Create homes that are havens for health and vitality
Life is too short to spend it in bad buildings.
Why we'd want to build at all?
The earliest built homes were the huts, tents, roofs over our head that sheltered us from the elements of nature while we temporarily settled in places between migrations.
As time passed short-term settlements became permanent. This gave the opportunity to invest more energy into buildings, to make them more protective, more durable and multifunctional. The most important uses were sleep, recreation and worship. They were keeping us alive for longer, even though we remained outdoor creatures.
These structures had diversified in character, had adapted to every place and to every unfolding culture. Vernacular architecture had evolved. Vernacular was the answer to the "shelter" problem expressed through the common man's wisdom.
Unfolding over millennia to resist the local climate the longest time possible, with the most available materials and the most effortless upkeep. - The Solar Manifesto.
Roaming less and less, we became more rooted in place and formed cities. This brought about more complex societies, the birth of monuments and classical architecture. The cities' expressed richer compositions and building techniques as response to local climates and cultures.
One example of a well-adapted solar city is the city of Priene of Ancient Greece, founded around 1000 BC. Priene was built entirely on a southern slope, employing vernacular patterns that maximised sunlight and fresh air for every house and inhabitant.
During the ~2700 years that came many cultures rose and fell.The situation on the globe remained roughly the same: 99% of the population lived in subsistence, intrenched in place, 80% of time spent in their countryside, toiling their domains, growing families and participating in religious festivities.
Then, the last 300 years of post-Enlightenment progress caused changes that gradually brought architecture and our body/mind health to the sorry state we are in today. We became increasingly indoor creatures, while accelerated technology made us culturally homeless. The defining conditions of the crisis of the built environment.
"In most communities, we have a box that we sleep in, a box we drive to the office or school in, and then, once we’re there, a box to work or study in. At lunch, we often go to a generic box that can be found in one of several dozen cities, and repeat the same thing every day. Occasionally, but less and less frequently, there may be some other box that we go to the movies in, see a show in, or go out to eat in." - The importance of Magical places by Coby Lefkovitz
As an answer to this challenge, I present four dimensions that define the buildings of the future and my practice:
I. Space
Indoor and outdoor spaces must adapt to our life, not vice-versa.
Ancients' green strategy for building dwellings was this: build the smallest enclosure that has the best quality they can afford.
The shelter should serve as space for rest {sleep}, space for rejuvenation {bath}, and space for nourishment {kitchen & social}. Everything else is secondary.
Minimising indoor space helped build the best using the least resources, and gave the opportunity to build dense cities, leaving space for outdoor and public activity.
Households had outdoor workshops, barns, summer kitchens, where people spent their time whenever weather permitted it. They always entertained themselves being a little bit uncomfortable.
My core idea regarding Space is this: We can build optimal indoors for sleep, rejuvenation and nourishment and leave space for quality, functional outdoor spaces. Even though we have completely different professional and workspace needs than our elders, we can do most activities in outdoor spaces, in most settlements on Earth, for at least 6 months of the year.
The greenest square foot is that we'll never have to build. The challenge is crafting the place and functional flow for our everyday lifestyles and wellbeing. My focus is on living patterns woven within a sufficient form-factor so no space or money is wasted.
"There is a myth, sometimes widespread, that a person need only do inner work...that a man is entirely responsible for his own problems; and that to cure himself, he need only change himself….The fact is, a person is so formed by his surroundings, that his state of harmony depends entirely on his harmony with his surroundings."
- Christopher Alexander
II. Sunlight
Odysseus had a solar palace.
Do you have one?
We spend up to 95% of our time indoors in scantly sunlit spaces. The mighty machines of modernity growing larger and larger, cut us off more and more from sunlight. The Sun shines with 120.000 lux. Your living room lets in almost 1.000 lux, at the sill of the window. Hell, even under a cloudy sky, you'll get more reflected sunshine outside than in an average room. {cloudy sky = 10.000 lux}
The "Increasingly Indoor Illness" epidemic is caused by severe lack of sunlight and fresh air. If we take our wellbeing seriously, it is essential that we build homes for our activities {both private or public} that maximise sunlight exposure.
Our sensory connection to the sun aligns our circadian rhythm that regulates our daily metabolic, energetic and hormonal cycles to maximise our health and vitality.
Sunbeams are as much an organic part of the fabric of a home as timber beams. A solar home provides up to 2/3rds of the heat energy passively in cold climates. Warmth from nature aligns us to the natural cycle of our body, keeping us energetic with green energy that we never have to produce.
III. Air
Modern buildings and the increasingly indoor epidemic cut us off from fresh air too. Fresh air is the vital nourishment we cannot survive without for more than a couple minutes. Yet we forgot completely how to design buildings that can be properly ventilated.
Modernists said they invented the ideal machine for living.
Instead they became machines for slow death.
Lack of proper ventilation kills slowly and invisibly. We breathe in five times as much CO2 inside than outside. Volatile organic compounds {VOCs} oozing from furnitures, artificial paint, decaying synthetic building components emanating micro-particles all harm us. Overly moist air leads to mould in the winter.
We end up with mouldy, suffocating, unhealthy indoor air. All these are lead causes for respiratory illnesses and asthma while constantly hampering our cognitive functions. Indoor air must be continually replenished with proper ventilation patterns.
Higher ceilings, ventilating transom windows, cross-ventilation schemes get more fresh air in and get stale air out quickly. Moisture regulating natural materials like wood fibers and clay plaster don't release VOCs and contribute to non-toxic interiors. Heat-recovery systems can be installed for the winter to refresh the air constantly without losing heat.
Building good open-air rooms are just as important as indoor rooms. In-between spaces like porches, porticos, verandas, terraces, courtyards, gardens, parks, street fronts all facilitate outdoor life. Connecting each other under the open sky, connecting us to our natural surroundings.
IV. Time
A 500 year old building is ten times more sustainable than one that will only stand for 50.
The dimension of time is probably the hardest to grasp. More precisely, the concept of low time preference influencing our willingness to think extremely long-term when deciding what type of buildings to invest our hard earned money in.
We've been living in a fiat economic paradigm since the First World War. This lead to two things:
1. We salvaged our tra$h-ca$h in increasingly debt-fueled real-estate to build wealth, no alternative remained to wealth-generation today other than building businesses, thanks to the century-old theft-scheme called inflation.
2. The quantity of square-footage became the determining factor for real-estate, first stalling then eroding quality. The cunning cost-efficiency optimisation got us to a point where we build buildings that quickly get us into maintenance and energy-hell.
Our ancestors were doing the exact opposite. The jump in quality during the Renaissance birthed many buildings that were designed to be as durable as possible, while crafted to be highly aesthetic. The wealth creation during to the economic reforms {accounting, Medicis etc.} and the first big wave of globalisation created beautiful, long-lasting architecture and cities.
Contemporaries claim we build more diversely than ever, a dizzying cognitive dissonance. Heaps of regulation and faux technological innovations covering for cost-efficiency cuts keep the built environment in a short-term cycle of building, demolition and rebuilding.
Yet the most visited, most coveted and most wealth-preserving land, urbia and architecture can all be found within the historic districts of well known metropoli:
London, Paris, Vienna, Rome, Florence, Barcelona, New-York, Charleston etc. You know them and everyone wants to visit them, secretly wishing they lived in them.
If you ever wonder why, the most liveable neighbourhoods are alive, are nurtured and taken care of. They have no modern labels apart from "traditional" and "historic", both being slightly misleading and derogatory because they are alive and well.
"The man of the future will be the one with the longest memory." - Nietzsche.
Building{s} for Vitality
Our home is the most important physical expression outside our body.
There's nothing new to be discovered, technology should be deployed to reinforce and enhance what was working for centuries for architecture, for our individual health and for our communities.
We won't RETVRN back completely. We know this as a fact. However, we can take pride in the abundance we've built and have to safeguard the values that created it. With the abundant energy we have on hand, we can create the most durable, most beautiful buildings that promote pro-human values for centuries to come.
Indoor illness won't go away unless we work actively against it, against our confinement in comfort.
Let's stop pretending that dancing in the dark is good for everyone, we need a new ideal for the built environment. The ideal for architecture is "building for vitality".
I. Spaces that are in better symbiotic flow with everyday life-patterns.
II. Abundant sunlight that boosts our metabolism, warms our homes and energises us wherever we are.
III. Fresh air that nourishes every moment.
IV. Low time preference - building to become appreciated ancestors.
Certain density is needed that promotes physical and mental vitality and civic well-being, so we have to build and safeguard cities that are similar to the most important urbia still respected today.
Stylistic expressions of vitality
"A building is not just a collection of walls and roofs, but a living organism, that must respond to the needs of its inhabitants. It must be a harmonious whole, not only in its external form but also in its inner organisation." - Rudolf Steiner
The vernacular localist styles infused with meaningful technological advancements are the most available expression of vitality we can get inspired by. The vernacular form is what we developed for the function of homes that is closest to nature's organism.
The last blooming styles that clearly expressed vitality combined with technological progress were the Art-Nouveau, the Organic and the Art Deco architectures of North America and Europe. We can impregnate our spirit by them if we want to paint a fertile future for architecture.
We can build on these ideas, that unfolded in thousands of different ways in regions all over the world.
So let's create homes that are havens for health and vitality.
Amazing and inspiring read - thank you
This is so inspiring! Thank you!