Living Homes for Living Families
- A Disposable Home: a home that is dependent on continuous external input for its continued operation – such as energy, time, materials, and money; and will eventually reach a state of disrepair where it is no longer financially feasible to maintain.
- A Living Home: a home that is a self sustaining cell producing more energy and free time than it consumes; creating an autonomous structure that is interconnected to maximize your families’ investment.
Ancient Building Principles – Addendum
In Ancient Building Principles, I discussed how the Romans and Native Americans used thermal mass and flow channels to heat and cool Roman bath houses and Navajo Hogans.
Along with these time tested and ancient principles of nature, there was another common technique used in passively heating and cooling buildings: thermal chimneys. Thermal chimneys are also referred to as solar chimneys; and is the process of a natural convection caused by solar gain on the top portion of a structure, heating the air inside the ventilation chamber, usually a tall chimney, and naturally drawing the cooler air from the lower portion of the ventilation chamber.
This natural convection current results in pulling cool air from the ground floor, or in the case of a geothermal exchange, through the ground itself; and releasing the heated air out the top of the building. During the summer, this effectively cools the interior of the building.
Keeping the Lights On
Buildings of Today
Buildings are the number one cause of energy consumption and environmental degradation worldwide.
Building Today: A Brief History of the American Construction Industry
In Ancient Building Principles, we discussed the building principles of annualized geo solar, thermal diffusivity, and thermal mass; and how ancient buildings, such as the Navajo’s Hogan and the Roman’s hypocausts, utilized these building principles.
In this post, I’ll examine key aspects of building today, and why few builders incorporate these time tested building principles.
Ancient Building Principles
Throughout history, the ever present, natural principles of sustainable building have been utilized in varying ways. What our ancestors practiced in building design for generations upon generations, we now call Annualized Geo Solar – a structural-heating technique combining summertime capture of solar warmth, deposit and storage of that heat in insulation-buffered sub-structure soil, and, after a designed-in conductive thermal lag, radiational return of a portion of the warmth from the surface of a conductive floor, to (usually passively) heat the living space – and Thermal Diffusivity – the measure of how rapidly a substance adjusts their temperature to that of their surroundings, in comparison to their volumetric heat capacity or 'thermal mass'.
Take for example the Hogan of the Navajo People of North America.
Rejuvenation – Step 4: Sustainability and Beyond
In the last three steps, we discussed the method of implementing sustainability by using the C.O.R.E. Technology for shelter, food, water, and electricity. While this technology addresses the four basic systems of life, rejuvenation is a multifaceted endeavor, with many integrated parts.
For rejuvenating our society, from a disposable mindset to a sustainable one, we must begin to think in sustainable terms, and really understand how they relate to our Intent for Life. Intent for Life is taking personal responsibility for all our thoughts and actions, and focusing them with purpose.
Rejuvenation – Step 2: Sustainable Shelter and Food
In Step 1 of Rejuvenation, we discussed how most people work their entire lives striving for the basic freedoms of a place of their own, with plenty of good food, water, and air; only to live paycheck to paycheck, barely scraping by; with the looming fact that if they don’t get their financial heads far enough above water, they’ll spend the REST OF THEIR LIVES working to live! We also examined: If we didn’t create this system, and it doesn’t represent who we want to be; do we have an alternative?
We do, and it’s possible, practical, and achievable. It’s based on four basic systems of life: shelter, food, water, and electricity. In this section, we’ll discuss the first two: shelter and food.
Rejuvenation – Step 1: Reexamining How We Live
With our busy and fast paced lives, have you taken a moment to really stop and look around? What have you seen? Do you see a society that represents your values and core ideals? Do you see a society that represents your social and environmental views?
What Down Turn? Green Building Sees Continued Growth!
On Jan. 13, 2009, Yuldeson Associates, a leading-edge green building consulting firm, projected that “Green Building will continue to grow in spite of the global credit crisis and the opening economic recession”…with more people going green each year, and nothing on the horizon projected to stop this trend.
