Many of our most valued buildings were built a long time ago. They were from the time before oil, before cheap energy, before the exploitation of fossil fuels, before we changed the atmosphere, before we caused global warming. They were built by hand and built to last. Of necessity they were built from local materials and on a human scale, for preference they were built to look pleasing, by craftsmen who learnt their craft from their forebears and neighbours. Distinctive regional styles emerged from the interaction of people, geology, landscape and climate.
If we are to halt the reckless use of fossil fuels and irreversible damage to our home on Earth, we might usefully learn from the methods and materials employed in vernacular building before the industrial revolution and before the era of cheap oil. The motivations are various but convergent: minimising climate change; conservation of non-renewable hydrocarbons; avoiding pollution and a legacy of hazardous waste; conserving and enhancing regional and local distinctiveness and diversity; ennoblement of the Human spirit; treading lightly on the Earth.
This is not to look at the past through rosy spectacles. Life may have been nasty, brutish and short. (Sadly, no change there then for all too many.) The buildings that remain are a minute fraction of what has gone before. Gone, fallen or pushed, we are left with with a sample that may not be representative. But this natural selection of buildings has left us with those fittest to survive and it from these that we may usefully learn the arts and crafts of good building. The learning is not so that we may recreate the past, produce replicas and reproductions. Rather it is to inform a new era of house building, cherry-picking materials and methods to develop a philosophy of building that is appropriate to the now and for growth into the future.
A robust philosophy of building, robust enough to withstand unknowable economic and social shocks that the future could bring, should allow a considerable degree of independence from the oil industry, from long distance transport, from over-sophisticated tools, from hard to learn skills, from manufacturing that is itself not robust in the face of change. Our philosophy of building should provide housing which is a pleasure to inhabit, warm and comfortable, beautiful and long-lasting, versatile, adaptable and within the competence of the householder and the neighbourhood to maintain.
Materials - Animal, mineral and vegetable.
So what do we need to build a house? Animal does not feature very largely in house building but sheep's wool for insulation, hair for strengthening lime plasters and milk casein and egg tempera in paints, more of each of which later, have significant roles to play.
Vegetable matter includes the myriad uses of timber, thatching for roofs, fibres such as straw for strengthening plasters and cob, various insulation materials and, in the form of straw bales, for walling. Vegetable oils, particularly linseed oil, and various resins have important rolls to play.
Mineral is the essentially unaltered stone and earth, fired clays to form brick and tile, kilned limestone to produce lime and sand used raw in mortars and plaster or melted to glass. Metals and mineral pigments are also extracted from the ground.
And that's about it. All you need to build a house can be dug up or cultivated, and processed mostly with technologies that were available to the Ancient Romans two millennia ago. Many of the elements of a building can be formed from a range of alternative materials, allowing regional distinctiveness based upon locally avail be materials. Plastics and the products of the petrochemical industry are not needed to build fine dwellings, indeed their use often devalues the long-term quality of a building.
So where do we use what? Floors, walls, roofs, windows and doors, let's start at the bottom with the floor. Now much modern building starts below the bottom with foundations. The Buildings Regulations, as commonly interpreted, seem to call for the burying of extraordinary quantities of concrete below ground level before any real building starts. Why? Let's take a look at what the Law says:
Requirement
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A1. (1) The building shall be constructed so that the combined dead, imposed and wind loads are sustained and transmitted by it to the ground:-
(a) safely; and
(b) without causing such deflection or deformation of any part of the building, or such movement of the ground, as will impair the stability of any part of another building.
(2) In assessing whether a building complies with sub paragraph (1) regard shall be had to the imposed and wind loads to which it is likely to be subjected in the ordinary course of its use for the purpose for which it is intended.
Ground Movement
A2. The building shall be constructed so that ground movement caused by:-
(a) swelling, shrinkage or freezing of the subsoil; or
(b) land-slip or subsidence (other than subsidence arising from shrinkage), in so far as the risk can be reasonably foreseen, will not impair the stability of any part of the building.
That is the Law and if you do not wish to become an outlaw you must comply. Note that the law makes no requirement for house builders to fill trenches with concrete. The Requirements of the Buildings Regulations are published within an Approved Document, which also contains a great deal of guidance. Some people think that everything in the guidance must be followed but these are the people who did not read this paragraph from the opening section section entitled 'Use of guidance':
Approved Documents are intended to provide guidance for some of the more common building situations. However, there may well be alternative ways of achieving compliance with the requirements. Thus there is no obligation to adopt any particular solution contained in an Approved Document if you prefer to meet the relevant requirement in some other was.
The emphasis is theirs. Thus although the Approved Document A gives much guidance in the matter of foundations constructed from Ordinary Portland cement (OPC), such methods are not required by the Law. What you are required to do is to build in such a way that the house won't fall down. You don't need concrete foundations under a timber framed straw bale house though you do need to tie your straw bales together.
So what's the problem with concrete foundations? It's the cement. Ordinary Portland cement is made by heating clay and limestone to a very high temperature. It involves digging large holes in the ground (so what - we're running out of landfill sites for our rubbish aren't we?) and the burning of prodigious quantities of fossil fuels to fire the kilns (hey, but they're burning old motor car tyres as a fuel source - now that's really sustainable). Unless you are unlucky enough to be near a dusty cement works, the cement will have to travel perhaps long distances by road to your building site. The concrete requires large amounts of sand and gravel aggregates. More holes in the ground. And one day, hopefully not for a long time, your house may be no more. But the concrete foundations will remain, hard, heavy, immovable and un-reusable. So concrete foundations involve quarrying, pollution, a high embodied energy and a legacy of hard to recycle material. It's manufacture involves global corporations and enormous industrial plant. It's use involves the handling of large quantities of 'ready-mix'. It is not a Slow building material.
(If you have stumbled across this web page and are wondering why it stops here, it's because I haven't finished it yet)
A report, written by Kevin Anderson, appeared on the BBC News Website in July of 2005. It describes how, at the Technology, Entertainment and Design (TED) conference in Oxford, a hi-tech conference bristling with bloggers constantly checking messages on Blackberries, smartphones, laptops and handheld computers, Carl Honoré told attendees they should unplug and slow down in a world that was stuck in fast- forward, that the infinite possibilities of the modern world leave us less satisfied instead of more.
And Barry Schwartz challenged the orthodoxy that to maximise freedom and welfare we should maximise choice. It is such a deeply embedded assumption that no one questions it, said Mr Schwartz, who explored the idea in his book, The Paradox of Choice. He pointed to his local supermarket where he has a choice of 175 salad dressings. 40 toothpastes, 75 ice teas, 230 soups and 285 varieties of cookies. Choice is good, he said, but in modern, affluent societies most people are confronted with a bewildering array of choices that leads to paralysis
Carl Honoré is the author of In Praise of Slow, in which he describes backlash against the "roadrunner culture", the slow food and slow city movement in Italy and how, across the world, people are slowing down, and are finding that they "eat better, make love better, exercise better, work better".
Schwartz said that his students sometimes become stuck in low-wage jobs because they fear making the wrong choice of career. Some professors at liberal arts colleges now joke that they "take students who would have been stuck working at McDonalds and makes them people who are stuck working at Starbucks". With so many options confronting us about almost every decision, there is a greater chance that we will regret the decision we do make. The myriad choices raise our expectations and create the anticipation of perfection. Regret after making the wrong decision or what is perceived as the wrong decision leads to self-blame, depression and, in extreme cases, suicide, he said. We are bad at realising the downside of choice. "Some choice is better than none, but more choices don't make things better," he argued.
An item from Chris Heathcote's website
slow building · 2006-06-06 19:36
I was speaking to Paul on IRC, and he wondered what the lack of ornament and decoration in modern buildings is doing to society. I agree; I’m a far bigger fan of brutalist architecture than most, but most new buildings are just, well, boring square boxes, wood, steel and glass. White walls. Wood floors. Right angles (though I don’t consider the blobject movement any more interesting or inspiring).
To me, it was the separation of interior design and architecture that was at fault (and the movement of star architecture to form and napkin-sketched primitives & deconstructionism rather than use), but most notably the speed buildings are constructed. If buildings are put up fast, there’s not time to try, change and adapt. There’s certainly no time to take stock of the shell, and alter the interiors as they are constructed. Old buildings used to take centuries to build, often with plans, architects and ideas changing constantly. New buildings appear without reflection. The whole remuneration system is designed to stop change, and to ‘finish’ as quickly as possible. The snagging should take place throughout the process, not at the end.
So, it’s time for slow building. Like slow food, it should celebrate the process, regionalness, and history, reward reflection, and most of all interalise change. I want skyscrapers that take a thousand years to finish, new towns that are built a street a year, demolition a room at a time.
I’m a fan of the oft-derided Arts & Crafts movement, and do miss some of the pretentiousness, indulgence and decadence in design and architecture. A few curlicues wouldn’t go amiss. I want new romantic architecture like Marc Almond and Visage even more than the neo romantic stylings of Saarinen.
(here, have a free link to the wonderful Grammar of Ornament (thanks, Paul))