The Solar Manifesto - Part 2.
...or how hard it is to name the foundations of a healthy home?
Welcome back my friend!
If you have subscribed to my substack in the last few weeks, thank you! This is Part 2. of my introductory series, the Solar Manifesto. If you are new here and have not read Part 1, click here to do so.
Let see the next set of solar principles:
12. Local
Every building has a complex connection with its immediate environment. This environment is unique to every house. There can be fundamental differences between two side by side neighbours.
This environment is defined by the exact coordinates of the house meshed with the sun's path on the sky. Each house sits at different angle to the North-South axis. Every lot has a distinct shading composition based on the foliage, horizon and nearby buildings.
The topography of the site is never perfectly flat. Many times we deal with a northern slope that shades itself or a valley that collects water to form a moat.
The soil has its own secrets that has to be investigated thoroughly before we commit to a build. Hidden water tables will not show themselves until we start to dig.
The wind, historical rain and snow conditions, the microclimate are all key elements in the response of the build. There is a reason why certain areas were avoided by settlers in the past. It’s only our newfound technological arrogance that aims to defy all decent wisdom and wants to conquer every corner of the globe.
All these things combined together add a unique set of challenges for the site. Thus the built result will always be unique. It must be adapted locally, even if we start with a good pre-designed house plan.
As aspiring inhabitants of a virgin place, we must get acquainted with it intimately to bloom with it in the future.
13. Vernacular - low-tech
Vernacular architecture is common man's wisdom answered to the shelter problem, locally developed over millennia to resist the local micro-climate the longest time possible, with the most available local materials and cheapest, easiest upkeep.
Vernacular architectural solutions and styles emerged in myriad ways over millennia. Each vernacular style is a localist response to all the challenges a place can present. We can cross-check these vernacular ideas with our contemporary findings and see that they stand their ground.
These vernacular principles can be improved or upgraded to fit more contemporary needs, but they can never be thrown away in exchange for sweeping technological ideas that advertise radical new solutions for ancient problems.
14. Decentralised - off-grid
Until the 20th century, almost all life was decentralised by default. The advent of mass industrialisation, electricity and globalisation got everyone on the grid - and into a giant global, messy village where we, the 8 billion, are all intricately dependent on each other.
Our lifestyles need energy, we are hungry for it. We are linked to our country’s energy grid that is in turn linked to the world’s. In turn it is unknown that up to 2/3rds of produced energy is lost on the grid due to inefficiencies and supply/demand desynchronisation.
Buildings account for 40% of our total energy consumption. Unfortunately, centralised, large scale renewables are unreliable and risky (see California & Texas blackouts early ‘21).
The good start is retrofitting and building less energy-hungry buildings, that put less strain on the system as a whole - see passive house introduction in Part 1.
When we reduce energy consumption, we can consciously decouple from these large, unpredictable systems, we can be more resilient to systemic failures and be dependent only on more local, smaller scale systems.
2021 showed what will happen if supply chains are interlinked and everyone on the globe is bidding for the same goods. Just one example: when the US entered a severe lumber crisis and placed a bid for it on every major marked, so the EU was out of raw material for two months since it was more profitable to send logs on containerships to North America for $50 more. Strange times. Prices skyrocketed everywhere at the same time while no one knew exactly how and when would supply stabilise.
A personal win for 2022 I would be happy if I knew that everything I buy and build in my houses comes from Europe only and not all over the world…
Joe Norman explains a lot about complex systems and their risks.
15. Resilient and quality architecture
Climate is volatile and unpredictable, it always has been. Most probably recent human activity added to this volatility. What we can do right now is to arrange our lives to be more resilient and independent from the effects.
After all, this is why building and architecture emerged in the first place.
Every local build challenge needs its resilient solution. Maybe vernacular principles have to be upgraded to accommodate our lives more energy-efficiently. A solar passive house functions like fasting in our body - it makes us less energy-hungry therefore more resilient. Decentralisation from energy & food systems also make us more resilient to future uncertainties.
The better the quality of the building is, the more resilient. The more functional, adaptable it is, the more it will be useful in the long term.
The more we tap into timeless beauty, the more appealing it will be for future generations to keep it. This is how we can nurture culture with quality architecture.
16. Affordable
The cheapest square feet / square meter is the one you never build.
This is my personal magic spell I cast at the beginning of every design project. The first key principle of affordability is knowing what you need. More importantly, knowing what you need every day, not more, not less.
How many separate rooms, spaces? Affordability fails if we want to plan our home for each unique event that might play out once or twice in a year/decade. Do we really need a separate play, family and living room when we all congregate around the kitchen table most of the time?
A roofing that lasts 100 years is more affordable than the one that’s cheaper but has to be changed after 20 years? A big heat source that eats a lot of energy is more affordable than spending for a thicker insulation? How about sliding doors vs. hinged doors?
Another affordability issue is that we have a desire to have everything set at the moment of moving in. Crispy lawn, finished patio, working doorbell, all bathrooms ready etc. This has two risks: going into (more) debt and not letting some things emerge after we started using the home. Both can be very dangerous and potentially materially damaging for us…
17. Community (smaller-scale)
You probably think that all these problems point to a singular solution: Solitary life in the edge of a forrest, where one can have a naked sunbath in silence.
Hell no. ;)
Well, as Joe Norman said: “We need a globe of villages, not a global village.”
We will be more self-reliant through our local community, not as lone wolves. It is very hard to do, especially as an introverted person, I am learning it slowly, painfully.
In the physical world, smaller communities have to emerge. 5-7-9 family neighbourhoods that reorganise around common themes, visions and goals.
In the digital world, a new paradigm is coming. We can (already) share, serve, help each other through the communities that are forming on the internet. (See Doomer optimism.)
18. Urban
This is the hardest theme for me because I am one foot out of the city already. I spent the last 15 years of my life in a big metropolis to come to the conclusion that I no longer feel good in it.
Cities are essential, they have always been the meeting hubs of people, the physical marketplaces of goods and ideas. Their density offered an abundance of experiences, relationships and experimentation.
The high-tech evolution, car-centric design made quite an abomination of cities and I simply don’t know what good the future holds apart from getting back to the smaller scale, slower, quieter townscapes.
I know, though, that a good life needs an urban stage. Therefore a healthy connection between city and rural life should be regained, not severed completely. Both need a selective dependence from each other as neither can live without the other.
19. Oikophilia - love of home = well-being
This is an idea crafted by Sir Roger Scruton - in his book Green Philosophy, of which I grew very fond of:
“We all have a capacity for love, and a deep-down knowledge that a life without love is futile, we all have to work to find that love, and to create the context in which it can flourish. Likewise with oikophilia. And this is where the political difficulties arise. As my discussion implies, oikophiles are in search of a home and it is to the beauty and heritage of this home that they devote their efforts of conservation.
They are not globalists, happy to be anywhere on the planet, but localists, who look after the place that is theirs. It is this local focus that leads them to make the first and most necessary step towards sustainability, which is to make out a territory and an identity as theirs, to be protected from predation, and embellished and looked after for the benefit of their descendants.” - Sir Roger Scruton.
20. Mono no avare
- sensitivity to impermanence
I finish off my manifesto with two Japanese concepts that go hand in hand and have been on my mind lately. The first one, mono no aware, could be best illustrated with the theme that Japanese people identify 72 seasons.
They lean into the fact that change is permanent and a good life comes from observing it and being in rhythm with this.
A building is in constant change. There is no such thing as a zero maintenance home, that remains just as new for decades as it was in its first year. It looks and feels different in each season, it ages with every passing year - and we have to observe its changes carefully to be able to nurture it.
21. Wabi-sabi
- acceptance of imperfection and transience.
This constant change and imperfection is what gives buildings life. Wabi-sabi gets very close to what Christopher Alexander calls Quality Without A Name.
"Our jobs, as architects, builders, citizens, is to create this life in the air and rooms and stones and gardens – to create life in the fabric of space itself. The appearance of life in space may be compared with an awakening, almost as if – as it comes to life – space itself, the very matter, wakes up, awakens, and that it is this awakening of space in varying degrees... that we recognise when we see life.
When a building works, when the world enters the blissful state which makes us fully comfortable, the space itself awakens. We awaken… In order to make it possible to have an idea like this, we need to understand space as a material which is *capable* of awakening.” - Christopher Alexander - The Nature of Order.
The most qualified Japanese person who can talk about this is:
A deeply philosophical essay about this idea is written here: The role of being in the Nature of order by James M. Maguire.
That’s it for the Solar Manifesto Part 2. I hope you liked it and found value in it. My plan with the substack is to flesh out these ideas in more detail, probably in multiple part series about each theme in a medium format issue published weekly or in a fortnight.
Before we get onto the architecture and building issues, in the next instalment I will write about our biological relationship to the sun.
I will present us, humans as circadian organisms!
Until then,