighting strategies
Active Energy Considerations
When passive means cannot satisfy the energy needs of a home, active and efficient systems should be utilized. Much interest and innovation surrounds improving the affordability and effectiveness of solar renewable technologies. The aggressive pursuit in solar technologies becomes well understood when considering the amount of energy that is abundantly provided to the earth’s surface. Table 5 illustrates the daily arrival of solar energy on earth compared to other energy quantities (Stein, 31). Solar energy received each day
1
Melting of an average winter’s snow during the spring
1/10
A monsoon circulation between ocean and continent
1/100
Use of energy by all mankind in a year
1/100
A mid-latitude cyclone
1/1,000
A tropical cyclone
1/10,000
Kinetic energy of motion in earth’s general circulation
1/100,000
The first H bomb
1/100,000
A squall line containing thunderstorms and perhaps tornados
1/1,000,000
A thunderstorm
1/100,000,000
The first A bomb
1/100,000,000
The daily output of Boulder Dam
1/100,000,000
A typical local rain shower
1/10,000,000,000
A tornado
1/100,000,000,000
Lighting New York City for one night
1/100,000,000,000
Table 5: Solar energy comparison
This section will highlight and briefly describe some of the most effective and affordable active energy options, with a particular interest in technologies relying on renewable energy. Solar Hot Water Collection: Evacuated Tubes Considered one of the most cost effective and efficient renewable energy technologies. Solar hot water collection can provide up to 50% of the domestic hot water (DHW) needs in Canada, while in warmer climates like Australia or Cyprus, 97% and 80% respectively are attainable (Harvey, 8). Given that hot water consumes over 20% of the energy needs in a Canadian home, a tremendous energy savings and environmental benefit is achieved using this technology. Although evacuated tubes are the most popular solar hot water collector, there is incredible potential in parabolic or concentrated solar collection, as they can achieve higher thermal gain using less required surface area and less solar energy. Parabolic systems are typically sized for commercial applications but could be reduced to accommodate household needs. Solar Hot Air Collection Solar hot air collectors are easily integrated into a roof design or a wall system and offer benefits in both hot and cold climates. Solar roof collection is located on the south facing surface and is used to preheat intake ventilation air in cold climates and induce stack effect air circulation in hot climates. Solar walls utilize
SYSTEM HOME: FIRST YEAR STUDENT ESSAYS FROM THE WORLD HOUSE PROJECT 127
perforated holes that allow intake air to enter and heat up along solar absorbing surface. Solar walls can be located on the south facing wall or on the east and west wall depending on latitude and potential benefit. In cold weather operation, solar walls pre-heat intake air but also inhibit heat transfer from interior space to the colder exterior (Stein, 128). In warmer climates, solar walls are still effective as they can induce a stack effect in the wall system, drawing hot air out of the home. Building Integrated Photovoltaic Panels (BiPV) PV panels have evolved to the point where thin, semiconducting photovoltaic panels can now be integrated into the design of the building. BiPVs are designed into the structural materials for roof shingles, wall siding, curtain walls and windows. A major benefit of BiPVs is they combine a structural use with power generation capability. Significant drawbacks from these technologies are their upfront cost and low efficiencies as an electricity-generating device. BiPVs are considered a fairly new technology and their cost and efficiencies should improve. One of the most common BiPV installations is on south facing sloped roofs. A built in air gap is used to dissipate the generated heat. This air gap can be used to preheat intake air or circulate water through tubes for DHW. Although they offer many advancements in combination systems, they are still considered financially unattractive Photovoltaic (PV) Solar Trackers With a typical PV panel, only 10 to 15% of the solar energy projected onto the PV surface is converted into electricity. A major issue with all PV panels is that they actually produce more heat than electricity and the electricity generating efficiency decreases linearly with increase in cell temperature. To improve and maintain PV efficiency, adequate heat dissipation is mandatory. Tracking solar panels offer even greater efficiency as they can track the sun and receive 10% more energy in the winter and 40% more energy in the summer (compared to a fixed panel). Solar trackers are still financially exclusive, however developments continue to improve both the affordability and the efficiency of these systems. The Sunball is a small and compact device that uses Fresnel lenses to concentrate and intensify the solar energy onto built-in PV panels. This solar tracking device uses a microprocessor to determine the solar position. Wind Power The origin and formation of wind is complicated but can be simplified and understood when considering that the sun heats the poles and equator unevenly, creating natural atmospheric convection. It is estimated that 1 to 3% of the solar energy that hits the earth is converted into wind energy. To gain perspective, this translates as 50 to 100 times more energy than is converted into biomass by all the plants on earth through photosynthesis (Wikipedia, Wind power). A wind turbine harnesses and converts the kinetic energy from the wind into a more useful form of electricity. Globally, wind power generation has quadrupled between 2000 and 2006, however it still only accounts for less than 1% of the worldwide energy used. The growing interest and demand for wind power exists because it offers a clean and renewable source of energy that is cost competitive with non-renewable power production
(without subsidies). Although the worldwide generation is minimal, Denmark, Spain and Germany have proven that wind is a valuable energy investment as it provides 18%, 9% and 7% of their respective electricity needs (Wikipedia, Wind power). In order to be financially feasible, wind turbine applications are generally only recommended in geographic locations where average wind speeds exceed 10mph (4.5m/s). The airflow should be consistent and undisturbed in order to reduce unpredictable loading on the blades and bearings and produce continuous power. The most common designs are Horizontal Axis Wind Turbines (HAWTs) and are placed high above the ground allowing for long propeller blades to freely rotate (Fig 22). Although effective, the major disadvantages of these turbines are their upfront cost, their supporting infrastructure and their aesthetic impact on their surroundings. It is difficult to blend these turbine designs into the architecture of a building or into the natural surroundings and as a result, they are noticed and are considered undesirable by some. Complaints are also voiced concerning the noise and the oscillating shadows generated by the rotating blades. In response to these constraints, much interest and development surrounds Vertical Axis Wind Turbines (VAWTs), as they typically require less supporting infrastructure and can be more easily integrated into architecture. VAWTs also provide greater operating ranges than a HAWT system, as they require lower cut-in speeds (minimum wind velocity required to initiate power generation and overcome friction) and can operate at significantly higher cut-out speeds (maximum wind velocity permitted to protect against loading and stress). The ability to harness wind speed is particularly beneficial as doubling the wind speed results in an eightfold increase in available kinetic energy (The Economist). The VAWT design is more compact, with a uniform and smaller blade design, thereby using less material and making it less expensive to manufacture. The Windside design is an example of a compact, yet efficient VAWT that can blend into architecture and has a large operating range. The cut-in speed ranges between 1 to 3m/s and can operate up to 60m/s, in comparison to a typical HAWT at 22m/s (Windside). Pellet Stoves A pellet stove is a high efficiency appliance that burns compressed wood or biomass to produce heat. Depending on the cost and desired complexity, pellet stoves range from manual feeds to automated hopper-fed combustion systems that can be controlled by a thermostat. The one major advantage of pellet stoves is their ability to use multiple fuel sources, depending on what is financially and locally available. A more common fuel source is densely packed, high quality saw dust, which is a post-consumer waste product from sawmills. The density of the pellets creates a rich and compact fuel source, capable of achieving high combustion efficiencies ranging between 86 and 99%. The high combustion efficiency results in minimal wasted energy, in addition to little waste and ash generation. An electric blower is used to improve the burner efficiency and circulate the localized heat to the surrounding room. A major disadvantage of pellet stoves is the initial cost, as they are typically more expensive than a gas or wood insert. That being said, their popularity is increasing due to the high efficiency output, cleaner combustion and lower fuel costs.
SYSTEM HOME: FIRST YEAR STUDENT ESSAYS FROM THE WORLD HOUSE PROJECT 129
Combined Heat and Power Generators (CHP) The CHP is a fairly new application for domestic use that combines space and water heating with electricity generation. The CHP utilizes natural gas as the fuel source for either a boiler or a furnace and in addition to producing heat, generates grid quality AC (or DC for batteries) electricity. The WhisperGen and the Freewatt Honda are amongst the two most popular units as they are both highly efficiency, compact and quiet. The WhisperGen is considered a greater innovation as it utilizes a high efficient Stirling engine but this product is only available in the U.K. and is not scheduled for North American distribution for several years. Catalytic Combustors Similar to the catalytic converter for an automobile, a catalytic combustor reduces the air pollution from wood burning. A honeycomb shaped insert is placed in the flue or built into the stove. When wood smoke passes through the combustor, it reacts with the chemical and ignites. This provides for a more complete combustion, creating more heat, while reducing creosote build-up and emitted pollutants. The one major constraint with catalytic combustors is they require a quality fuel source, such as wood, and will not react with plastic, coloured newsprint or metal (which are typically not recommended for any combustion). Ground Source Heat Pumps (GeoExxchage Systems) Ground source heat pumps can provide the domestic hot water, heating and cooling needs for a home. Environmentally safe refrigerant is circulated through underground tubing, exchanging heat between the refrigerant and the “constant� soil temperature. Depending on the terrain and available land, the tubes can be installed horizontally, vertically or into a water source (Stein, 365). Horizontal installations require trenches 3 to 6ft deep, where 400 to 650ft of pipe is installed per 12,000 Btu/h of heating and cooling capacity (Stein, 362). Vertical closed loop tubes are installed when horizontal land is limited. Depending on the soil and heating and cooling needs, vertical holes are drilled 150 to 450ft deep. This method typically requires less tubing in comparison to horizontal installations but is typically more expensive to install. A water installation submerges loops into nearby water and heat is transferred to and from the water. The heat carrying capacity of water results in less tubing than either the vertical or horizontal installation. Water installation is the least expensive but requires a body of water with minimal waves and a depth greater than 8ft.
Fig. 13: Ground source heat pump configurations
Appliances Although appliances are not the greatest energy consumer in the home, attention to product efficiency and design can have a significant impact on electricity savings. The refrigerator is the greatest electricity consumer
of all the appliances in the home, followed by the dryer. The electricity demand can be reduced by purchasing energy efficient appliances (Energy Star label) and by using interior or exterior clotheslines. The American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy (ACEEE) publishes a list of recommended appliances for the home and should be consulted prior to purchasing. Another impact on electricity consumption is the “phantom loads” or the standby losses that occur when appliances are left plugged in but are not running. A 2001 study carried out at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the University of California found that standby losses can account for 6 to 25% of the household electricity consumption. Computers, laser printers, TVs, VCRs, cellphone chargers and cable boxes are the worst offenders and consume 75% of their total energy usage while off (Venolia, 139). To minimize these standby electrical losses, the appliances mentioned above should be plugged into power bars and turned off when not functioning.
Appendix A: Insulation Material Properties FORM
R-VALUE (in.)
ADVANTAGES
DISADVANTAGES
BATTS / ROLLS
Fiber Glass
3.2
Health concerns, respiratory and cancer causing agent
Do it yourself
Don’t seal cavities tightly
Inexpensive
Settles/sags over time
Made from 30-40% recycled glass Dense Fiber Glass (20% more $)
R-value reduces when wet
Won’t burn, no insects, or mold 3.8
Made from 30-40% recycled glass
Miraflex formaldehyde free
Typically made from formaldehyde binding agents
Fibrex made from 92% recycled content Mineral Wool
2.8
Moisture resistance, retains R-value when wet
More expensive than fiberglass
Density provides acoustic insulation Non-combustible Natural resource, non carcinogenic Natural Wool
3.9
Flame resistant
More expansive than fiberglass
Can absorb and desorb humidity improving indoor comfort
Limited availability
Absorbs indoor pollutants
SYSTEM HOME: FIRST YEAR STUDENT ESSAYS FROM THE WORLD HOUSE PROJECT 131
Superior acoustic and thermal insulation Natural Cotton
3.5 – 3.7
Formaldehyde and VOC free
More expansive than fiberglass
85% post industrial recycled natural fibers
Limited availability
Foil barrier protects against air leakage and moisture buildup SPRAY / BLOWN
Loose Cellulose
3.5
One of the most environmentally friendly choices and lowest embodied energy Inexpensive
Dense Cellulose
4.0
No cancer causing agents
Dry cellulose may eventually sag Can absorb moisture, over long periods may lead to rotting or mold growth
Wet/acrylic binders prevents sag Expansion foam acts as vapor barrier (0.03 air exch) High thermal insulator, limits thermal bridging Icynene
3.5 – 4.0
No HCFC or formaldehyde, 100% water-blown
Expensive
Maintains performance No shrinking or settling Reduces air leakage and moisture buildup, limiting mold growth FOAM BOARD
EPS
3.8
High insulation for low thickness
High embodied energy
Least environmentally damaging of the foams
Petroleum based product Toxic fumes if burnt
Water resistant, ideal for foundations
High insulation for low thickness XPS
Use of halocarbons for foam expansion, strong GHG High embodied energy
4.8 Water resistant, ideal for foundations
Petroleum based product Toxic fumes if burnt
Unfaced Polyisocyanurate Foil Faced Polyisocyanurate
5.8 ~2x the R-value as fiberglass/cellulose water resistant ideal for foundations 7.0
Use of halocarbons for foam expansion, strong GHG High embodied energy Petroleum based product Toxic fumes if burnt
B: Window Characteristics (Stein, 197) GLAZING DESCRIPTION & REFERENCE NUMBER
LAYERS OF GLAZING & SPACES (Outside to Inside)
Total Window U-Factor
Total Window
W/M2 K
SHGCb
VTC
LSGd
1/8 in (3 mm) clear 1/8 in (3 mm) bronze 1/8 in (3 mm) clear 1/2 in (13 mm) air 1/8 in (3 mm) clear 1/8 in (3 mm) bronze 1/2 in (13 mm) air 1/8 in (3 mm) clear
7.38 7.38 3.63
0.79 0.69 0.65
0.69 0.52 0.62
0.87 0.75 0.95
3.63
0.55
0.47
0.85
1/8 in (3 mm) clear 1/2 in (13 mm) air 1/8 in (3 mm) clear 1/8 in (3 mm) bronze 1/2 in (13 mm) air 1/8 in (3 mm) clear
2.78
0.58
0.57
0.98
2.78
0.48
0.43
0.90
1.87
0.55
0.52
0.95
1.70
0.44
0.56
1.27
1.65
0.31
0.51
1.65
1.76
0.26
0.31
1.19
1.93
0.52
0.53
1.02
1.93
0.52
0.53
1.02
Aluminum (no thermal break)
single-glazed clear single-glazed bronze double-glazed clear
double-glazed bronze
Wood / Vinyl (aluminum)
double-glazed clear
double-glazed bronze
Wood / Vinyl (stainless)
double-glazed low-Eƒ
double-glazed low-Eƒ
double-glazed spectrally ƒ selective ƒ double-glazed spectrally ƒ selective ƒ triple-glazed clear
1/8 in (3 mm) clear 1/2 in (13 mm) argon 1/8 in (3 mm) low-E 0.20 1/8 in (3 mm) low-E 0.08 1/2 in (13 mm) argon 1/8 in (3 mm) clear 1/8 in (3 mm) low-E 0.04 1/2 in (13 mm) argon 1/8 in (3 mm) clear 1/8 in (3 mm) low-E 0.10 1/2 in (13 mm) argon 1/8 in (3 mm) clear 1/8 in (3 mm) clear 1/2 in (13 mm) air 1/8 in (3 mm) clear 1/2 in (13 mm) air 1/8 in (3 mm) clear
Insulated Vinyl (insulated)
triple-glazed clear low-Eƒ superwindow
1/8 in (3 mm) low-E 0.08 1/2 in (13 mm) krypton 1/8 in (3 mm) clear 1/2 in (13 mm) krypton 1/8 in (3 mm) low-E 0.08
Based upon a casement window, 2ft x 4ft b Solar heat gain coefficient (higher numbers means more solar heat flow) c Visible transmittance (higher numbers means more light transmitted) d Light-to-solar-gain ratio. LSG=VT/SHGC (for typical centre-of-glass values) f Low-E ratings indicate what percentage of the long-wavelength radiant energy is admitted; 0.2 therefore admits 20% and reflects 80%
SYSTEM HOME: FIRST YEAR STUDENT ESSAYS FROM THE WORLD HOUSE PROJECT 133
C: Average Insolation, Temperature and DD Data CANADA Edmonton, Alberta – Elev 2220, Lat 53.6 HS
Halifax, Nova Scotia – Elev 136, Lat 44.6
VS
TA
D50
D55
D60
D65
HS
VS
TA
D50
D55
D60
D65
JAN 324
746
4
1421
1574
1728
1883
JAN
456
737
26
752
900
1051
1204
JUL 1977
1378
62
1
7
38
117
JUL
1694
929
65
0
1
8
57
YR
1205
36
6317
7563
9016
10650
YR
1076
907
46
3457
4500
5746
7211
1114
Suffield, Alberta – Elev 2549, Lat 50.3 HS
Ottawa, Ontario – Elev 377, Lat 45.5
VS
TA
D50
D55
D60
D65
HS
VS
TA
D50
D55
D60
D65
JAN 433
937
7
1333
1486
1640
1794
JAN
510
914
13
1169
1320
1473
1627
JUL 2173
1377
67
0
2
11
49
JUL
1875
1040
69
0
1
04
23
YR
1269
40
5500
6637
7923
9393
YR
1158
1015
43
4912
5965
7158
8529
1239
Vancouver, British Columbia – Elev 310, Lat 37.5 HS
Toronto, Ontario – Elev 443, Lat 43.7
VS
TA
D50
D55
D60
D65
HS
VS
TA
D50
D55
D60
D65
JAN 254
395
37
425
572
724
878
JAN
487
777
22
891
1041
1194
1348
JUL 2021
1239
63
0
1
13
82
JUL
1958
1035
70
0
0
3
18
YR
916
50
1791
2781
4041
5588
YR
1171
948
46
3842
4853
6013
7343
1060
Winnipeg, Manitoba – Elev 820, Lat 49.95 HS
Normandin, Quebec – Elev 450, Lat 48.8
VS
TA
D50
D55
D60
D65
HS
VS
TA
D50
D55
D60
D65
JAN 461
1011
0
1588
1740
1893
2047
JAN
454
921
0
1564
1719
1873
2028
JUL 2025
1264
67
0
2
9
45
JUL
1707
1031
62
1
7
40
118
YR
1199
36
6925
8062
9338
10790
YR
1092
1053
34
7037
8308
9762
11376
1190
Elevation in feet, latitude in degrees north altitude, HS (horizontal surface) and VS (vertical surface) insolation in Btu/day ft2, TA in degrees F, D50, D55, D60 and D65 in degree days F (for these various “base” temperatures).
C2: SSF Guidelines APPROXIMATE SSF VALUES Solar Glazing / Floor Area
Standard Performance
HIGH
LOW
LOW
Edmonton, Alberta
0.25
0.50
—
Suffield, Alberta
0.25
0.50
28
Nanaimo, British Columbia
0.13
0.26
26
35
Superior Performance
HIGH
LOW
HIGH
—
54
72
30
67
85
45
66
28
40
60
—
54
74
CANADA
Vancouver, British Columbia
0.13
0.26
20
Winnipeg, Manitoba
0.25
0.50
—
NR
NR
Dartmouth, Nova Scotia
0.14
0.28
17
24
45
70
Moosonee, Ontario
0.25
0.50
—
NR
—
48
67
Ottawa, Ontario
0.25
0.50
—
NR
—
59
80
Toronto, Ontario
0.18
0.36
17
23
44
68
Normandin, Quebec
0.25
0.50
—
—
54
74
NR
C3: Thermal Mass Guidelines Thermal Storage by Weight/Collector Area
Recommended Effective Thermal Storage Area per Unit Area of Solar Collection Area
Expected Solar Savings Fraction (SSF), %
Water kg/m2
Masonry kg/m2
Water Surface Areab Collector Surface Area
Masonry Surface Areac Collector Surface Area
10
29
147
0.1
0.7
20
59
293
0.2
1.5
30
88
440
0.3
2.2
40
117
586
0.4
2.9
50
147
733
0.5
3.7
60
176
879
0.6
4.4
70
205
1026
0.7
5.1
80
234
1172
0.8
5.9
C4: Thermal Mass Materials MATERIALS
SOURCE DENSITY, p (lb/ft 3)
SPECIFIC HEAT, c (Btu/lb Fยบ)
HEAT CAPACITY, CONDUCTIVITY, DIFFUSIVITY, pc (Btu/lb Fยบ) k (Btu/lb Fยบ) k/pc (ft 2 /h)
PCK (Btu 2 /h ft
Water
1
62.3
1.0
62.3
Concrete
2, 3
144
0.21
30.3
0.89
0.029
27.0
Concrete block
2, 3
Heavy weight
135
0.21
28.4
0.74
0.026
21.0
Medium weight
105
0.22
23.1
0.41
0.018
9.5
85
0.23
19.6
0.27
0.014
5.3
Paving
135
0.19
25.7
0.75
0.029
19.3
Face
130
0.19
24.7
0.75
0.030
18.5
Building
120
0.19
22.8
0.42
0.018
9.6
Light weight Brick
1, 4
Mortar or grout
1
116
0.20
23.2
0.42
0.018
9.7
Adobe
5
80
0.20
16.0
0.38
0.024
6.1
20.0
0.75
0.038
15.0
Gypsum or platerboard
1
50
0.26
13.0
0.097
0.058
9.8
Douglas fir plywood
1
34
0.29
9.9
0.067
0.007
0.7
Hardwood
1
45
0.30
13.5
0.092
0.007
1.2
100
SYSTEM HOME: FIRST YEAR STUDENT ESSAYS FROM THE WORLD HOUSE PROJECT 135
Glossary Terms
Altitude – angle between the horizon and the sun’s angle above the horizon (Benjamin, 150). Azimuth – angle along the horizon between
the projected position of the sun and the true (solar) south (Benjamin, 150). Conduction –heat transferred directly from
molecule to molecule; within or between materials, with proximity to molecules (Benjamin, 179). Conductivity – denoted by the symbol k
and quantifies the rate of heat flow in an hour that will pass through 1Ft2 of material that is an inch thick when the temperature difference across the material is 1°F. Expressed in units Btu/h Ft2 °F (Benjamin, 180). Convection – heat exchange between a
Solar Heat Gain Coefficient (SHGC) – the percentage of solar radiation incident on a window/skylight assembly that ends up in a building as heat. Measure of the window’s ability to resist heat gain from solar radiation (Benjamin, 195). Solar Saving Fraction (SSF) – extent to
which solar design reduces a building’s auxiliary heat requirement relative to a reference building. A measure of the solar building’s conservation advantage (Benjamin, 227). Specific Heat – a measure of the heat
energy required to raise the temperature of a given amount of substance by one degree. Thermal Bridging – when framing interrupts insulation and creates a path of heat transfer with minimal resistance.
fluid (typically air) and a solid with the motion Thermal Conductivity – a material’s ability of fluid (Benjamin, 179). to transmit heat through a specific thickness due to a temperature difference Density – mass per unit of volume (kg/m3). Thermal Mass – any material that absorbs Embodied Energy – An accounting indicator and retains heat. Particularly useful in that quantifies the amount of energy that passive solar design, allowing solar heat to was needed to mine/harvest/produce, accumulate in the wall and be released to fabricate, and transport a unit of a material. the surrounding. Radiation – heat flows via electromagnetic waves from hotter surface to detached cold surface – across empty space and potential great distances (Benjamin, 179).
U-factor – Sum of the heat flow rates
Resistance – denoted by the symbol R
Visual Transmittance (VT) – Percentage of visual light at normal angle of incidence that passes through the particular glazing (Benjamin, 196).
and is a measure of the resistance to heat flow. It is the reciprocal of conductivity and quantities the effectiveness as an insulator. Expressed in units h ft2 °F/Btu (Benjamin, 180).
through the various window surfaces/ components, producing a single resistance value
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Ballensky, Drew. “High Performance Roofing: The Merge of Cool and Sustainable Roofing.” Eco-Structure – Improving Environmental Performance of Buildings and Their Surroundings. January/February 2007. Bonded Logic. “UltraTouch Natural Cotton Fiber Insulation.” Bonded Logic Inc. http://www .bondedlogic.com/ultratouch.htm (accessed February 15, 2007). Chiras, Dan. “All About Insulation: Make Your Home More Energy Efficient and Comfortable.” Mother Earth News, January/February, 2002. http://www .motherearthnews.com/DIY/2002-12-01/All-About-Insulation.aspx (accessed February 15, 2007). Economist. “Turning Wind Power on its Side”. Economist 378, no. 8468 (March 11 2006): 4. Elizabeth, Lynn, and Cassandra Adams. Alternative Construction: Contemporary Natural Building Methods. New York: John Wiley, 2005. Fisette, Paul. “Cellulose Insulation – A Smart Choice.” Building Materials and Wood Technology Programme, Department of Natural Resources Conservation, University of Massachusetts, 2005. www.umass.edu/bmatwt/publications/articles /cellulose_ insulation.html (accessed February 1, 2007). Gernot, Minke. Earth Construction Handbook: The Building Material Earth in Modern Architecture. Boston: WIT Press, 2000. Good Sheppard Wool Insulation. “Good Shepherd Wool Insulation: Sheep Wool Insulation for Log, Frame and Timber-Frame Homes.” Good Sheppard Wool Insulation. www .goodshepherdwool.com (accessed February 15, 2007). Harvey, L. D. Danny. A Handbook on Low-Energy Buildings and District Energy Systems: Fundamentals, Techniques and Examples. London: Earthscan, 2006. Icynene. “Icynene: Superior Insulation Performance for Increased Energy Efficiency and Sustainable Design; The Icynene Insulation System.” Icynene Inc. www.icynene.com (accessed February 15, 2007). Kachadorian, James. The Passive Solar House: Using Solar Design to Heat & Cool Your Home. White River Junction, VT: Chealsea Green Publishing, 1997. Kriner, Scott. “Cool Metal Roofing.” Environmental Design and Construction, October 2006. Oak Ridge National Laboratory. “Insulation Fact Sheet: Table 1; Types of Insulation – Basic Forms.” United States Department of Energy - Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy. http://www.ornl.gov/sci/roofs+walls/insulation/ins_tab1.html (accessed February 19, 2007). Also available in pdf format as part of “Insulation Fact Sheet,” Department of Energy document number DOE/CE-0180/with Addendum 1, October 2002. SBC Firemaster. “An Inside Look at Pellet Stove Technology: Pellet stove Cut-A-Way Diagram.” SBC Firemaster Ltd. http://www.sbcfiremaster.com/pelletstoves/index.html (accessed March 7, 2007). Stein, Benjamin, John S. Reynolds, Walter T. Grondzik, and Alison G. Kwok. Mechanical and Electrical Equipment for Buildings. New Jersey: John Wiley, 2006. Venolia, Carol and Kelly Lerner. Natural Remodeling for the Not-So-Green House. New York: Lark Books, 2006. Wikipedia. Wind Power. www.wikipedia.com (on wind power; accessed March 15, 2007). Windside Production Ltd. “Wind Energy Solutions for Extreme Conditions.” Oy Windside Production Ltd. www.windside.com (accessed March 15, 2007).
SYSTEM HOME: FIRST YEAR STUDENT ESSAYS FROM THE WORLD HOUSE PROJECT 137
AIR HANDLING
Air: The fluid which we breathe, and which surrounds the earth; the atmosphere. It is invisible, inodorous, insipid, transparent, compressible, elastic, and ponderable. —brainyquote.com
What is the air handling system?
Often referred to as Heating Ventilation and Air Conditioning (HVAC) in houses, the system of moving, replenishing, moderating and maintaining air quality within and around the home is fundamental to health and wellbeing of the occupants.
SYSTEM HOME: FIRST YEAR STUDENT ESSAYS FROM THE WORLD HOUSE PROJECT 141
Historical Analysis
In the past, humans relied on passive air handling systems and natural air exchanges to moderate extreme temperature and humidity out of necessity, conditioning their environments for survival. Over time, air handling systems have increasingly been used to condition the home for comfort, relying on heavily mechanized and costly inputs, conveniently located out of sight. This shift is most visible in the physical transformation of the social centre of the home: from the courtyard or hearth – which facilitated air circulation and temperature control – to the TV which, to say the least, does little for air quality. Most recently, poor air handling and air quality in buildings is an increasing contributor to respiratory problems, presence of allergens and sick building syndrome, paving the way for a movement to conditioning for health.
Future Trends
In order to improve the overall comfort and health within the home, a balance between passive and active design strategies is required. Integrating the passive principles and solutions from the past with efficient mechanical systems will not only decrease the operating cost of the home, but will improve the indoor air quality and comfort. Air quality within the home can be improved by designing for sufficient air exchanges, maintaining comfortable relative humidity, and utilizing healthy building materials.
SAMPLE HOMES
Bedouin Tent and Igloo
Historically, humans have discovered innovative ways to manipulate airflow, allowing us to inhabit event the most hostile regions of the earth. The Bedouin tent, found in the desert climates of the Middle East, predates human civilization. Tents are fabricated from loosely woven goat hair – porous enough to allow hot air to escape. The goat hair also naturally constricts during periods of rain, preventing moisture from leaking into the home. At the opposite end of the spectrum, Inuit communities have constructed a home perfectly suited to the extreme cold of the Central Canadian Arctic and Greenland. The dome shape of the igloo improves natural circulation, while venting holes provide exhaust escape. A cold sink at the entrance draws down cold air from outside, ensuring moderate temperatures inside the igloo. Straw Bale
A straw bale house utilizes a densely packed agricultural waste product to create either the infill or the supporting structure of a home. When complete, the walls provide a natural and healthy building envelope that is free of formaldehyde, VOC’s or synthetic materials. Although the bales are densely packed, they are slightly porous, providing a breathing envelope that allows for natural air exchanges between the interior and exterior space. Houses that are naturally ventilated are said to be more comfortable and more energy efficient as they do not rely on mechanical systems to force air movement. Sunset Breeze
Designed by Michelle Kaufman in 2005-06, Sunset Breeze is a flexible prefab home with a courtyard or garden adjoining each room. Green spaces and operable windows naturally circulate into each of the major rooms, allowing the occupant to take advantage of California’s temperate climate.
SYSTEM HOME: FIRST YEAR STUDENT ESSAYS FROM THE WORLD HOUSE PROJECT 143
AIR HANDLING IN DEPTH
Human Comfort and Health
The intelligent design of a building’s thermal envelope can provide comfortable indoor temperatures for the majority of the year in most North American climates (Stein, 317). That being said, the major comfort determinants of relative humidity, air motion and air quality typically require mechanical intervention to maintain year round comfort. As outdoor impurities and uncomfortable levels of humidity become more of a concern, designers are encouraged to create airtight buildings, relying on mechanical means to filter and circulate air. Air Exchanges Sufficient air exchanges are required to maintain fresh and healthy air quality in the home. The required rate varies from house to house and country to country depending on construction details and climatic factors. All buildings require a minimum number of air exchanges to provide oxygen to the occupants, control the humidity, eliminate odors and reduce the potential for mold and fungus growth. AHSRAE Standards 6.2 recommends a minimum ventilation rate of 1cfm (cubic feet per minute) per 100ft 2 plus 7.5cfm per bedroom. Aside from buildings that are airtight by design, very few homes have the ability to truly control air exchanges to this standard. In older homes, where air leakage is significant, it is not uncommon for all the air in the home to be replaced every hour (ToolBase Services). This can contribute to up to 40% of the heating load, in addition to increasing cooling loads, and can create uncomfortable drafts and introduce more hot, humid air into the home. Although an airtight building envelope provides many advantages for comfort, health and energy savings, another approach is to utilize a construction material that will satisfy the required thermal and insulating needs and provide natural air exchanges through the wall. This is achievable in most natural building materials, like straw bale or earth construction, where the densely packed, porous nature of the wall provides consistent fresh air into the building. Relative Humidity (RH) Relative humidity is a measurement used to quantify the amount of moisture in the air. Typically, humidity is a concern in warm climates, as it contributes to increased perspiration and uncomfortable, “muggy� days. Humans are sensitive to humidity, as the skin relies on air to remove moisture during sweating. When the RH is high, sweat does not evaporate from the body easily, resulting in the inability to regulate our temperature. The opposite is true with low RH in the winter, where sweat quickly evaporates from the skin, cooling the body down faster. In addition to the thermal discomfort caused by RH extremes, perhaps a bigger concern is the health and respiratory affects. Long-term exposure to RH below 40% increases susceptibility to colds and respiratory problems. RH above 70% not only feels uncomfortable, but also enables and encourages mold and fungus growth. RH between 40 and 70% is considered ideal, as it is more comfortable, and reduces the fine dust in the air and the life of bacteria and viruses. In order to reduce RH levels and improve comfort in the home, two design strategies are utilized. The first and most common approach is to create an airtight building envelope, limiting the amount of hot and humid air that enters the home. When needed, a dehumidifier can be used to mechanically condense the water out
of the air (discussed in Active Air Handling Strategies). The second approach relies on appropriate building material selection that can absorb and desorb moisture in the air. Earth construction can absorb humidity faster and to a greater extent than any other building material, holding thirty times more moisture than a burnt brick (Gernot). Moisture is absorbed and evaporated from the wall surface, creating a balance of indoor and outdoor climate and achieving a comfortable year round environment. Air Motion Thermal comfort and occupant health is strongly dependent on the air quality and the means in which fresh air is supplied to the home. Although thermal comfort typically varies from person to person, it is defined as a feeling of well being and an unawareness of how one is loosing heat to the environment (Stein, 86). In order to achieve this sensation of comfort, the velocity at which air is supplied and directed to the occupant requires design attention. Figure 1 provides an illustration of the satisfaction of air velocity, as a function of temperature. As shown, people will tolerate higher air velocities (convection currents) when temperatures are higher. This concept becomes highlighted when considering the behavior of an air conditioner. Conditioned air is typically supplied at 13°C at 0.25m/s air velocity and using Fig. 1, this corresponds to approximately 40% of the people dissatisfied with the draft. Ceiling fans on the other hand provide the same velocity of convection currents but at a higher temperature, leaving only 15% of people dissatisfied. 80 60 40 Percent Dissatisfied
20
68
( ºF
10
ºC
)
) ºC 23 F ( º C) º 5 6 . 73 º F (2 79
20
8 6 4 2 1 0
0.3
0.6
0.9
1.2
1.5
Mean Air Velocity, ft/s
0
0.1
0.2
0.3
0.4
0.5
m/s
Fig. 1 Percentage of people dissatisfied a function of mean air velocity as a function of temperature (Stein, 97, fig. 4.9)
Passive Air Handling
Studies have shown that buildings that are passively conditioned are more thermally comfortable than those controlled by mechanical intervention. Passive design offers the sensation of a uniform temperature throughout the interior, without the presence of cold spots and forced mechanical air blowing at uncomfortable velocities. A conducted study confirmed that when outdoor temperatures were 30°C, the average preferred temperature increases to 25°C in mechanically ventilated buildings and 27°C in naturally vented buildings (Elizabeth, 44). SYSTEM HOME: FIRST YEAR STUDENT ESSAYS FROM THE WORLD HOUSE PROJECT 145
Cross Ventilation Cross ventilation is one of the oldest and most effective methods of harnessing and introducing outdoor convection currents into the home. Operable windows and skylights, with variable openings provide fresh air into the home, reducing the indoor temperature. Cross ventilation is maximized with a narrow floor plan that has minimal east-west obstructions and proper window distribution and placement. Special consideration should be taken to ensure that bedrooms are individually vented (for noise and privacy) and that bathroom venting does not circulate into living spaces.
Fig. 2 Variable window openings can provide alternative venting strategies, accommodating for both changing wind velocity and room occupancy (Stein, 73, fig. 3.30).
Figure 3 (Stein, 237, fig. 8.14a) provides a relationship between the cross ventilation window inlet area (expressed as a percentage of total floor area), wind speeds and the resulting heat removal capacity of a crossventilated system (note that a window outlet of greater or equal area is required). As expected, higher wind velocities and larger window areas will provide greater cooling capacities. CROSS VENTILATION CAPACITY – Btu/h ft 2 (W/m 2)
Inlet Area Percentage Of Floor Area
15%
90
10% 30
5%
0
15
(2 84 )
15 0 (3 78 )
(4 73 )
(1 89 ) (1 42 ) 5)
45 (9
60
12 0
(4 7)
5 440 (2.2)
10 880 (4.5)
15 1320 (6.7)
Wind Velocity mph fpm (m/s)
Fig. 3 (Stein, 237, fig. 8.14a) Cross ventilation design guidelines for heat removal per unit floor area and relationship to window area and wind speed. The figure is generated assuming minimal obstructing partitions and that a 3°F temperature difference exists between interior space and outdoors. The wind is also not quite perpendicular to the window opening, using a wind-effectiveness factor of 0.4.
Stack Effect The stack effect utilizes a differential in height to induce convection currents into the home, using buoyancy principles and rising hot air. A common design practice is to combine both the stack effect with prevailing wind directions to create an even greater suction effect. – –
–
+
–
+
+ –
+
+
Fig. 4 (Harvey, 200)
As shown in Fig. 4, the wind will create a positive pressure on the windward side and a negative pressure on the trailing leeward side, thereby inducing circulation in the building. To accommodate for variable wind directions, interior ducts can be created within the stack using vertical partitions, forcing air into the stack and throughout the building before it is exhausted. The stack effect is quite common and useful in hot, arid climates with limited wind and therefore limited benefit from a cross ventilation. When wind is available, cross ventilation designs generally provide greater heat removal capabilities than stack ventilation systems. A greater pressure differential can be achieved by utilizing a passive or turbine ventilator at the stack exhaust. Appendix A (Stein, 124, table 5.7) provides exhaust capabilities for various wind suction and stack effect combinations, with a standard turbine ventilator installed. The heat removing capacity of the stack design is dependent on the height differential between the air inlet and the stack exhaust, in addition to the temperature difference between incoming and exhausting air.
Stack Area Percentage of Floor Area
STACK-VENTILATION CAPACITY – Btu/h ft 2 (W/m 2)
30% 75 (2 3 60 (1 8 9)
20%
45 (1 42) 30 (9
10%
6)
15 (4 7
5)
)
Stack Height
0
10 (3.0)
20 (6.1)
30 (9.1)
40 (12.2)
50 (15.2)
ft (m)
Fig. 5 (Stein, 237, fig. 8.14b) Stack ventilation design guidelines; heat removal capacity for varying stack heights and inlet areas. As a note, stack outlet or throat area is greater than or equal to inlet area.
SYSTEM HOME: FIRST YEAR STUDENT ESSAYS FROM THE WORLD HOUSE PROJECT 147
To increase the convection flow and the stack effect, the inlet air should be as cold as possible. This can be achieved by either positioning the air inlet in a shaded region or introducing a buried earth tube as the inlet to the home (covered in the Energy chapter). The heat extraction capacity can also be improved by increasing the air exhaust temperature using a solar chimney. A solar collecting surface on the south face of the chimney and a high thermal mass material within the chimney will allow for more heat to be stored, creating a greater temperature differential between the inlet and outlet. This is typically useful during hot, sunny days as the solar heated chimney will provide increased suction and heat removal capability. This combined concept is shown in Fig. 6 (Wikipedia: Solar Chimney). 48 in. fan hung 10 in. below 8 ft. high ceiling Air motion in ft/min 36 in. above floor 100–150 50–100
300
95º F
11'-8''
100–200
200–300
55º F Heat Exchange 17'-8'' Fig. 6
Fig. 7 (Stein, 325, fig. 9.4)
Active Air Handling Strategies
When passive means cannot provide the health, comfort and air quality necessary, active mechanical systems are required. The following section provides a brief description of various efficient, low-cost active systems that can improve the air quality and comfort of a home. Ceiling Fans Ceiling and area fans provide an attractive alternative to air conditioners, as they consume considerably less energy and reduce the associated uncomfortable drafts and temperature imbalances. Ceiling fans are useful in the winter to circulate warm air from the ceiling and in the summer to increase wind currents and remove heat from the skin surface. It is a common misconception that fans provide a cooling benefit when the room is unoccupied. On the contrary, fans will create a localized heat gain in the room and are only considered beneficial when the convection currents are used to remove heat from the occupant. As a general rule, people will perceive a 1°C temperature decrease for every 1m/s in convection currents (Stein, 325).
Dehumidifiers Desiccant dehumidifiers utilize a rotating wheel, desiccants and a heat source to remove moisture from incoming hot air. Desiccants (such as a silica gel or synthetic polymers), in active systems are typically heated using natural gas to remove the moisture from the incoming airflow (Stein, 134). Although active systems are effective at reducing moisture, passive systems are becoming more attractive and more widely used as they utilize building exhausted heat and/or solar energy to heat the desiccants. Solar powered desiccant dehumidifiers provide high heat during summer months, which is ideal during the high RH conditions. Heat Exchangers As building construction trends continue towards airtight designs, there is a growing need for effective mechanical ventilation systems that can provide sufficient air exchanges, while minimizing energy losses to the outdoors. A heat exchanger ventilator is used to provide the necessary fresh air into the home, while recovering and transferring the heat from the exhaust to the incoming airflow. Commercially available heat exchangers are capable of extracting over 70% of the heat from the exhaust air and are typically more efficient when the airflow is at lower volumetric flow rates (Stein, 130).
Air Quality
Outdoor air quality is a growing concern as continued harmful emissions and fine particulate matter contaminate the air we breathe. Increases in both urban and rural densification provide even further incentive to design airtight buildings in order to filter out both the outdoor noise and air pollution from our homes. An even greater health concern is the quality of air from our interior spaces, as they typically consist of numerous toxic compounds from unhealthy, synthetic and petroleum based building materials. Natural materials, with non-toxic paints or coatings will significantly improve air quality, reducing exposure to harmful chemicals and allergens. Healthy building materials include straw bale, earth, natural fibers, soy-based insulation foam, cellulose and low-VOC paints. Filtration A major drawback to passive air handling strategies is that the incoming air is rarely filtered. Although many types of passive and active air filters exist, the healthy building movement advocates the introduction of green spaces or atriums to filter and purify the air. Green spaces can be integrated into floor plans through atriums or living walls, or can connect to the exterior of the home via solariums. Appropriate plant selection and location can have a significant impact on air quality and improve comfort.
SYSTEM HOME: FIRST YEAR STUDENT ESSAYS FROM THE WORLD HOUSE PROJECT 149
Appendix OUTDOOR WIND VELOCITY: mph (m/s) T, indoors-outdoors
Turbine Throat Diameter
10" (250 mm)
14" (350 mm)
18" (450 mm)
4 (1.8)
6 (2.7)
8 (3.6)
10 (4.5)
Fº
10
20
30
10
20
30
10
20
30
10
20
30
10
20
30
Cº
5.6
11.1
16.7
5.6
11.1
16.7
5.6
11.1
16.7
5.6
11.1
16.7
5.6
11.1
16.7
437
442
534
545
550
Height Above Intake – ft (m) 10 (3)
6" (150 mm)
2 (0.9)
Exhaust Capacity (cfm)
114
125
130
210
221
226
20 (6)
122
135
144
218
231
240
30 (9)
129
144
156
225
240
252
314
325
330
426
322
335
344
434
447
456
542
555
564
329
344
356
441
456
468
549
564
576
40 (12)
135
152
166
231
248
262
335
352
366
447
464
478
555
572
586
10 (3)
209
222
274
370
383
435
545
558
610
728
741
793
915
928
980
20 (6)
234
269
301
395
430
462
570
605
637
753
788
820
940
975
1007
30 (9)
254
301
328
415
462
489
590
637
664
773
820
847
960
1007
1034
40 (12)
269
318
355
430
479
516
605
654
691
788
837
874
975
1024
1061
10 (3)
333
383
422
558
608
647
804
854
893
1062
112
1151
1324
1374
1413
20 (6)
376
444
496
601
669
721
847
915
967
1105
1173
1225
1367
1435
1487
30 (9)
413
496
560
638
721
785
884
967
1031
1142
1225
1289
1404
1487
1551
40 (12)
444
539
614
669
764
839
915
1010
1085
1173
1268
1343
1435
1530
1605
10 (3)
476
564
623
755
843
902
1071
1159
1218
1399
1487
1546
1737
1825
1884
20 (6)
549
662
747
828
941
1026
1144
1257
1342
1472
1585
1670
1810
1923
2008
30 (9)
611
747
853
890
1026
1132
1206
1342
1448
1534
1670
1776
1872
2008
2114
40 (12)
662
819
941
941
1098
1220
1257
1414
1536
1585
1742
1864
4923
2080
2202
A: The combination of wind suction and stack effect produces the following exhaust capabilities for various throat diameters and stack heights of turbine ventilators
GLOSSARY TERMS
Living Wall – a vertical garden
comprised of two sheets of fibrous material anchored to a wall. Moss, vines and other plants are rooted in compartments between the sheets, and water trickles through from the top. The roots of the plants are host to natural bacteria which filter impurities such as VOCs out of the air. Living walls may also incorporate fish and salamanders in a pool at the base, where water is filtered before being redirected to the top of the wall. The addition of fans can direct filtered air from the wall into the building’s air circulation system. Sick Building Syndrome (SBS)
is a combination of illnesses related to an individual’s workplace or residence. SBS is now purportedly linked to up to 30% of new and remodeled buildings.
Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs) are organic chemical
compounds that can vapourize and enter the atmosphere under normal conditions. When leaked into their surroundings, VOCs can contaminate soil and groundwater, and lead to air pollution. Paint thinners and wood preservatives are prevalent sources of VOCs in conventional housing materials. Prolonged exposure to significant amounts of VOCs can cause leukemia, respiratory problems and sick building syndrome. Some VOCs are also powerful greenhouse gasses, and contribute to global warming.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Gernot, Minke. Earth Construction Handbook: The Building Material Earth in Modern Architecture. Boston, MA: WIT Press, 2000. Harvey, L. D. Danny. A Handbook on Low-Energy Buildings and District Energy Systems: Fundamentals, Techniques and Examples. London: Earthscan, 2006. Stein, Benjamin, John S. Reynolds, Walter T. Grondzik, and Alison G. Kwok. Mechanical and Electrical Equipment for Buildings. New Jersey: John Wiley, 2006. ToolBase Services. “Energy Efficiency in Remodeling: House Air Leakage.” NAHB Research Center, November 1996. http://www.toolbase.org/ Home-Building-Topics/Energy-Efficiency/house-air-leakage (accessed March 5, 2007). Wikipedia. Solar Chimney. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_chimney (on solar chimney; accessed March 7, 2007).
SYSTEM HOME: FIRST YEAR STUDENT ESSAYS FROM THE WORLD HOUSE PROJECT 151
CONSTRUCTION
Stone, glass, wood, light – these are the humble ingredients architects can use for a higher purpose, to express ideas and emotions, to tell stories and chart histories. —Daniel Libeskind
What is the construction system?
Every kind of structure is comprised of a set of relationships between its many parts. Designed as a response to several complex, interdependent aspects, the building or assembly of this infrastructure is commonly referred to as construction. It must take into account everything from design and materials, to development and costs, to budgetary requirements. The constructional system of the home refers to the materials that comprise a dwelling; their means of extraction, processing and fabrication into the constituent building elements that make up a house. The integration of these elements into a system of knowledge that coordinates labour, products, craftsmanship, machine processes and information technology results in a constructional system that delivers responsible shelter for human habitation.
SYSTEM HOME: FIRST YEAR STUDENT ESSAYS FROM THE WORLD HOUSE PROJECT 155
Central to this is the topic of eco-housing (or low impact housing), a system of residential design and construction wherein the lifecycle of the house is considered. Sustainable principles are applied throughout these various stages. Further understanding of what goes into a house will yield immediate benefits and also create opportunities for new ways of designing and building in the future. Today we aim to move away from destructive building and construction practices towards methods and materials that minimize environmental impacts. Worldwide, communities are growing at rapid rates and, with a burgeoning middle class, an increasing shift towards suburban home ownership seems inevitable. What is currently being done to minimize the traditionally large environmental impact of the type of conventional construction that is globally accepted today?
Historical Analysis
Throughout history humans and animals alike have been constructing shelter in order to provide a habitat that is protected from the outdoors: from termite mounds to what is believed to be the first human shelter built 500,000 years ago by an ancestor of humans, Homo Erectus (BBC News). Since then, homes have evolved technologically over the centuries. While they began as rudimentary structures of mud or stone, they have become enhanced, conditioned and automated structures for living. Early innovations like the Code of Hammurabi and the Bessemer Process were the predecessors to modern day building codes and manufacturing. Today, processes and materials of construction are slowly turning away from wasteful means and methods in favour of more sustainable options. In 2002, the concept of Optimum Value Engineering was introduced and research is continuous into alternative building materials and methods.
Future Trends
Today, alternative building materials and methods of construction provide multiple options in housing design. ‘Green building’ refers to construction that allows interaction between structure and environment to be considered. Definitions for this type of building range from attempting to create healthier living environments, to focusing on improving the materials that are utilized (Snell, 17). Dealing with the issues that are inherent in design and construction is complex and often requires compromise. Ideally green building aims to take these issues into account and provide viable solutions that allow for minimum construction impact (as building is initially a destructive activity), consideration of the lifecycle of the building and resources used, and use of nontoxic materials to generate a healthy environment, while allowing for an aesthetic quality and beauty in the design. Green construction materials currently available range from straw bale and engineered timber, to rammed earth and recycled insulation. As advances in technology continue to develop at rapid speeds, cross-pollination between fields traditionally outside the construction industry are contributing to the discovery of new uses for
existing materials and technologies. For example, veneers made from Paulownia wood or the development of Computer Numerical Control (CNC) machining to fabricate housing components demonstrate new operations for old technologies. Ultimately, an innovative construction system is personally suited to an individual, merges with the user’s lifestyle and location, and specifically addresses their personal needs within the framework of their local environment (Snell, 17).
SAMPLE HOMES
Yaodong Caves
These caves date back 4,000 years and housed tens of millions of people. They are typically constructed of either earth, brisk or stone and are 100 to 200 meters deep. Although originally dug into the mountainside, recent evolutions are partially inset or freestanding. With south facing orientation thermal mass of the mountain is used to moderate the temperature, keeping them warm in winter and cool in summer. These caves have survived hundreds of years, take advantage of locally available materials, and require little or no manufacturing, transport or machinery. Representative of the people of this area, the caves are historically connected to this type of construction and design, exemplifying harmony with nature. Usonian House
Envisioned as an easy-to-build, customizable, affordable and functional system of housing, Frank Lylod Wright designed a series of homes that would provide a low cost option for middle-income families. The series, called Usonian (abbreviation for United States of North America) was intended to be distinctively American and affordable for “common people”. An early attempt at prefabricated housing, the Usonian played with the notion of grouping uses: a public wing, private wing and a service/wet core. Grown from Wright’s earlier Prairie style homes, Usonian homes also featured low roofs and open living areas. The houses had little ornamentation and no attics or basements to cut costs. The central hearth and was shaped to the surrounding landscape, with gardens and terraces located outside living rooms and bedrooms. The idea was to create a formula for constructing affordable, yet beautiful, homes. In this way, the family could shape their own home.
PHOTO - Janet Powell
Wright further developed the design to make use of something he termed “Usonian Automatic” to describe the relatively cheap concrete block construction of the later homes. He designed three-inch thick modular blocks that could be put together in a variety of ways and would be secured with steel rods and grout.
SYSTEM HOME: FIRST YEAR STUDENT ESSAYS FROM THE WORLD HOUSE PROJECT 157
FACIT
“It is hard to believe, but Britain is still using house building methods that go back to the Elizabethan age. The Digital House takes a quantum leap in terms of adopting current technology to construct better designed and more efficient housing.” —Architecture Foundation Digital House, from Bell Travers Willson Architects and FACIT, demonstrates an alternative to traditional housing by capitalizing on the advances made in digital technology over the recent years. The firm’s aim was to “engage traditional house builders to develop ways to enhance new housing construction using digital technology” (Architecture Foundation). Developed to be five times faster than ordinary building methods, the house boasts other advantages such as superior quality and a flexible labour force with low overhead. Produced using a 3D computer model, every component is detailed and predetermined before construction, down to the last screw hole. Using a CNC router all the elements are rapidly cut out of engineered timber. Pieces are assembled, much like Lego, and cavities are filled with recycled newspaper to prevent air leakage and provide insulation. The Digital House differs from standard prefab housing in that it challenges the idea that standardization is what makes prefab systems economically ideal. Its process actually allows for customization to individual requirements because each piece can be cut differently, meaning several of these homes could be clustered on a site and none would look alike.
MATERIALS LIST
A small sample of innovative materials and products to consider when constructing or renovating your home that favour sustainability, universality, balance and the intelligent design. WOOD AND ALTERNATIVES
Surface Treatment
Surface Treatment paulownia-wood siding is a sustainable substitute to conventional vinyl siding. Fast-growing paulownia wood is well-suited to architectural applications, as it is lightweight, easily worked, resists warping, and rarely succumbs to infestation. The siding weathers much like cedar, providing a beautiful, natural façade. Designers Kate Wise and Anna Motzer propose Surface Treatment to integrate functional ornamentation into a dilapidated building façade. “The last few decades have had so much cheap, bad construction,” Wise says. “More compelling facades would improve the urban environment, and that’s where our wood siding comes into play” (http:// www.metropolismag.com/cda/story.php?artid=2546).
FSC Certified Lumber
The Forest Sterwardship Council (FSC) certifies only lumber which has been ecologically harvested. Varieties of hard and soft woods are available, including Ponderosa pine, Hem-Fir, Sugar pine, Incense Cedar, oak and maple. Producers handpick each tree to be cut, considering its overall effect on its ecosystem (http://www.buildingforhealth.com/proddetail.php?prod=FSC_Lumber).
StrawBoard
An alternative to industrial-grade particleboard, StrawBoard is made from wheat straw and a non-toxic, emission-free binding agent. It meets or exceeds all specifications for conventional particleboard, and is suitable for use in all of the same applications. Stronger, 7 to 10% lighter, more moisture resistant, and Urea Formaldehyde-free, the board provides good matching and laminating properties (http://www. buildingforhealth.com/proddetail.php?prod=STR).
Alog Shelving System
This modular shelving system, comprised of MDF and ash, enables various combinations and compositions of shelves. A modular wall mounted bracket provides a grid in which to insert easily detachable shelves that require no fittings, allowing the user to design and redesign shelving units to meet changing desires and needs. Each T-shaped shelf fits into the wall bracket in vertical, horizontal and diagonal directions, providing eight options for insertion (http://www.vujj.se/index.php?id=36).
PLASTICS
Construcel
Especially suited to large, curved spans, this plastic brick does not require any supporting steelwork or concrete. The polycarbonate triangular prisms can be bolted together to create varying forms, and are easily assembled and disassembled, making the product optimal for reuse in temporary buildings and disaster relief shelters (Fuad-Luke, 243).
SYSTEM HOME: FIRST YEAR STUDENT ESSAYS FROM THE WORLD HOUSE PROJECT 159
XPonential Products
Manufactured from 100% recycled materials, XPonential Products offer a proven alternative to wood. Postconsumer plastics and non-metalic byproduct from recycled automobiles are used to create a product that provides superior durability and exceeds the compressive strength of wood. Products have a life expectancy of 75 to 100 years, and are not greatly affected by severe temperatures, submersion in fresh or salt water, or freeze/thaw cycles. They are also resistant to insect damage, termites, rodents, road salt, and periodic contamination with oil, gasoline and other corrosive chemicals. XPonential Products include Impact-Posts™ (6 x 6), ImpactCurbs™, landscape ties (2.5” x 3.5”) and four by fours (http://www.xpotentialproducts .com/main.htm).
GLASS
Pilkington HUSH Glass
Cast In Place (CIP) Laminated Glass designed to reduced noise. HUSH Glass is effective for reducing noise that may cause annoyance and impair work performance or sleep, maintaining balance and calm within the home and eliminating mental stressors. Two sheets of glass are bonded together with a specially formulated noisereducing resin interlayer. Glass is suitable for use in residential housing, apartments, partitioning, doors and most standard size window frames (http://www.carglass. fi/Applications/products/asia+and+australasia/new+zealand/english/bybenefit/ noise+control/products/pilkington+hush+glass/default.htm).
EnviroGLAS Terrazzo
Recycled materials are crafted into floors, countertops and decorative surfaces. Seamless, colourful Terrazzo floors combine light epoxy resin with glass chips from discarded bottles, mirrors and plate windows, and porcelain chips from discared toilets, sinks and tubs. The achieved surface is harder that traditional marble and has a life cycle of over 40 years. No off-gassing will affect indoor air quality, and the seamless composition erases opportunity for mold or mildew to grow. The smooth finish also reduces tripping hazards and is ideal for universally accessible spaces (http:// www.enviroglasproducts.com/terrazzo.asp).
INSULATION
UltraTouch Insulation
Natural Cotton Fibre insulation provides effective sound absorption and thermal performance. It contains no chemical irritants or volatile organic compounds, and meets testing standards for fire and smoke ratings, fungi resistance and corrosiveness. Made from 85% post-industrial recycled natural fibres, this product is ideal for human health and the health of the environment (http://www.buildingforhealth.com/proddetail.php?prod=BLI_UTI).
Celbar Cellulose Insulation
Comprised of 100% recycled materials, this insulation conserves energy use in the home, reduces load on landfills, and requires substantially less energy to manufacture than conventional products. Available as loose fill or blown insulation, Celbar eliminates drafts, energy loss and condensation caused by air leakage. It can also be produced with minimal ink, making it one of the cleanest products currently on the market (http://www.buildingforhealth.com/proddetail.php?prod=INC_CCI).
INTERIOR SURFACES
Richlight速
A member of the U.S. Green Building Council, Richlight Company manufactures environmentally sustainable paper-based countertops and surface materials for kitchen, bath and office spaces. These durable surfaces bring a warm, natural ambiance that is rarely achieved with solid stone or plastic surfaces (http://www.richlite.com/countertop/).
AFM Safecoat
High quality, water-based primers, paints, adhesives and caulks are suitable for a variety of surfaces, and are formulated with human health in mind. Durable, washable and tintable primers and paints for interior use seal outgassing from previously applied coatings or building materials, and are safe for chemically sensitive individuals. Safecoat all purpose exterior paints are durable and weather resistant, and prevent soil contamination around the home. Caulks and adhesives are available for a wide range of applications (http://www.buildingforhealth.com/categories.php?cat=8).
HIGH-TECH
Flexible Solar Cell
This supple solar cell can be easily bent or manipulated. Its application will greatly increase the possibilities of eco-energy construction, removing the previous limitations of rigid solar panels. The flexibility of the cell is enabled by the use of ETFE Film, a protective material that encases the amorphous silicon generator panel. The lightweight ETFE Film offers 10% greater transparency than that of glass, provides high impact resistance, and allows for decreased bulk. The highly functional material is also heat resistant, not easily ripped, fire-retardant, and does not easily allow condensation. It has been conventionally used in limited areas, such as green houses, aerospace technologies, and insulating materials. The New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization (NEDO) in Japan has taken up the flexible solar cell as an important area of research (http://www.agc.co.jp/english/company/04.html).
Sunlight-transport System
Developed by Swedish-based company Parans, this system uses fibre-optic cables to transmit sunlight into interior spaces receiving little or no natural light, such as basements or windowless offices. Outdoor collector panels are placed at varying angles to capture maximum sunlight as it moves across the sky throughout the day. Light is directed indoors through a well-designed overhead fixture, which combines different types of beams to create a tree-filtered effect (Steffen, 161).
Note: This list is intended as a brief example of the wide range of options available that differ from conventional uses and manufacturing processes. However, while some of these products are currently readily available, others are in developmental stages or not easily obtainable.
SYSTEM HOME: FIRST YEAR STUDENT ESSAYS FROM THE WORLD HOUSE PROJECT 161
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Adigard, E., A. Betsky. Architecture Must Burn: A Manifesto for an Architecture Beyond Building. United Kingdom: Gingko Press, August 2001. Architecture Foundation. “1:1 Making the Digital House,” Our Programme, March 6 – March 20, 2007. http://www .architecturefoundation.org.uk/framesets/fp_371.html Asahi Glass Company. “AGC Into the Life: Fluon® ETFE Film.” Asahi Glass Company, 2007. http://www.agc.co.jp/ english/company/04.html (accessed June 16, 2007). BBC News. “World’s Oldest Building Discovered.” BBC News: March 3, 2000. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/ nature/662794.stm. Building for Health - Materials Centre. “Environmental Paints, Stains, & Finishes.” http://www.buildingforhealth .com/categories.php?cat=8 (accessed June 17, 2007). Building for Health - Materials Centre. “Green Construction Supplies: Eco-Friendly Insulation; Calbar Cellulose Insulation.” http://www.buildingforhealth.com/proddetail.php?prod=INC_CCI (accessed June 17, 2007). Building for Health - Materials Centre. “Green Construction Supplies: Eco-Friendly Insulation; Ultra Touch Insulation.” http://www.buildingforhealth.com/proddetail.php?prod=BLI_UTI (accessed June 17, 2007). Building for Health - Materials Centre. “Green Construction Supplies: Fiberboard; Strawboard.” http://www .buildingforhealth.com/proddetail.php?prod=STR (accessed June 17, 2007). Building for Health - Materials Centre. “Green Construction Supplies: FSC Certified Lumber; FSC Certified Lumber and Specialty Products.” http://www.buildingforhealth.com/proddetail.php?prod=FSC_Lumber (accessed June 17, 2007). Cavanaugh, Rebecca. “Next Generation: Beneath the Surface.” MetropolisMag.com, March 14, 2007. http://www .metropolismag.com/cda/story.php?artid=2546 (accessed June 16, 2007). Craven, J. “Usonian,” About.com: Architecture. http://architecture.about.com/ od/franklloydwright/g/usonian.htm. CRI Online. “About China: Civilian Residential Housing.” CRIENGLISH.com. http://en.chinabroadcast.cn/1702/20052-18/14@207629.htm. EnviroGLAS. “Product Info: EnviroGLAS Terrazzo.” EnviroGLAS. http://www.enviroglasproducts.com/terrazzo.asp (accessed June 17, 2007). Facit UK. “1:1 Making the Digital House.” http://www.facit-uk.com/info.pdf. Fuad-Luke, Alastair. eco Design: The Sourcebook. London: Thames & Hudson, 2002. *Halsall, Paul, ed. “Ancient History Sourcebook: Code of Hammurabi, c. 1780 BCE.” Internet Medieval Sourcebook. New York: Fordham University, 1998. http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/ancient/hamcode.html. *Milne, Geoff, and Chris Reardon. “Technical Manual: Materials Use.” Your Home: Design for Lifestyle and the Future. 3rd ed. Australia: Australian Government and the Design and Construction Industries, 2005. http://www .greenhouse.gov.au/yourhome/technical/fs30.htm Metropolis. “Text Message with Kitty Hawks,” March 2007. Pilkington Group Limited. “Pilkington HUSH Glass – Overview.” Pilkington Group Limited. http://www.carglass .fi/Applications/products/asia+and+australasia/new+zealand/english/bybenefit/noise+control/products/ pilkington+hush+glass/default.htm (accessed June 17, 2007). *Public Private Partnership for Advanced Housing Technology. “Resources: Tech Sets; Alternative Framing Techniques.” PATH, 2006. http://www.pathnet.org/sp.asp?id=14140 Richlite Company. “Richlite®: Bringing Kitchen Countertops Out of the Stone Age.” Richlite Company, 2003. http://www.richlite.com/countertop/ (accessed June 17, 2007). Science Museums of China / Computer Network Information Center of Chinese Academy of Sciences. “Cave Dwellings and Siheyuan (Chinese Courtyard Houses).” http://www.kepu.net/english/nationalitymse/ han/200312240022.html (June 2007). Snell, C., and T. Callahan. Building Green. Asheville, NC: Lark Books, 2005. Spence, William P. Construction: Materials, Methods, and Techniques. Albany, NY: Delmar, 1998. Steffen, Alex, ed. World Changing: A User’s Guide for the 21st Century. Forward by Al Gore. New York: Abrams, 2006. Tennessee Tech University. “Chinese Cave Dwelling in Nortwest China.” Iweb.tntech.edu/pli/HG/Cave_Dwelling.htm Usonian House, www.pbs.org/flw/buildings (accessed November 2006). VUJJ. “Products: Categories; Shelving 1/1 - Alog Shelving System.” VUJJ, 2006. http://www.vujj.se/index .php?id=36 (accessed June 16, 2007). XPonential Products. “Product Information and Product Specifications.” XPonential Products, 2004. http://www .xpotentialproducts.com/main.htm (accessed June 16, 2007). www.yubanet.com/artman/publish/articleK_ 33651.shtml (accessed December 2006; site now discontinued).
GLOSSARY TERMS
the mining and manufacturing of materials and equipment, the transport of the materials and the administrative functions. Embodied energy is a significant component Bessemer Process – The Bessemer of the lifecycle impact of a home process was the first inexpensive (Milne). industrial process for the massproduction of steel from molten pig Lifecyce – A progression through iron. a series of differing stages of development. Eco-housing – a system of residential design and construction Net Zero – Infrastructure that wherein the lifecycle of the house creates as much energy as it (from design through to construction consumes. and materials) is considered. Optimum Value Engineering – Embodied Energy – Embodied (OVE) refers to framing techniques energy is the energy consumed by that reduce the amount of lumber all of the processes associated with used to build a home while the production of a building, from maintaining the structural integrity the acquisition of natural resources of the building (Public Private to product delivery. This includes Partnership). Code of Hammurabi – The earliest
known example of a body of laws, set out to regulate the organization of society (Halsall).
SYSTEM HOME: FIRST YEAR STUDENT ESSAYS FROM THE WORLD HOUSE PROJECT 163
Home can never be transferred; never repeated in the experience of an individual. The place consecrated by parental love, by the innocence and sports of childhood, by the first acquaintance with nature; by the linking of the heart to the visible creation, is the only home. —Mary Angelou 1987
PHOTO - Peru, The Road to Titicaca by Tyson Gillard
EXPRESS
Culture
Many elements combine to form culture: from customary beliefs, social forms, and material traits, to the characteristic features of everyday existence shared by people in a particular place or time. The dictionary defines culture as “the act of developing the intellectual and moral faculties especially by education” (Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, 10th ed., s.v. “Culture”). In the instance of culture and home, we can see the influence of 21st century technological advances as a primary component to the education of an individual and of society as a whole, thus influencing the creation of culture. In the study of culture and home we examine spatial, identity and social systems, beginning by tracing the historical narrative of these systems as they contribute to the formation of culture, and moving forward to current static and mobile technology as the protagonist of our present definitions for culture and home.
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Culture Through Time
Spatial The physical, emotional and spiritual experience of the homeowner is the essence of the cultural system within the home. For instance, archeologists study the evolution of home through time by focusing on the optimization of space, and associating it with the growth of one’s personal area. By gathering data on objects found in the selected area of a dwelling or burial place, archeologists can determine the object’s relation to the humans who have lived in that area. Findings will illustrate how form, scale and proportion of the home are relevant to the homeowner’s usage. Historically there are many examples of interesting ways to functionally organize space. An early example is found in the terrace houses of wealthy Ephesians, built in the 7th century A.D. The spatial design of these homes integrated the use of the slope of Bulbul Mountain, incorporating the roof of one house with the terrace of another. Archeologists surmise these dwellings belonged to the bourgeoisie, due to the luxurious bathrooms, bedrooms, tricliniums and kitchens, which illustrate the comfortable, nourishing environment of those times (IstanbulNet). Identity The identity of the home encourages a stable mental and psychological state of the homeowner, thus creating a healthy environment within the home. Home design incorporates elements that create a balance of human and nature, physical reality and spirit. Cultural relativism – the study of individuals’ beliefs and activities and their interpretation in terms of their respective cultures – is a tool used to understand and critique cultural contexts. For example, research can illustrate how a homeowner identifies with the home through decorative aspects that express his or her culture. In Eastern aesthetics, decoration is a testament of devotion. Hindu temples and Muslim mosques, for instance, are dazzling monuments to decoration. In their approach, it would be impossible to have too much decoration, just as it would be impossible to have too much devotion of god (McCreight). In any part of the world, the beliefs of the homeowner are incorporated in the home; without cultural indicators, expressed through décor, the home becomes foreign. Social Essential to the design of a home, social aspects create hierarchy and unity and facilitate a connection to the outside world. The study of the sociology of architecture analyzes the built environment in relation to the individual. It is a tool that is capable of humanizing the designed physical environments. For example, a common gathering area within a dwelling was of great significance for ancient Asian culture; in contemporary Western culture this gathering space has taken the form of the kitchen area. Designing a home with an understanding of cultures around the world is valuable in creating a nourishing environment in which to live. It is to our benefit to understand the driving forces of the diverse lifestyles that exist in the world, and build upon them in creating the World House.
The Knowledge Economy
A healthy environment within our homes is driven by how we communicate and interact. Today, home-based digital technology enables individuals in the developed world to create cultural diversity and share it globally, at a fast pace. Technology is a powerful tool to use for the promotion of cultural diversity at local and international levels. Home-based creative technologies enable us to connect to global markets. Currently, digital technology revolutionizes cultural industries by enabling individuals to create small, homebased creative businesses. In an interview with Rolling Stone Magazine, film director Joseph Kahn describes how technology has transformed the singular function of home into a multi-purpose environment: Having an Avidest Express process in my house has changed my life by saving time. Having an editing system in my house means I have access to whatever I want; just the mere act of driving an hour to some place. Now I have that hour back (Kahn). Technology enables Kahn to efficiently communicate with a targeted network of people who work collaboratively via email and phone to produce music videos. Given the low funding priorities that the arts industry struggles with, having these time saving mechanisms could result in the realization of more projects, at a higher quality. Technology not only revolutionized the live/work environment, but also created new possibilities for education by enabling home-based learning. Educational programs allow students achieve a degree through virtual classes. For example, Athabasca University provides online courses at a post-secondary level. Students can attain undergraduate and graduate degrees through virtual classes. As well, internet-based education can assist adults by granting an opportunity for stay-at-home parents to simultaneously care for their families and pursue higher learning. Another example of online education is Smarthinking Company, a district-based online tutoring company. Smarthinking works with 70,000 students at 300 schools across the United States, and has tutors in the U.S. and abroad. Review sessions and other aspects of instruction are globally distributed: 20% of Smarthinking’s 500 tutors are in other countries, including India, the Philippines, Chile, South Africa and Israel. With the use of such technology, traditional home-schooling practices may see a revival. Digital technology has altered the home as a venue for social gatherings. Through digital technology, the home environment is transformed into a virtual gathering place. Internet based social networking has also seen growing popularity among younger generations. For instance, websites like myspace, Facebook and YouTube virtually enhance cultural diversity at an international level. Fred Stutzman, a doctoral student at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, explains “What’s so unique about YouTube is that most of the content on the site is this conversation between people. The interesting thing is that the conversations are happening in videos.” (Breck, YouTube) Mobile phones are another powerful tool for social networks. Donnie Fowler understands that a mobile phone is now more like a personal computer. Fowler, the owner of Cherry Tree Mobile Media, says: You’ll not only be able to text people with messages, you’ll be able to raise money, deliver video, audio, create viral organizing — where one person sees something really interesting and it gets passed on and on (Breck, Mobile Tools).
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His company promotes wireless communication for diverse audiences, from political sectors, to entertainment industry, educational environments and fundraising. Younger generations use mobile phones as the main vehicle of socializing and interacting. They are accustomed to text messaging as part of their daily lives. A survey done in New Zealand by Internet Safety Group (ISG) concluded that teenagers see mobile phones as an essential tool. In the survey 56% said that they use mobile phones for talking and text messaging friends. For some, this is a cause for concern. The Director of the ISG explains: It will come as no surprise to most that a mobile phone seems an essential element in the social lives of most young people. However, it is important that we better understand this particular development in youth culture, in order to better tailor our cyber safety education for teenagers. There are wonderful social and safety benefits to this mobile technology, but very real risks in this online environment, from text bullying to ‘grooming’ by pedophiles. As well, Internet-accessing phones give young people 24/7 mobile access to the Net, and the advent of 3G networks will dramatically increase the availability of pornography in the mobile market. Effective cyber safety education must reflect a true understanding of the scope of young people’s use of mobiles (NetSafe). The ISG survey concluded that the impact of mobile phones on teenagers necessitated a development of a code of usage to create responsible patterns of activity. If used responsibly, mobile phones could become a vehicle of education for younger generations.
Connecting Every Village
The tools and mechanisms of the cultural system showcase an enhancement in education and work within the home, thus facilitating a powerful, global sharing of cultural expression. It is important to note that populations of developed countries comprise the main body of Internet users. According to the World Resource Institute (WRI), less than 2% of the world’s total population is active online. However, in theory, the rapid spread of digital networks could connect “every village and every family on the face of the earth” by 2010 (Trott). The coming years will test the efficiency of digital technologies. As WRI Chairman William D. Ruckelshaus said: Digital technologies are being used right now in very innovative ways that are creating significant social and environmental benefits for the billions of people who do not yet have access to the Internet. Market drivers will be required to quickly and effectively bring the benefits of connectivity and participation in the e-economy to all of the world’s people (Trott). We will likely continue to see the influence of technology as a primary driver in the creation of modern culture. Large and small scale versions of this influence are sure to penetrate the façades of our dwellings, linking the culture of your home with another that is physically, emotionally and spiritually distant.
GLOSSARY TERMS
Tricliniums – a couch extending
along three sides of a table, for reclining on at meals (dictionary. com) BIBLIOGRAPHY
Breck, Judy. “Mobile Tools for Campaigns: How to Recognize the Future when it Lands on You.” SmartMobs.com, March 13, 2007. http://www .smartmobs.com/archive/2007/03/13/mobile_tools_fo....html (accessed March 6, 2007). , Judy. “Networking Tutoring and Education Outsourcing: Technologies of Cooperation”. SmartMobs.com, May 22, 2006. http://www.smartmobs.com/archive/2006/05/22/networking_tuto ....html (accesed March 11, 2007). , Judy. “YouTube Secret Sauce is Community: Technologies of Cooperation”. SmartMobs.com, October 27, 2006. http://www .smartmobs.com/archive/2006/10/27/youtube_secret_....html (accesed June 13, 2007). IstanbulNet. “Terrace Houses.” Explore Turkey. http://www.exploreturkey .com/exptur.phtml?id=162 (accessed March 8, 2007). Kahn, Joseph. “Rolling Stone Presents Joseph Kahn: A Visionary Redirects an Entire Industry.” By Rolling Stone. The Human Network (CISCO). http://www.cisco.com/web/thehumannetwork/index.html?Referring_ site=PrintTv&Country_Site=CA&Campaign=HN_CA&Position=URL&Cre ative=/humannetwork&Where=/thehumannetwork/index.htm (accessed March 8, 2007). McCreight, Tim. Design Language. Cape Elizabeth, ME: Brymorgen, 1996. NetSafe. “Text Generation: New Survey Illustrates the Profound Impact of Mobile Phones on Many New Zealand Youth.” NetSafe: The Internet Safety Group (Media Release), January 30, 2005. http://www.netsafe .org.nz/isgnews/text_generation.aspx Rheingold, Howard. “Why Facebook-feed smart mobs reacted so swiftly”. SmartMobs.com, November 23, 2006. http://www.smartmobs.com/cgi -bin/mt/_tr4cKb4cKs.cgi/8516 (accessed March 3, 2007). Trott, Bob. “Conference Features Technology for Third World Countries” CNN.com, October 23, 2000. http://archives.cnn.com/2000/TECH/ computing/10/23/3rd.world.tech.idg/ (accessed March 11, 2007). United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. Understanding the Engine of Creativity in a Creative Economy: An Interview with John Howkins. By Donna Gheilfi, WIPO, Creative Industries Division, Office of Strategic Use of Intellectual Property for Development, 2005. Wikipedia. Life Style. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_style#Lifestyle_ classifications (on life style; accessed March 4, 2007). Wikipedia. Terrace House. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrace_house (on terrace house; accessed March 4, 2007).
PHOTO - NASA, The Human Footprint, http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Study/footprint/, (Image courtesy of Sanderson et al.) SYSTEM HOME: FIRST YEAR STUDENT ESSAYS FROM THE WORLD HOUSE PROJECT 171
IDENTITY
While the home may provide people with a site of retreat from the public gaze, it is also the stage upon which people project the most intimate image of their ‘selves’ to the world. The fact that they can ‘control’ this image to a certain extent is important, but their control is mediated by expectations about acceptable forms of decoration, social manners, service and order. —Tony Chapman, Jenny Hockey and Martin Wood
What is the identity system?
In the study of cultural geography, identity is fittingly explained through the lens of social constructionism: “identities are formed and continually reformed through interaction with others and thus are fluid and negotiable.” In the context of one’s home, this fluidity is seen unanimously from past to present, from culture to culture and from country to country (Norton, 10). Many factors – both innate and learned – contribute to the socially constructed characteristics of the individual and the collective, thus impacting the formation of human identity. Some commonly cited factors include: place, language, religion, ethnicity, nationality, community, class and gender (Norton, 10).
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In the context of defining a home’s identity, it is often said that home is where the heart is – a popular phrase that captures the role that place plays in defining personal belonging. Our sense of self, our cultural patterns, and our relationship to society are embodied in dwellings. The creation of ‘home’ pages on the World Wide Web is a testament to the role the home takes in representing ourselves to the world at large.
Historical Analysis
House as Shelter In our early society, nomadic living was the precedent for formulating housing design. Temporary dwellings served hunting or advanced food-gathering practices. These communities had distinguishable, seasonal, dwelling types: the Inuit, Plains Indians and the Maasai of Kenya demonstrate such forms. In this era, a home’s identity was linked to its function as a shelter and as a provision to its community. House as Philosophy We can also see historic examples of how a society’s philosophy translates into a home’s identity. For instance, the Egyptians demonstrated identity by focusing on creating housing innovations for the dead, as opposed to the living, as seen by their elaborate tomb structures. Similarily, the homes of ancient Greeks were decidedly unpretentious, mirroring their democratic ideals and beliefs. House as Status In Asia, courtyard houses are inward looking: from the outside, passersby only see gray walls and trees peeking thorough the top of the internal family cluster. This design allowed for the co-existence of larger, mixed communities: low and high-income populations could live next to one another without a sense of invasion and intrusion because personal wealth wasn’t flaunted beyond the inhabitants’ eyes. Conversely, in the western hemisphere, dwellings are outward looking, thus projecting an individual identity. Houses tend to look towards the street, sharing a reciprocal view to the surrounding environment beyond the home’s walls. In this circumstance, concerns often arise over the condition of the house, its appearance, how it is perceived, and who one’s neighbours are. House as Self-Expression We see how identity can influence community development and shape neighbourhoods. Rather than approaching identity as and afterthought, we endeavor to understand how the identity system can change the future of housing to be one that integrates sustainability, intelligence, balance and health.
Future Trends
The Evolution of Green Identity It is said that ‘similarities lie in the implication of opposites’, thus making wilderness the opposite of the human world (Simmons, 161). Therein lies an explanation of the polarity in the attitude of humankind towards Nature in an unaltered state. There are many ways of expressing the duality: where we come from versus where we’re going, how we’re the same versus how we’re different, how we depend on the global ecosystem versus how we control it, and so on. But to understand what all of this means to us today, we have to step back and take a broader view of both sides of the equation, of both humanity and nature (Trefil, 6).
Thus we will examine the adoption and evolution of green identity by tracing history and the paralleling perception of Nature in the public. In pre-modern Europe, Nature was seen as a divine chain of being, with strict hierarchical order. Every thing and every person had a purpose and a place - from rock to flower to man. In the 1400’s, Nature was perceived as a network of living organisms. By the 1500’s, Nature was seen as machine: a complex mathematical model of a clockwork universe. In the 18th century, two streams of Nature emerged: the scientific notion that nature can be used for benefit, and pastoral ideals that rested on romantic and restorative views, which, embodied moral values. In the 19th century, as the capitalist system was embedded into the psyche, Nature was seen as a tool to be used for the greater glory of mankind. Humans played the evaluative role, sitting outside of Nature, and eventually, aimed to control Nature for our own advancement and profit.
SAMPLE HOMES
Bedouin Tent
A long-standing nomadic tribe, the Bedouin have developed their housing system to suit their migratory needs. The temporary tent is easily set up and is made of relatively light materials, namely a goat hair tarp, wooden supports and rope. Their dwelling clearly reflects the identity, relevant customs and practices of their culture. Inside the tent, there is a distinct division, by means of a hanging cloth, between women and men’s spaces. In Bedouin law, no person is allowed entry into the tent without permission from the tent’s owner. However, any fugitives requesting refuge must be accepted and provided with lodging and protection for a minimum of three days. Failure to do so is punishable by Bedouin law. The Elemeno
100 square feet in size, the Elemeno is a very small home. This house was inspired by the Buddhist story of Hojoki, which translates to mean “The 10 Foot Square Hut.” Constructed on the ideology of ‘subtractive design’, designer Jay Schafer created the Elemeno because of his growing concerns about the negative environmental impact of large houses and the pervasive tendency of homeowners to maintain large areas of unused space. With a cathedral ceiling and integrated porch area, the amount of useable interior space in this home multiplies considerably. A boat heater keeps the home warm in winter climates, while the vented loft area sleeps two people comfortably. A dining table tucks away beneath the desk when it is not in use. The identity of a home is a reflection of both the home’s inhabitants and the choices their environment and context offers to them. The Elemeno offers a new vision with a choice to dwell in a pared down, intimate existence.
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Digital House
This futuristic house reflects changing domestic structures in the new millennium. Challenges to traditional habits, demographics and precedents of typical houses are necessary to mimic the evolving pattern of interaction between a home’s inhabitants and their surroundings: in essence, the evolution of identity. Designed to showcase what a house of the future might entail, the Digital House concentrates on changing social and domestic structures, as well as an emerging redefinition of family and home. Shelter in a Cart (Design Boom)
Re-envisioning the image of housing, and sites that are appropriate for dwelling, this shelter addresses a serious question in the concept of identity and home. The idea behind this shopping-cart-home developed in response to the challenge of re-imagining shelter and storage for the homeless. The body of the cart can be divided into 3 main areas, the lower portion, which is the platform for mounting the wheels, the recyclable materials storage area, which is located in the front of the cart and the clothing storage area, at the back of the cart. The rear wheels are commonly found in a shopping cart and can be steered 360 degrees. The design reduces the risk of disease by separating the individual from their belongings and contaminated recyclable materials. Regarding road safety, the cart is equipped with three reflective surfaces attached at positions that indicate the overall volume of the object and a brake system that uses bicycle parts.
Modern environmentalism saw the rise of techno-centrics and proponents of a ‘light green’ model. There is the recognition that resources are finite, but this model identifies the larger problem as being an inefficient use of resources. This movement believes that economic development and endurance can be created from human ingenuity, science and technology would devise better methods of resource use. Therefore, we can address environmental problems without changing fundamentals of society. This view only accounts for the destruction of nature in terms of potential impact on human activity; in other words, save the planet for the sake of humankind. This theoretic stance is best demonstrated by James Trefil, author of Human Nature, who writes: [T]he more we separated ourselves from nature, the less we were willing to be content with what nature offered, the more successful we became, the greater our numbers, the richer our lives. This is what I like to consider the first step – the first separation of the human race from the natural scheme of things. In it the human race stepped out of natural selection and into a world where science and technology increasingly dominated out choices and our future (Trefil, 7). The alternative view, eco-centric or deep ecology, rejects the idea that humans stand at the pinnacle of nature. Instead it proposes the connection of a web of relations, where humankind is simply another element of the eco-system. Yet even here, it is acknowledged that a change to the environment will occur due to human infringement. For example, the Taoist view on Nature and wilderness practices a non-interventionist, quietistic vision; however, they are still ultimately responsible for changes to the land and water masses around their community (Simmons, 170).
GLOSSARY TERMS
Green Identity – evolution of the
environmental and ecological movement environmentalism: a concern for the preservation, restoration, or improvement of the natural environment, such as the conservation of natural resources, prevention of pollution, and certain land use actions (Reynolds). BIBLIOGRAPHY
Brydon, Anne and Amy Karlinsky. Home Show: Essays by Anne Brydon and Amy. Winnipeg: Winnipeg Art Gallery, 2003. An exhibition catalogue. Chapman, Tony, and Jenny Hockey, eds. Ideal Homes? Social Change and Domestic Life. London: Routledge, 1999. Christie, Claire, and Sylvie Fortin. The House Project. Toronto: The House Project, 1994. Design Boom. “Shelter in a Cart: Hown Design.” Design competition submission by Panaglotis Dramitinos, Karaolis Alkis, and Alexandros Papageorgiou (Greece) to Design Boom. http://www.designboom .com/contest/view.php?contest_pk=10&item_pk=6175&p=3 (accessed on May 12, 2007). Kovarik, William. “Environmental History Timeline.” Environmental History Timeline. www.environmentalhistory.org (accessed May 29, 2007). Norton, William. Cultural Geography: Environments, Landscapes, Identities, Inequalities. Don Mills, ON: Oxford University Press, 2005. Rapport, N., and A. Dawson, eds. Migrants of Identity: Perceptions of Home in a World of Movement. New York: Berg, 1998. Reynolds, Andy. A Brief History of Environmentalism. Channel 4 (OFCOM), 2002. http://www.channel4.com/science/microsites/S/science/nature/ environment.html (accessed May 12, 2007). Schoenauer, Norbert. 6,000 Years of Housing. New York: W.W. Norton, 2000. Simmons, I.G. Environmental History: A Concise Introduction. Cambridge: Blackwell, 1993. Trefil, James. Human Nature: A Blueprint for Managing the Earth; By People, for People. New York: Times Books / Henry Holt, 2004.
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SPATIAL
Scale refers to the way we proportion our surrounding and relate our own height to the places in which we find ourselves‌Appropriate scale enhances a sense of comfort with our surroundings. —Avi Friedman
What is the spatial system?
People inhabit space. Space has depth, breadth and height. Yet, it is the invisible, conjured by the interplay of light, shadow and form. Space governs and gives purpose to the construction system and yet cannot be experienced without it. Beyond this definition, the way space is created and manipulated also reflects a person’s needs, and indicates something of their desires, socio-cultural values, traditions, status and habits.
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Historical Analysis
In the past, spaces were shaped through a general notion of need. Limited mobility and access to resources meant that humans lived in closely-knit communities and settlements. The necessary interdependence between individuals and family units translated into smaller private spaces and greater emphasis on shared, communal areas. As mobility and access to resources increased, so too did independence and desire for private space. During the Industrial Revolution, populations began to shift from the vast expanse of rural areas (with abundant exterior space) into high-density urban environments (with limited exterior space), and living spaces became increasingly compartmentalized as rural community life became less significant in burgeoning urban centres. As personal wealth and standards of living increased, people began to expand, shape and fill their spaces according to whimsy. With the invention of the automobile and post-depression wealth, people were able to distance themselves from the workplace and crowded, polluted neighbourhoods of the city. This gave rise to suburbia, and people were able to continue to accumulate material possessions in ever-expanding homes. This trend has continued and, as Avi Freidman writes in his book Room for Thought: Rethinking Home and Community Design, “Homes have become entertainment‌ promoting consumption of space and contentâ€? (Freidman, 10). With growing populations, higher urban density and the escalating costs associated with building infrastructure necessary for expansion into undeveloped countryside, the current trend towards monster homes, especially prevalent in North America, is not a sustainable option. Instead a new trend is surfacing and needs to take precedence: shaping space to meet both needs and desires with a focus on intensification.
Future Trends
Virtual Expansion of Space: Beyond Walls Another way to expand perceived space while reducing physical space is through virtual space. Increasingly, the importance of virtual space seems to supercede the physical environment in which people live. With the advent and increasing popularity of personal computers and the Internet, space, in many ways, has become boundless. Interactions that once required the physical presence of others can now be made virtually. If most interactions are done through the computer, rather than in the surrounding physical environment, then actual space previously required to allow for this becomes less of a necessity.
Colour
Light colours suggest more openness and airiness whereas darker colours tend to make a space feel smaller, more intimate, confined or cozy.
Light
Playing with light and, conversely, with shadows can create visual interest and delineation in space without physically or permanently dividing or altering it.
Texture
Texture and material changes can help dramatize and define space and possible functions. A tiled area of flooring, for example, suggests a more transitional, public or utility-centered area than a wooden or carpeted floor. By using this application of texture, space can be zoned without being confined through physical barriers like walls. Moreover, transparent, translucent and opaque materials all directly correlate to a person’s perceptions of impermanence and permanence, permeability and solidity.
Partitioning
Partitions can be apparent (through static or moveable walls) or implied through colour, light, and texture. In either case, they are the ‘boundaries’ that delineate space. The use of more unconventional partitioning, such as curvilinear walls, can increase visual space. With a straight wall the end is visible, a curved variation suggests a hidden continuation of space.
Height
Ceiling height and building height greatly influence the size perception a person will have towards a space. For example, while a floor plan might be confined, a higher ceiling opens up the area and gives the impression of more space.
Connection to the Outdoors
When space is lacking inside, expand outside. This can be created through the addition of windows, skylights, patios, and balconies. By blurring the distinction between the interior and exterior, spaces appear limitless.
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Scale
A huge component of how people perceive space is through the relation of one surface, object, or form, to another. Relational scale can thus either work in favour of creating an airy environment or it can make a space appear cramped and crowded. If a king size bed is placed in a 10’ x 10’ room, while the bed might fit, the mismatched scale between the bed and room size will make the room appear tiny and the bed appear monstrous. When physical spaces are reduced, it is crucial to be cognitive of proper scale. Smaller or multipurpose furnishings or integrated furniture and storage become important considerations.
Flexibility
A space that is more kinetic gives the appearance of more options. Generally, the more options a space has, the less size becomes an issue. Moving partitions and mobile furniture can easily help to make a space appear (and function with) more flexibility.
Grade Changes
Much like the effects of texture changes, changes in grade can also break up a space. A step down from an interior space to a garden patio enforces the transition from the home to the outdoors, whereas a seamless deck from the house connects the two spaces.
Sound
Small and quiet, large and loud. If a small space had an echo, would it effect the way we interpret the size?
Air Quality and Flow
Airiness is a quality associated more often with larger, open areas whereas smaller spaces are more likely to be considered “stuffy”. By improving air quality and flow, a smaller space may feel larger.
Temperature
Temperature helps locate us, whether it informs us as to whether we are inside or outside, in a cozy bedroom or a cool basement. By playing with temperature we can then influence the way we perceive the size and location of a space.
SAMPLE HOMES
Traditional Japanese House
With its careful attention to human scale, relationships between elements, moveable partitions, flexibility and adaptability of space, shadow, light, movement and flow and interior and exterior private and public relationships, the traditional Japanese courtyard house encompasses a truly innovative sensibility towards the spatial systems which make up a home. Its unique and thorough approach has made it a major influence for many of the modular housing designs of today (see Japan Links). The characteristics of one of these traditional home include: Floor as Furniture – The floor is an area for sitting, lounging and sleeping. Furniture is limited, lightweight and easily moved so that spaces can cater to many uses. Scale – Space is measured not only through absolute distances, but also through relative scale (the relationship between elements). This method of laying out space is known as ken. Tatami mats, which cover the floor, are roughly the size of a human body (approximately 3’ x 6’). As a result, the use of these mats scale the floor plan to the proportions of the human body. Integration of elements – Storage and components making up rooms like the kitchen are hidden underneath floor panels or behind sliding wall panels so that the visible space in a room remains clean and without a clearly assigned function. Flexibility – As a separate component to a structural wooden frame, walls (called Shoji screens) can move freely and be reconfigured, linking or dividing spaces based on the needs and desires of the inhabitant. Due to this, there is no clear or permanent formalization of rooms. Connection to Outside – Typical traditional Japanese homes do not have windows. Instead, the Shoji screens not only act as moveable partitions within the interior space, but also as transitional ports to the exterior. When a screen is pushed aside for a view, circulation or airflow, the interior becomes completely open to the exterior and the two spaces are no longer rigidly delineated. It is for this reason that entering one of these traditional homes is not the act of coming into the interior space, but instead, a result of coming into the garden and courtyard which connects all the living spaces together.
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The Townhouse: Cookie Cutter Homes
A product of the Industrial Revolution, the townhouse (also know as a row house) was originally built to maximize housing density in high-density urban areas. This was achieved through a number of spatial considerations. Characteristically, townhouses are long and narrow. The result of this design is that minimal precious streetfront real estate is needed for access into the house, so that more houses can be positioned wall-to-wall along a block. A trade off of this has meant that generally, windows are then only positioned on the front and back ends of the house, resulting in little natural light penetration or airflow into the interior living space. In terms of interior spatial configuration, townhouses have generally divided space into clearly compartmentalized public, communal areas such as the living room, dining room and kitchen on the ground floor and more private areas like the bedrooms and bathrooms on the upper level. Today, while private and public areas are still generally divided by floor level, individual room divisions, especially on the ground level have been removed in lieu of a more open concept. An open concept gives the appearance of flexibility, but in reality is merely a manipulation of space to give the impression of a greater area in a small home. While closely packed together, townhouses clearly delineate private and public, interior and exterior with their pure emphasis on interior space. With such a high building density, exterior social spaces and interaction come as a result of a nearby public park or town square and not from the housing itself. Because of their generic plan and low building cost, townhouses are now commonly found in many parts of the world and built with a very similar formula, despite varying geographic location. The Naked House
Designed in 2000 by Shigeru Ban Architects, the Naked House consists of a number of open cubical ‘rooms’ that can be freely wheeled around an open, two storey high plan based on the desires and needs of the family. Each of the open rooms allows for a suggested division of space without forming an actual permanent blockade. As a result, only minimal privacy is granted and family members stay connected while having their own space for individual activities (Shigeru Ban).
GLOSSARY TERMS
Intensification – furthering the development of existing neighbourhoods to increase dwelling densities though approaches including infill and urban consolidation.
Monster H ome – a house perceived as excessively large. Spatial Perception – sensing space:
becoming aware of space through the senses.
Modular – components with a standard size or design that can be configured in a variety of ways.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Barker, Eric J. Tenant Participation in Housing Design: A Report on Experimental Public Housing Projects in Winnipeg and Brandon, Manitoba. Edmonton: Barker & Guslits Associates, 1976. Beinhocker, Eric D. The Origin of Wealth: Evolution, Complexity, and the Radical Remaking of Economics. Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2006. Boyd, Robin. New Directions in Japanese Architecture. New York: George Braziller, 1968. Friedman, Avi. Room for Thought: Rethinking Home and Community Design. Toronto: Penguin Group (Canada), 2005. Gallagher, Winifred. House Thinking: A Room-By-Room Look at How We Live. Toronto: Harper Perennial, 2006. Giedion, Sigried. Space, Time and Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition. Boston: Harvard University Press, 1954. Gillis, A. R. The Urban Environment and Individual Unease: An Empirical Look at Wirthian Logic. Research paper. Toronto: Centre for Urban and Community Studies, University of Toronto, 1979. Japan Links. “The Traditional Japanese House: Shapes, Spaces and Architectural Elements.” Japan Links. http://www.japanlinks.ch/ traditional_japanese_house/. Miron, John R. Changing Patterns of Household Formation in the Toronto CMA: 1951 to 1976. Toronto: Centre for Urban and Community Studies, University of Toronto, 1979. Muth, Richard F. Cities and Housing: The Spatial Pattern of Urban Residential Land Use. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969. Pritchard, Roger Martin. Housing and the Spatial Structure of the City: Residential Mobility and the Housing Market in an English City Since the Industrial Revolution. London: Cambridge University Press, 1976. Richardson, Harry Ward. Housing and the Urban Spatial Structure: A Case Study. Lexington, Mass.: Saxon House / Lexington Books, 1975. Schumacher, E. F. Small is Beautiful: A Study of Economics as if People Mattered. London: Sphere Books, 1973. Shigeru Ban Architects. “Works: Houses and Housing; The Naked House – Saitama, Japan 2000,” Shigeru Ban Architects, http://www. shigerubanarchitects.com/SBA_WORKS/SBA_HOUSES/SBA_HOUSES_24/ SBA_Houses_24.html.
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SOCIAL
Good design enables you to control your privacy while also having more of a sense of connection with your neighbourhood. —Renee Chow
What is the social system?
The social system refers to the social unit a home shelters, ranging from a single person to an extended family or even an assembly of several smaller groups, all living under the same roof. This social unit is embedded in a larger community, either within a group of people, sharing the same boundaries of a local neighbourhood or, more recently, encompassing a widespread range of social networks, connected through ties of kinship and shared interest.
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If we are to build truly sustainable housing, the social component needs to be reintroduced into the design process. Rather than focusing solely on green technologies, construction should follow social requirements. Basic human needs for social interaction with the neighbourhood and the possibility for retreat within the home should drive the design process. The aim is to create buildings that act as social hardware, balancing public and private spaces and fostering interrelations with their direct environment. How can we integrate communication technologies in terms of social software, tools that stimulate face-to-face relationships on a local basis, rather than replacing them?
Historical Analysis
In the earliest days, the social unit was a reflection of how food was procured. Hunter-gatherers lived in bands where the interest of the community prevailed over the interest of the individual for survival. Several tribes lived in communal houses. The domestication of animals and plants allowed people to transition to a sedentary lifestyle and gradually caused houses to cluster into small villages. The size of these communities was still determined by the number of people needed to cultivate the land. Increasing food surpluses made it possible for some people to specialize in tasks other than food production. This started to shape political structures and early urbanization processes. Community was still found in groups of people who shared location and ancestry. They were spatially compact, close-knit and tightly bound. People walked to visit each other, which offered multiple occasions for accidental encounters. Social activity centered around easily observed public spaces and within neighbourhoods. The social unit was mainly shaped around the extended family, a very broad unit that sheltered multi-generational families, and in many cases also included workers and servants. With the introduction of more efficient transportation and communication systems (as early as railways and telegraphs) contact could be maintained with greater ease and over longer distances. Community started to shift from locally based groups to shared interest networks. This had major implications on the nature of a community. It became more fragmented and loosely woven. Networks of specialized ties (centered around work, and hobbies) started to take shape, social activity gravitated towards less accessible private homes and no longer took place within the context of the local neighbourhood. The social unit reacted by shrinking into nuclear families consisting of two parents and their offspring. With the absence of local group dynamics, social ties and relationships now had to be maintained over distances and across physical barriers (Wellman). Portable communication technologies (such as mobile phones and laptops with wireless connections) are introducing a new shift within the social unit. Communication is again becoming detached from the home and is no longer connecting households (as fixed phones used to do) but is fully targeting the individual. Each person within a family has the opportunity to build his or her own personal network independently of other members (Wellman). Community is no longer defined spatially, but rather virtually, wrapped around the individual.
Future Trends
Paradox Recently, the social unit, as well as its given community, have been challenged in numerous ways by technological innovations. In developed countries in particular, the social unit has become notably smaller and fragmented. We observe that social activity is no longer centered around public spaces but has shifted towards the private home and is now focusing in on the individual through portable technologies, allowing each person within a family to construct their own network independently. On the one hand, this has increased the diversity of opportunity for the individual, offering him or her a wider range of people to interact as well as freeing him or her from a single group’s restrictive control. Yet is has also caused the loss of a tangible local community that provided a strong sense of identity and belonging. The lack of neighbourhood community can no longer guarantee local safety, and watchful neighbours are being replaced by fenced gates and surveillance cameras. Living in a low crime area is becoming increasingly important, fostering a segregation of classes within the urban tissue (Wellman). Despite these technological innovations and new opportunities, the general need for a tightly knit neighbourhood has never been lost. People still enjoy to chatting with neighbours, visiting relatives, and helping each other out, and object to loud parties or other disturbances next door. Physical proximity continues to affect the frequency with which people see one another and provide material aid (Wellman). Neighbourhoods remain as refuges from outside pressures, sources of interpersonal aid in dealing with large bureaucracies, and useful means to keep the streets safe (Wellman). But rather then polarizing the information technology debate surrounding the creation of stronger or weaker communities we want to focus on how information technology is transforming communities and determine which new range of options it brings for people. How can these technologies be used as tools to reinforce the social cohesion within a given social unit or local community? Recent studies have shown that online interactions are mostly used for filling in communication gaps between face-to-face meetings and are therefore in service of physical encounters rather then substituting them. Also, with the introduction of portable devices, communication (and in some cases work) is no longer attached to the home and social activity is again shifting outside of the private sphere, gravitating again towards public ‘in between’ places that favour light, air and sociability (such as coffee bars or public lawns).
Proposals
If we are to tackle the social system within the house we must consider both the composition and spatial arrangements of the social unit within the home as well as the relation of the house to its direct surroundings. This can be materialized partly through reintroducing ancient but successful planning and building principles into the design process and translating them into a contemporary context, as well as by integrating social software as a facilitator in recomposing local communities into pockets of subcultures, based on shared values and interests within the urban fabric.
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The Social Unit within the Home: Towards the ‘Voluntary’ Family Until recently we considered the nuclear family as the standard social unit in most developed countries. Unfortunately, it seems very likely that the nuclear family is not a viable social form. It is too small. Each person in a nuclear family is too tightly linked to the other members of the family; any one relation that goes sour, even for a few hours, becomes critical; people cannot simply turn away towards uncles, aunts, grandchildren, cousins and brothers. Instead, each difficulty twists the family unit into even tighter spirals of discomfort. Children become prey to all kinds of dependencies and oedipal neuroses, the parents are so dependent on each other that they are often forced to separate (Alexander, 377). It seems essential that the individuals in a household have at least a dozen people around them so that they can find the comfort and relationships they need to sustain them during their ups and downs (Alexander, 378). However, since we observed that the extended family – the multigenerational unit that was standard until the 1960s – is gone and is not likely to return due to the increased social opportunities among its members, we might see the emergence of a social unit with a more dynamic nature, offering a firm base for a number of core members but also providing room for occasional passersby. This would be an interdependent group based on shared interest rather then shared ancestry, shaped and facilitated by social infrastructures like the Internet. This assembled family could give body to the social unit by attaching multifunctional ‘hub’ spaces to their dwellings, offering the possibility to enlarge and enrich the social unit for limited periods of time. Online collaborative filtering could facilitate this process by synchronizing wants and needs within the social unit. If one or more persons happen to leave the house for a certain period of time, this vacancy can be filled in through ‘personal agents’ (myspace meets Craigslist) hooking up like-minded others that can complement the unit for the time being. However, if we want this new assembled unit to be successful, we have to create a social setting of spaces within the house that respect both the needs of every individual for retreat, but also offer common areas at the heart of the home where people can meet. The Social Settings within the Home: Towards a Balance of Private and Public Every successful dwelling is a delicate assembly of public and private spaces that encourages social activity at the heart but also offers personal retreat at its periphery. When taking a closer look at these spatial arrangements we find that they are submitted to some very basic principles that can be found in the traditional floor plans of most cultures. The first principle to highlight is the occurrence of an intimacy gradient of spaces within a home. The intimacy gradient implies a gradual hierarchy of spaces in a building, ranging from the most public spaces at the front and the very private at the back. When inviting guests in, casual friends are received at the front, while more personal friends are allowed into the private realms. The bedroom is considered to be the most intimate; a back sitting room or study less so; a common room or kitchen more public still; a front porch or entrance room most public of all. When a building lacks these clearly defined degrees of intimacy, the possible subtlety of social interaction in the building will be diminished or even erased entirely (Alexander, 619).
A second principle that manages the social liability in a dwelling is found within the non-public areas of the home and deals with the balance between common areas and private realms. Given the needs of every individual for both social interaction as well as personal privacy, the house has to be partitioned into distinct parts: a private realm for each dweller where they can find some rest, next to a common area to meet together. Both areas should be roughly similar in size, with the commons slightly larger. When laying out floor plans we should make sure that the common areas are found at the heart of activity and that the paths between more private rooms cross this common area so that a steady flow of people throughout the shared space is ensured. Until recently the relation of the home towards the street was perceived very differently within Eastern and Western cultures. Eastern cultures (ranging from the earliest settlements along the Tigris and the Euphrates all the way to the ancient urban houses in India and China) developed an inward-looking housing type that enclosed a central courtyard. Western civilizations, on the other hand, favoured an outward-looking model (Shoenauer, 672). Norbert Shoenauer states in his book 6000 years of housing that this inward orientation of Eastern urban houses had profound social implications on both the social life within the home as well as the positioning of the home towards its surroundings. He argues that the limited contact with the street offered privacy from neighbours and passersby, in respect to both household activities and material possessions, and that the absence of public display of both wealth and personal status towards the street allowed smaller and larger houses, weathly and poor, to exist next to one another within the same neighbourhood. The Western outward-looking model on the other hand, favouring larger windows that faced the street, increased concern about who was living next door and how we were perceived by them. This made it harder to share the same streets and, in some cases, favoured segregation of income groups between neighbourhoods (Shoenauer, 672). This is not to say that contact with the street within residential areas should be avoided. However this relation should be handled with care and sculpted according to the cultural preferences and value sets of its environment. In places where interaction with the street is desired, either by residents or for commercial activities, an introduction to the building by an in-between place that mediates between the house and the street is favourable. Porches in residential homes and arcades in public streets have facilitated this function very well, and there are many other ways in which people have addressed this issue successfully in the past. A Home Towards a Maximum Variety within the Boundaries of a Subculture. In order to understand the nature of the social unit in relation to its community it is useful to observe how evolution has sculptured successful communities in nature over time. One of the most fascinating examples of dynamic communities is to be found within the composition of a fertile soil. Similar to a balanced community, a healthy soil encourages a variety of generations, intermingles life and death and provides the opportunity for growth and decay. The roots of a plant and the earthworm have distinct contributions to make within the life cycle of a soil community in order to ensure its fertility.
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Monocultures will erode soil, and disruption to natural cycles will incur considerable time to recovery. However, well-managed soils are able to balance healthy crops and fertile ground. In these soils, the roots of human-planted, perennial staples will interact with the existing mass of organic material and organisms, forming closely-knit and interdependent tissues that can ensure fertility. We can build off this example when shaping our neighbourhoods, starting by setting up a solid framework of human-scaled structures that can shelter pockets of households at considerable density, to then create the opportunity for diversity through the introduction of various activities and a mixed-income population. The first element to consider when looking at neighbourhoods is density. When considering a cluster of houses in a rural environment or a neighbourhood within a larger urban area, it is widely accepted that dense environments enrich the social fabric and improve safety within a neighbourhood as well as benefiting the community by sharing costly urban infrastructure and municipal services (Shoenauer, 451). When looking at the dense environments of earlier societies, we notice that a lot of them grew out of necessity. People were restricted to closely-knit communities for reasons of policy restriction, security or a lack of efficient means of transportation and communication. For example, Greek and Chinese city-states, directed by growth control policies, were conceived as coherent wholes that would not expand beyond their initial boundaries but would establish new cities at considerable distance when maximum capacity within city limits was reached (Shoenauer, 123). Similar developments unfolded in Medieval Western Europe where dense and organic urban neighbourhoods were restricted and enclosed by the walls of a fortified city to protect them from hostile invasions. Although we often associate these early urban developments with the diseases and filth they produced, it is important to note that they also encouraged vibrant urban fabrics within their walls and maintained an ecological balance with their hinterlands; the countryside offered the produce, the city offered a marketplace (Shoenauer, 235). Much later, when fortification walls lost their military importance and urban areas emerged outside of the city walls, restrictions in transportation continued to shape many European cities into dense areas. Because many of them were built before the arrival of the car, commuting distances were limited, and city dwellers were therefore forced to build residential neighbourhoods within close range of the inner city, resulting in vertical expansions rather then horizontal ones. In their initial stages of development, and later spurred by the Industrial Revolution, many of these early urban areas were confronted with the lack of sanitation and a growing inequity among its citizens, leading to several outbreaks of epidemics and social unrest (Shoenauer, 291). With the gradual introduction of a proper infrastructure and social reforms some of these early urban developments are now considered to be wonders of closely-knit urban tissues, offering fertile soils for social cohesion. They were allowed to grow and adapt through various stages of trial and error into new and exciting forms of human habitat, in a process of evolution that was driven by and restricted to frameworks of necessity. Although density must be considered at all times when planning communities, a large body of research shows that successful implementation will dramatically increase when density manifests itself in mid-rise rather then high-rise developments. Not only does the infrastructure of high-rise developments appear to be more costly, the large mass of the building is responsible for several negative micro-climatic conditions on a
pedestrian level. These developments produce several social problems for their occupants. Inhabitants tend to become alienated from what is happening on the streets when living on higher levels, and poorly lit corridors and elevators hinder them from having accidental encounters with the other residents. Mid-rise housing developments tend to be more suitable in providing affordable dwellings to a wider range of income levels and households, ranging from single persons to families with children. Because self-policing is more effective in these buildings, they provide a feeling of security for their occupants, and, since no dwelling is at a higher level then mature treetops, each dwelling can easily maintain a visual connection with the street (Shoenauer, 460). Still, within mid-rise developments, scale must be considered. If a mid-rise development encompasses too many units at once it will be perceived as superficial. The opportunity for growth and mass customization within a development has to be offered through the elaboration of flexible frameworks that will allow growth over time. Opportunities for individual adaptations must be embraced and cultivated within the master plan rather then shunned to match an idealized architectural picture. Customization will not only add colour and vibrancy to a neighbourhood and make visual its history, it will also enable more adaptation over time, suitable for an ever changing context. When adding functions to this built hardware we must consider diversity and aim for a mixture of commercial, residential and industrial land-use. Diversity in land-use will prevent monotonous urban environments and ensure a more balanced continuity of development. Again, mixed-use developments make public transport systems more viable and economical, since the flow is more continuous in areas with an around-the-clock occupancy of buildings. Within a community we observed that local social cohesion increased when members shared certain values and lifestyles. Motivated by others in their behaviour, people will be encouraged to open up and share experiences. Houses ought to cluster around shared interest, rather then shared income levels, in order to form vibrant subcultures that can feed off to each other (Alexander, 44). This framework of social hardware, brought to life with the introduction of people and activities, can now be fertilized with social traffic. Recent papers show that new means of information technology are well suited to support families that have different schedules and agendas. Although being unable to reverse the trend of fragmentation within households and communities, information technologies can transform, enrich and complement relationships between the different members of a household, compensating for the inadequacies of earlier means of communication. A stream of new messaging media ranging from mobile phone conversations, e-mail, blog postings and instant messaging can reinforce loose ties because they allow for quick, asynchronous messages, offering both parties the opportunity to move around independently while still being connected (Wellman). After connecting people on a global level we can start focusing on how online software can reconnect people within their local context (see: i-neighbors.org).
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Conclusion
Increased opportunities will allow the individual to become even more independent, and will further transform our social units into fragmented and dynamic entities. We can respond to this reality by incorporating flexible spaces within our homes that function as temporary attachments for occasional visitors managed by social software. This dynamic space will enlarge the social unit, making it a more vibrant and balanced entity. Furthermore, we have to contrast spaces that favour sociability against spaces that offer individual privacy within the home. We have to consider the layout of a distinctive intimacy gradient within our home that will inform guests on the nature of their visit establishing a gradual connection with the street. We must design with time in mind when retrofitting our suburbs and planning the neighbourhoods of tomorrow. We have to allow our neighbourhoods to fail by putting up flexible frameworks that welcome personal adaptation and organic growth; frameworks that allow for children to be born and parents to grow old; neighbourhoods that orchestrate the evolution of their population by capitalizing on diversity. We have to aim for communities that act interdependently and become largely self-sufficient, sculptured by a framework of flexible buildings, driven by a community of diversity and fertilized by a range of wireless interactions.
SAMPLE HOMES Eastern Courtyard Home
We can find multiple variations of the courtyard model in most Eastern cultures, dating from the earliest urban settlements along the banks of the Tigris and the Euphrates all the way to the ancient Hutongs of Beijing. Having survived a lifespan of nearly 6000 years, this inward oriented setting has been favoured for multiple reasons. The courtyard home inward-oriented house veiled household activities and material wealth from the street. It insulated the family against the bustle of the city and focused on a short-range view of private space. The courtyard welcomed social activity and braided extended family around it. The resulting streetscape revealed little about the status or wealth of its occupants, which largely contributed to an integration of different social classes within one community (Shoenauer, 99). Montreal Multiplex
The duplex or multiplex represents the typical multifamily urban housing type that is indigenous to Quebec cities in Canada. First built in 1852 by the Grand Trunk Railway Company, these homes provided affordable urban, housing for the working class (Shoenauer, 364). In the first duplexes, one family occupied the lower floor, another the upper. Over the decades triplex and even a quadraplex became available with the addition of a basement suite. This allowed for a steady rotation of occupants and gave substantial density to the neighbourhood. Originally, some of these houses operated as co-housing models. Different households bought a share in the house rather then a specific floor. This resulted in shared maintenance costs, provided common garden space and kept prices low. Over time, residents began to live on one floor while renting out the others, spurring speculation and eliminating the common interest in the property. The generic ground plan allowed easy adaptation to successive generations of occupants. It consisted mainly of rooms of equal dimensions, permitting their interchangeable use as bedrooms, living rooms or dining rooms over time. The external staircases supported this generic ground plan by freeing up space inside the envelope and giving each occupant a private entry. They also contributed to the social viability of the dwelling creating a public entrance to the home. Up until recently, these staircases functioned as tiered seats of a viewing platform from which the street could be observed and accidental meetings could take place.
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These house were easily customized allowing a wider range of variability. Little adjustments at the front of the buildings bring welcoming distractions while preserving the overall democratic look. In contrast the accumulation of semiattached, ‘homegrown’ shacks connect a web of staircases and bridges that revitalize the back alleys of these homes. The Craigslist Home
People are becoming increasingly skilled in bypassing traditional specialized housing infrastructures like hotels, and prefer to reside in more personal settings when abroad. A ‘Craigslist home’ would link up wants and needs and connect people through online platforms that display both spaces for rent as well as individual inquiries for temporary stays. Empty apartments could be reviewed online and eventually rented when a user goes on holiday; well hidden bed and breakfast addresses would float from mouth to mouth (or inbox to inbox); contacts in far destinations would be shared and exchanged. Both the emergence of online tools (Craigslist meets myspace), as well as the increased flexibility that people experience today, would allow this development to gain momentum. This shift would stimulate households to become more dynamically assembled and interest based, and has the ability to synchronize occupation levels within our existing houses. Elderly individuals with large empty homes could enjoy an extra income by renting out one or more rooms, unused empty space for some could be the perfect temporary workspace for others, and friends of friends could host other friends of friends after brief online introductions.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Alexander, Christopher, Sara Ishikawa, Murray Silverstein, with Max Jacobson, Ingrid Fiksdahl-King, Shlomo Angel. A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977. Benyus, Janine M. Biomimicry, Innovation Inspired by Nature. New York: Harper Perennial, 1997. Boase, Jeffrey, and Barry Wellman. “Personal Relationships: On and Off the Internet.” In The Handbook of Personal Relations, edited by Dan Perlman and Anita L. Nangelisti, PAGES. Cambridge: University Press, 2004. Friedman, Avi. Room for Thought: Rethinking Home and Community Design. Toronto: Penguin Group (Canada), 2005. Gehl, Jan, Johansen Lotte Kaefer, Solvejg Reigstad. Close Encounters with Buildings. Hampshire, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. Kennedy, Tracy L.M., and Barry Wellman. “The Networked Household.” Information, Communication and Society, April 8, 2007. http://www .chass.utoronto.ca/~wellman/publications/ Schoenauer, Norbert. 6,000 Years of Housing. New York: W.W. Norton, 2000. Wellman, Barry. “Physical Place and Cyberspace: The Rise of Personalized Networking.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 25, no 2 (2001): 227-252. , and Wellman Associates. The Persistence and Transformation of Community: From Neighbourhood Groups to Social Networks, Ottawa, Law Commission of Canada, 2001.
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Design is an intersection point with politics and economy.
PHOTO - Pakistan, picker of paper waste from roads to recycle
POLITICS
Optimism is a political act. —World Changing
PHOTO - Bolivia, La Paz by Tyson Gillard (March in recognition of workers rights)
Politics
In earliest societies home provided the most basic needs of the community. Home was where there was food, water and protection from the elements. It was flexible and transportable, affordable and equitable, and fully integrated with the natural world. Bands of humans moved with seasonal migration and growth patterns, and home was where they found shelter and their most immediate needs for survival. No person or group controlled what home was, how it looked or where its bounds were. Nothing was bought or sold, enforced or banned. This lack of transaction meant the user did not need a regulating body to determine what was safe, appropriate, allowable or available – the system was utterly transparent. We lived in full consciousness of the true cost of our shelter and sustenance, with a holistic view of our dependence on the systems of the natural world.
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Over time, the growing influence of political systems has seen the rapid transition from those first egalitarian bands to complex, stratified societies with multi-level bureaucracies. As recently as 1500 AD, less than twenty percent of the world’s landmass was delineated into state boundaries governed by bureaucracies and laws. Today only Antarctica remains free of such divisions (Diamond, 266). Hunter-gatherers began the politicization of society with the development of cultural rules surrounding the treatment of food and waste. Omnivorous humans learned to navigate the wilderness and pass on experiential knowledge by developing cultural norms surrounding gathering and eating food, and death and burial. Our sense of taste, smell and innate disgust can partially help us differentiate between safe and unsafe food and biological matter, but we depend on culture to do the rest. In The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Michael Pollan says: [W]e codify the rules of wise eating in an elaborate structure of taboos, rituals, manners, and culinary traditions, covering everything from the proper size of portions to the order in which foods should be consumed to the kinds of animals it is and is not okay to eat (Pollan, 295-6). Food culture led to regulated laws and religious rites (the two have always been inextricably intertwined), enforced to help us navigate nature, educate our children and pass down our collective experience, and to limit human exposure to harmful microbes. Some of these “rules” persist as milder cultural guidelines, but many are strongly reflected in our body of law and regulation. As human societies gradually transformed into settled tribes and chiefdoms, terrain became politicized with increased control of resources and land. Surpluses of food gained from early agricultural activity were paid as tribute to the big man or chief and redistributed to members of the community. Increased centralized power allowed for the development of a paramount village, predecessor to the urban centre. With increasing size and complexity, societies became progressively more hierarchical, paving the way for ownership and the commodification of resources and goods. Intensive agricultural societies developed a politicized economy with monetary exchange and ownership of land and personal property. Still greater food surpluses made division of labour possible; stratified societies could now support multilevel bureaucracies and urbanization. These centralized governments changed the nature of mobility and communication through government roads built for military purposes and trade. It was here that we took the first steps towards a global economy and a mobile population. As transactions continue to become more complex, regulating bodies are needed to protect the health and safety of individuals, as well as the stewardship of shared resources. Multilevel bureaucracies must increasingly monitor the production and flow of goods, and the development and construction of our homes. The home is no longer simply made up of the necessities for survival, available in our immediate surroundings, but is rather a complex aggregation of materials and goods, produced and exchanged around the globe, and regulated by several levels of government – local, regional, federal and even international. Choice and transparency have been supplanted in the face of opportune government policy, and the relative security and wealth of a global capitalist economy.
Post-Industrial societies have even politicized domestic climate control, with the commodification of water and energy, adhesion to strict building codes and regulation of air rights. As the impact of human activity fuels drastic climate change, governments will inevitably have to impose increasingly stringent regulations to protect decreasing resources and fragile environments. Sadly, because of the enormous complexity of our society, the scale of the global economy, and our increasing disassociation from the natural world, government policy is often misguided. Some regulations are more harmful than helpful, and there are many gaps where governments could be stepping in to keep the market honest and protect our health and safety. Political systems that were once designed to increase the security and safety of communities, and the individuals in them, are now designed to sustain an abstract economy that is accountable to only a few.
Politics in the Home
For better or worse, political influence runs as an undercurrent to each of the twelve systems of the home. Political policy is responsible for many of the lifestyle options available to us. Homes are affected by policies themselves, or the lack of policy where regulation is needed. Often the most detrimental effects to our health and safety stem from the perversion of housing policies or the corruption that subverts them. Political environments define the complex building codes and urban planning regulations that affect where and how we live. For example, in postwar America, the production of the Interstate highway system, the G.I. Bill (which provided veterans with housing loans) and federally subsidized mortgages promoted a mass exodus to the suburban developments that have become iconic in the American landscape (Pollan, 67). Policy determines urban density, road capacity and public transport, making it either difficult or desirable to commute (by various modes of transportation) to work, school or the grocery store. It determines whether communities are gated, segregated and unwelcoming, or multi-use, diverse and accessible. Codes and planning regulation also determine to large extent what our houses look like – how tall or short they might be, how old and decrepit, or how newly, tightly sealed. The building code determines our homes’ proximity to the street and to each other. It favours certain conventional building materials and methods of construction over experimental practices. In places where no building codes exist or are enforced, homes are built inefficiently or without the proper safety concerns, often at the extreme expense of the marginalized poor. For example, in the UK building codes are sparse, and weakly enforced, compounding issues of energy overuse and excessive carbon emissions. There are 17 million homes with cavity walls in the United Kingdom, but only 6 million with cavity wall insulation. Given that injecting mineral fibres between the bricks is so cheap that it pays for itself within two to five years, the 65 per cent of homeowners who choose not to use it must either be so poor they have no capital to spend, so poorly informed that they have never heard of the process, aware that someone else (the tenant) is picking up the heating bill, or perversely attached to burning money (Monbiot, 65-66).
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At its worst, lack of policy means shanty towns can be built on toxic soils, or the precarious slopes of a hill, in the direct line of natural disaster. From the 1920s to the 1950s the Love Canal in the Niagara Falls region was used as a landfill site for toxic waste disposal. As the population in the area increased, new low-income residences were built adjacent to the site. Municipal sewage beds built in 1957 breached the walls of the canal, allowing chemicals to seep into residential land. Residents suffered from abnormally high rates of cancer and birth defects. City officials investigated, but did not act on the issue. Nothing was done until 1980, after several years of legal agitation from the area’s homeowner’s association, when residents were finally relocated. Most of the world’s poor live on similarly precarious terrain, yet lack the support of the legal system the Love Canal residents relied on when government officials acted negligently (Wikipedia, Love Canal). Municipalities or regional governments control the water, energy, and air entering a home and the waste that comes out. These necessities are becoming increasingly privatized as governments bow to corporate entities, leading to raising management costs and favouritism of industry needs over residents in areas where resources are scarce. Unequal distribution and mistreatment of resources is an apparent issue even in the most privileged nations. The Walkerton tragedy in Ontario, Canada, in which more than 40% of the community fell ill from E. Coli contamination of the local water supply, sparked new regulation demands from the Ontario government. Small communities were required to install water treatment plants, at a huge cost to local taxpayers. This new regulation was enforced in Sydenham, Ontario (population approximately 1000), where residents already have access to their own safe supply of well water. As is often the case, the efforts of a centralized government to standardize and simplify policy to cover vast and diverse communities causes redundancy at the expense of homeowners. Conversely, many native reserves across Canada, which comprise some of the poorest areas of the country, struggle for access to clean water. Some regions have been on boil water advisories for years, and many rely on bottled water as their primary source (CBC News). Food is controlled explicitly through regulating bodies such as the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (or the Food and Drug Administration in the U.S.) and implicitly through farm subsidies and agricultural policies. Food, and commodities derived from food products, often travel around the globe before finding their way into our homes, passing through a complex system of production, processing, packaging and transport regulated by international trade agreements. In The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Pollan traces the industrial food chain, beginning from the supermarket, all the way back to the American Corn Belt, where a large percentage of our food finds its roots. In fact, of the 45,000 items in the average supermarket, more than a quarter now contain corn. It’s not the market responding to our desire for corn, but rather: …a quarter century of farm policies designed to encourage the overproduction of this crop and hardly any other. Very simply, we subsidize high-fructose corn syrup in this country, but not carrots. While the surgeon general is raising alarms over the epidemic of obesity, the president is signing farm bills designed to keep the river of cheap corn flowing, guaranteeing that the cheapest calories in the supermarket will continue to be the unhealthiest (Pollan, 108).
Despite the obvious damage to our health, the government continues to back cheap corn due to pressure from massive corporations (such as Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland Company (ADM)) and the convenience corn products offer in their processing, storage and transportability. Home is no longer a place designed to sustain and protect us, with a holistic view of the world as our architectural plan. It is a collection of objects circumscribed by governments and corporations in the interest of an artificial economy. In each of the twelve systems of the home, our lifestyle choices are made almost entirely within the framework determined by government policy. We need government policy to help us navigate through the unknown wilderness that the global economy and the complexity of the modern world has become. We depend on policy to help us make healthy and sustainable choices. We need it to ensure our structures are sound, our cities, towns and neighbourhoods are clean, and our food is safe. We need it to ensure everybody has equal access to heat, light and clean water. We need it to preserve the cultural traditions that first taught us how to live abundantly in this world. The question for the World House Project is: how can we ensure the development of political systems and policies that are grounded in a holistic view of the world, and with our sustenance and survival as the chief measure of their value?
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BIBLIOGRAPHY
CBC News Online. The State of Drinking Water on Canada’s Reserves. CBC New Online, February 20, 2006. http://www.cbc.ca/slowboil/ Diamond, Jared. Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. New York: Viking, 2005. , Jared. Guns, Germ and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. New York: W. W. Norton, 1997. Homer-Dixon, Thomas. The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity and the Renewal of Civilization. CITY: Alfred A. Knopf Canada, 2006. Monbiot, George. Heat: How to Stop the World from Burning. Cambridge, MA: Doubleday Canada, 2006. Pollan, Michael. The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals. New York: Penguin Press, 2006. Wikipedia. Love Canal. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love_Canal (on Love Canal; accessed on February 25, 2007). Wikipedia. Sydenham, Frontenac County, Ontario. http://en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/ Sydenham%2C_Frontenac_County%2C_Ontario (on Sydenham, Frontenac County, Ontario; accessed February 25, 2007). Wikipedia. Walkerton Tragedy. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walkerton _Tragedy (on Walkerton Tragedy; accessed February 25, 2007).
PHOTO - Bolivia, La Paz by Tyson Gillard
(20,000 tons of salt is extracted from the Salar de Uyuni annually making it the regions largest export. )
CASE STUDY
Housing Policy and Integrated Design
In order to better understand how our Federal, Provincial and Municipal governments influence housing in Canadian urban centres such as Toronto, a series of interviews were conducted with individuals who worked with housing policy in various capacities.* The nine interviewees had diverse experiences in a wide range of professional environments. They had past or present experience as architects, interior designers, carpenters, private developers, public developers, policy writers and legislators for Municipal and Federal government, youth workers and social workers. They were currently working, or had previously worked in several institutions or on significant projects that affect, or are very much affected by housing policy, including the City of Toronto Affordable Housing unit, the Ontario Homebuilder’s Association, the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, George Brown College’s Architecture Technology program, the Nelson Mandela Public School Model School program (located in Regent Park) and the Federal Task Force for Homelessness. Discussions covered a broad spectrum of current housing issues in cities across the country. Most interviewees were located in Toronto, but several had worked nationally, in Vancouver and in New Brunswick and were able to comment on policy issues from a pan-Canadian perspective. The interview questions focused on discerning the major issues that favour or hinder the development of healthy housing – housing that is accessible, affordable, safe and environmentally friendly. Participants were also asked what positive policy changes were possible, and how those changes might be put into effect. What emerged in the discussions was the importance of extending the integrated design process beyond the design team. Interviewees felt that for policy to be effective, representation from a number of affected parties, and reform of the consultation process was required to address how housing is formulated, implemented and maintained. Social and physical infrastructure must be aligned, and diverse groups must be seamlessly interwoven into the urban fabric. Bureaucrats, developers, social support groups and residents must work collaboratively, and there must be lateral interaction between sectors.
Social and Physical Infrastructure
“One in four children in Toronto relies on food banks.” ** Most participants agreed that ‘good’ housing includes both physical and social infrastructure, and that often one or the other, or both, is neglected. One participant felt that the housing in Vancouver’s downtown eastside is insufficient because it fails to provide the necessary support services. He detailed these services as: medical health support, including food and nutrition and mental health support; social supports, which he described as enabling “people to care for one another, and contribute to and participate in neighbourhood life”; and cultural supports, which he sees as the design of housing and community life with special attention to particular (often marginalized) cultural groups. He, and others, felt that urban centres are facing an accumulation of under-supported residents due to cutbacks in social services in recent years. *Due to the conditions of a release form signed by all participants, none of the interviewees can be identified ** Unprefaced quotes are also drawn from interviews
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Several interviewees believed that the best housing programs include employment opportunities and community development, often linked to environmental policy. One participant singled out programs that use labour-intensive construction methods that are environmentally responsible as ideal for low-skill labourers who could benefit from involvement in such projects. Other participants offered examples such as: a church in New Brunswick that is being torn down and rebuilt within a seniors complex, integrated with independent and assisted living; a social housing centre in Malvern for aboriginal men that is ideally located near a library and other public resources; and Eva’s Phoenix in Toronto, a transitional housing centre that incorporates a training facility and print shop. One participant, who worked as a custom homebuilder, pointed out that when the Canadian Mortgage and Housing Company (CMHC) began providing interest adjustments and incentives for first-time homebuyers, most purchases were not made on newer housing product. Buyers opted for older stock that was closer to schools, on bus routes, or near other public amenities, even if it meant a smaller home for the equivalent price. Participants felt that strong social infrastructure that includes good housing and physical infrastructure makes for solid communities, where people want to live and businesses want to locate. As one interviewee said, “It’s not just the bricks and the mortar, it’s the supports that are there, and that’s where the real creativity comes in.”
Diverse Communities
“The biggest ghetto is North Toronto.” Most interviewees agreed that communities with a mix of cultural groups, income levels and building types were more likely to be vibrant, safe and desirable neighbourhoods. One participant said, “people don’t have to do social engineering and say there shall be a detailed mix. However, if you look at the literature, it talks about a detrimental non-mix.” Another interviewee felt that the separation between where people work and where they live is particularly damaging. He said, “You used to be able to walk to work, or bicycle to work, or take a short bus trip. Now you can’t do that, even for small facilities of low industrial commercial impact.” Not only is this non-mix disadvantageous to communities, it also contributes to urban sprawl. Another said that “Healthy cities ensure low-income people feel as at home as anyone else, and that there is respectful interaction among different people with different income levels.” Most participants saw integration of market properties – either privately or cooperatively owned – with publicly funded housing as ideal. Most also agreed that incorporating business and industry into a community increased its viability and safety. However, zoning by-laws make the process very time-consuming and costly. Social housing programs and low-risk industry are forced to cut through a lot of red tape to see projects to fruition.
Several interviewees suggested co-housing as a good socializing model, where units are privately or cooperatively owned, but amenities like kitchens and play spaces are shared. One participant named Island Cohousing on Martha’s Vineyard as a specific example. Another participant felt that Vancouver has done a better job than Toronto at building mixed-use product. She said that the low, three or four story residential buildings with street-level commercial units allowed densification of the downtown without detracting from the city’s character, and were beneficial to small businesses.
Private, Public & Not-for-Profit
“[Housing] policies were never developed through engagement with people who live in social housing. It’s a bunch of guys in suits who make the policies and make the decisions that really impact.” Interviewees saw a need to work in tandem with private sector developers, non-governmental organizations, and residents in developing communities. Several participants saw great potential in collaborating with private developers to build social housing, since they had the most expertise and available resources. In conjunction with this, non-governmental organizations were seen as necessary in operating and maintaining social housing, since they were most experienced in working with tenants. However, it was generally agreed that no group should be excluded from the design process. One participant, speaking about social housing programs, said, “I really like the idea of involving the two populations who are most knowledgeable: future residents and co-op and non-profit societies. Too often neither is involved in design.” Potential to merge public and private objectives was also seen in the development and renewal of physical infrastructure such as roads, sewage and water. While these services are necessary to strong communities, municipalities often can’t afford to do what is needed. Collaborating with private partners may help to revitalize inner cities and small communities. Several participants mentioned one such partnership in Milton, Ontario with Mattamy Homes – a partnership that has allowed the once-small community to thrive. A participant said, “Municipalities are cash-strapped. They have to look at partnerships with private developers to finance.” However he did add, “How you do that without corrupting or compromising yourself is another issue.”
Horizontal Integration
“Look at all our institutions – health care, education, social services – they’ve all got the silo mentality.” All the policy development that affects social and physical infrastructure directly or indirectly affects housing policy. Interviewees felt that an integrated plan is needed in the structures of government bureaucracy. One participant commented on the silo organization of the government. She works with disadvantaged youth in New Brunswick, and often has to deal with eight to ten different government departments to help one person find adequate housing and social supports. She said, “Everyone’s focused on their own little issue…We’ve all got our little niche.”
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Other interviewees also saw opportunities for smaller municipalities to work more collaboratively. One noted that municipalities are too compartmentalized and don’t have the ability to borrow or leverage financial resources the way provincial or federal governments can. Another said, “Small communities need to get together, we’ve got way too many Mayor-doms around Ontario. They can’t afford a fire department or a police department, and they really can’t even afford their services…They need to get together. And I believe that’s where provincial government could be of more help, to be the catalyst for that kind of discussion.” In fact, several felt that there could be better cooperation between all three levels of government in the implementation of housing policy, and other related policies. Others also saw opportunities to interact differently with other institutions and individuals involved in the housing process. One felt we could “negotiate differently with insurers, with cities, with planners, with examiners and with bankers, and with the people who inhabit [homes].”
Solutions
“A lot of these changes can happen in small ways, in ways that are inspiring, but to actually have a large effect they usually need to be incorporated into policy. Collectively, society – through government – makes a decision that we need to do things this way, even though individually it wouldn’t make sense for us.” Participants offered a diverse set of political solutions to increase collaborative planning and development of urban housing. One pointed to conditional zoning by-laws that would allow for ‘experimental zones’ (a model that already exists in the Netherlands). He felt that “people need to see good examples of small community design that provide privacy from smell, from sound; that provide safety; and that provide a good feeling of nurturing.” He believes that experimental zones would allow us to “produce alternative ways of mapping and strategizing to make new communities.” By drawing on technical responses, research vehicles and sociological studies, we would find the means to improve the way we live. Another participant felt that policy has to treat housing as a part of the city’s growth management. He believes that we need to think about “housing as a reinvestment tool, housing as a way of shoring up social mix, housing as a way of taking stress off households who are paying large amounts of income on rent or living in crappy housing.” Several agreed that the absence of a national housing program was particularly problematic. They saw the need for regional planning that controlled the urban sprawl that draws much-needed resources out of the city centre. Regional standards could also enhance community diversity by requiring a certain percentage of affordable housing per district. A national program would also enable greater sharing of resources and financial planning. One participant commented that in recent years we’ve merely been cobbling together bits of resources and programs, “all absent a national housing program, and the provincial housing strategy in each province across the country that would actually drive a housing agenda.” Most interviewees felt that interaction between all three levels of government and the various bureaucracies that affect housing policy is insufficient at this point. One said, “People are asking for a government mechanism [to create] a contact point for community groups with cross-cutting issues.” Or, as she put it, “We need a free-range chicken.”
PHOTO – Demolition at Regent Park, Toronto SYSTEM HOME: FIRST YEAR STUDENT ESSAYS FROM THE WORLD HOUSE PROJECT 219
We have inherited a large house, a great “world house” in which we have to live together—black and white, Easterner and Westerner, Gentile and Jew, Catholic and Protestant, Moslem and Hindu—a family unduly separated in ideas, culture and interest, who, because we can never again live apart, must learn somehow to live with each other in peace. —Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. 1968
PHOTO - Cuba by Jennifer Lee
A Assignments
T Tours
Week 1: TEAM CONVENES
T Mattamy Homes A Intro to 4 Lenses
E Events
Week 4: T Breakdown Condo Interior A Present 10 Scenarios L CMHC and Dean Goodman L Monica Contreras C CMHC and Dean Goodman
Week 3: T Alex Wilson Comm. Garden L Todd Falkowsky
AUGUST
SEPTEMBER
Week 2: T Windshare, CNE Wind Turbine A Present 100 Houses A Begin Systems Research L Michelle Wiebe
L Lectures
D Deliverables
Week 8: T Turtle Island Facility A 10 Manifestos Presentation L Greg Allen
Week 12: T Chester Springs Marsh E Chicago Massive Change Symposium C Chicago Massive Change A 4 Manifestos Presentation
Week 11: A 4 Manifestos Presentation L Craig Jowett L Aaron Setit
Week 7: T Everdale Farm L Judith Gregory
OCTOBER
Week 5: A Review Systems Research L Richard Lombard Week 6: T 157 House L Martin Liefhebber L Greg Van Alstyne
S Student Presentations
Week 9: C Will Harney Pavilion L Liv Babra
Week 15: L Vince Mancuso A Common Homes Book Complete A WHP Manifestos Presentation
NOVEMBER
DECEMBER
Week 13: L Syd Kessler L Spiral Garden
Week 10: T Computer Science Building at York University E Green Building Festival A 10 to 4 Manifestos Presentation A Press Package Release
C Charrettes
Week 18: D WHP Research Book Started D Living Model Planning Started D Interdesign Planning Started S Giorgi–Problem Solving Tools S Thomas–iMovie S Liz & Heidi–InDesign S Gary–Structural Design Week 17: A Mini-expert System Choosen S Jennifer–Event Planning S Sarah–Microcredit S Evelyne & KarYan–Web Networks
JANUARY
Week 16: L Alan Etherington A Preliminary Timline Started S Perin–Grant Writing C Will Harney Pavilion Redo
Week 14: L Sharon Temple L LEED A Azure Ad Printed A Business Card Printed
Week 20: E IwB Fundraiser Art Show
Week 19: S Carmen–Perception of Space S Thomas–Collage Workshop S Liz–Politcs & the Four Fold S Richard–SketchUp Workshop C Marotta-Nave Remodel
Week 22: S Richard–Rammed Earth Workshop L Theresa Cooke
Week 21: S Giorgi–UN Experience A Matrix Cards Printed C 40th Anniversary
Week 26: S Heidi–Communication Senses Week 25: S Evelyne–CNIB Tour
FEBUARY
Week 23: S KarYan–Research Analysis L Tasos Calantzis Week 24: E Interior Design Show (IDS)
Week 29: S Jennifer–Gladstone Tour
MARCH
Week 27: S Carmen–Garbage Arts C WHP Living Model Week 28: S Jennifer–Brick Works: Rethink Space
Week 38: A Mini-expert System Research Complete
Week 34: Student Work Week
Week 30: Student Work Week
Week 33: D Living Model Prototype S Perin–Cherry Beach Tour
APRIL
Week 37: Student Work Week
MAY
Week 31: S Gary–Building Science
Week 35: Student Work Week
Week 32: S Sarah–Systems Photo Essays Week 36: D Living Model Building Started E Doors Open Exhibition
JUNE
Week 39: D WHP Research Book Printed D Art Instalations D Living Model Built D Water Book Printed Week 40: D Interdesign Week C Capcity, Revitalization, Sustainability, & Conservation
THE IDEAS
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