Condition People First

Professors in architecture school taught us that the human comfort range is 10°F, and the design temperature should be 68°F in winter and 78°F in summer. But sitting in those classes, I clearly remember that as a child, my parents and grandparents would put on sweaters around 60°F and would pull out small hand-held fans to cool themselves around 90°F, so they obviously had comfort ranges of about 30°F. Fast-forward to today, and there are thermostat wars in offices across the US over 2°F on the thermostat. So in our perpetually-conditioned lives from home to car to office, workshop or school we have made ourselves so thermally fragile that the prevailing human comfort range has shrunk to just 2°F; 1/15th of that of my grandparents.

What can we do? Spend time outdoors! Getting acclimated to the local environment leads to a condition known as Living In Season where on all but the most extreme days of the year, we can throw open the windows and cut the equipment off. And we'll quickly learn that there is no equipment so efficient as that which is off! And Wanda and I and our two young sons proved that for ourselves, building our superinsulated passive house shortly after graduation. With it, and by Living In Season, we had several consecutive months in spring and fall where our only utility costs were for water, lights, and laundry, with those bills being as little as $17/month. So this isn't just theory; we've practiced it. And the savings dwarf those that would have accrued by buying the top-of-the-line most efficient equipment of that day.

Gizmo Green

It's clear that Gizmo Green has important roles to play in frugality. When equipment is required, why would we not choose the most efficient equipment we can get? The answer, of course, is that we should. But the problem so clearly illustrated on this street is that if the implementation of the gizmos is considered all engineering and no design, then that can result in some quite unlovable places. For perspective, the diagram in this post clarifies the relative contribution of Gizmo Green to the entire Original Green. Yes, it is definitely a contributor but it's nowhere close to being the entire story.

three beautiful observatories at Wissenschaftpark Albert Einstein in Potsdam, where there are several more

The da Vinci Institute

I would like to propose the da Vinci Institute. Leonardo da Vinci can be viewed as the father of modern engineering. Yet his attention to beauty set an unprecedented standard. Today, however, his progeny have sunk low, becoming in many cases nothing more than "plug-and-chug" (their term) spreadsheet drivers who compete with other disciplines like accounting for the moniker "the dreary profession," as several of my engineer friends have told me. One engineer even stood up at the recent Green Council and assailed Tom Low's magnificent new Light Imprint Urbanism book, stating that it "would not have standing amongst engineers because it is not ugly enough." And some notable New Urbanists insist on the same thing: playing down to the non-recognition of beauty in engineering culture by making our documents ugly, for exactly the same reason: to have standing with the engineers.

If this were nothing more than a debate on publication graphics, it could be dismissed as trivial. But we stand at a threshold today of another generation awakened to the need of building sustainable buildings and places. The same thing happened in the late 1960s and early 1970s. But because the solutions generally were engineering solutions with no thought for beauty, the solar water heater installations that took place by the hundreds of thousands in the 1970s were ripped off only a decade later because people said "Get that hideous thing off my roof! I cannot tolerate it any longer, even if it is saving me money!" And so an entire generation was lost because the solutions could not be loved. We cannot afford to lose another generation to solutions that cannot be loved.

The da Vinci Institute would foster the re-convergence of engineering and beauty in several ways. Because one of the missions of the Original Green is to foster serious off-the-grid sustainability that gets to the level of Deep Green, not just marketing fluff, a range of mechanical devices will be required. The da Vinci Institute should first conduct charrettes involving both engineers and architects intended to produce devices that are fundamentally beautiful and fundamentally integrated into the architecture. Later, it can operate a laboratory that refines those devices. Beyond this initial nuts-and-bolts work, the da Vinci Institute would conduct ongoing symposia for engineers with an interest in breaking their specialists' chains and reacquainting themselves with the founding pioneer of their discipline, Leonardo da Vinci, and eventually even with beauty itself.

Recycling vs. Repurposing, Re-Skinning, and Reuse

This is Russall Hall at the University of Alabama after the 2011 re-skin renovation, which is a hybrid of repurposing and reuse, and far superior to recycling as detailed in this post. The upshot is that while recycling gets most of the press, it is a far inferior process to the other three. And while it gets Good on a Good-Better-Best scale, it really should get a Meh instead. But yes, Wanda and I are dedicated recyclers at home and work.

Simplicity

The precept of "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler" is often attributed to Albert Einstein, but regardless of source, simplicity is a first cousin of frugality. Simplicity is also the starting point of vernacular architecture, from the primitive hut to Shaker design. And things that visually gunk up a scene are also inclined to gunk up the budget.

Sometimes, visual slop is considered necessary because of context. Ever notice how subdivisions in sprawl tend to have houses with many gables? The houses have to be so visually busy, or so the builders believe, because the streets are so boring. Houses in traditional neighborhoods can be much simpler, saving a lot of money.

Bigger vs. Better

The Luxury of Small was covered earlier as a contributor to lovable buildings, but it is equally a contributor to frugality in ways explainable in simple math: the less space you have to condition, the less energy it's likely to cost to do so.

This is our son Sam, a graduate near the top of his class at the Culinary Institute of America (the other CIA) cooking in our South Beach kitchen; we were able to finish our condo with better materials than we ever dreamed of using in the superinsulated, mostly-passive house where he grew up because it was right at 3,000 square feet whereas the condo was about a quarter as large at 747 square feet. Sam said "this is a chef's kitchen, not a show kitchen, because it's durably finished and small enough that everything is easy to get to and the cooking tools are all visible."

This brings up one of the most important choices of our era: do we want want things that are bigger or things that are better? And bigger is NOT better. Bigger is definitely worse because for a given budget, you have to use really cheap stuff on a bigger surface. Standard of living is measured by how much we consume, while quality of life is measured by how much we enjoy. More or better... increase one, and you reduce the other. Come down on the side of building better if you want a more frugal place; err on the side of building bigger if you want a more wasteful one.

Choose For Beyond Our Time

An attitude prevailing in the real estate industry is "I won't live anywhere longer than 7-10 years, so why should I care about a house that lasts for a hundred years?" One would think this comment would come from people scraping to get by, but I heard it dozens of times from clients at a high-end development in which I did a lot of work in the 1990s. This results in buying cheap junk thrown up quick that will fall apart in a few years. Many individual throwaway choices make a throwaway city.

The choice to build durably isn't just applicable to cathedrals, courthouses, and other civic buildings; it works on humbler buildings as well. The house pictured above was built in 1920, over a century ago as I'm writing this. Yet it's lovable enough that it was never demolished, durable enough that it never fell down, and adaptable enough that it has been a single-family home, an office building, and in an unfortunate event converted to a 3-unit student housing apartment building. Wanda and I fell in love with it several years ago and made it our home.

It's important to remember that we tend to sustain more the things we love more. In our case, we love this little bungalow so much that we did a serious exterior makeover recently which should extend its life at least another century after we are gone. Why? We'll be forgotten long before that time is up, but why not give gifts to future generations? ... to neighbors yet to come? We're crafting a nest we love, and could have done so as an ephemeral stageset unlikely to survive beyond our time... but it might not even outlast us if we did so. So we chose and continue to choose to renew it as something we hope continues after our departures.

Choose Smaller Stuff With Double Duty

This is a dining booth in an Idea House Wanda and I designed years ago. It replaces the formal dining room. A six-seat booth (this is somewhat larger) requires 36 square feet while a six-seat formal dining room with proper clearances all around requires 180 square feet. Five times as much square footage. Because the booth benches back right up to the wall, there are electrical outlets and data outlets not visible in this image to which anyone in the home can hook up outside of mealtimes and work from home comfortably with no fear of someone tripping over their cables. Footage frugality thrives on things that are smaller than normal to begin with, and which can do multiple jobs because of their compactness.

Operate Naturally

Buildings have been unemployed since the beginning of the Thermostat Age when the equipment began doing all the work and the buildings just sat there doing little more than looking pretty. It's high time to get our buildings... and us... back to work again. Why not open a window for a breeze? Or open a curtain for morning sunlight? Living in harmony with the places we live is a great way to live!

Renewable Energy Sources

Why would we not choose energy sources that don't run out over those that do? Especially when those that do run out tend to pollute the world around us? This should be a simple choice. Choose sources that renew over things that burn and run out. Yes, fossil fuel advocates have objections as strong as their trillion-dollar stakes, but there are common-sense solutions. Consider these wind generators: some complain that they kill birds. They do.

Here are the annual US bird mortality numbers from greatest to smallest: Cats: 1.3 - 4 billion, Buildings: 100 million - 1 billion, Cars: 200 million +/-, Communication Towers: 6.6 million +/-, Wind Generators: 234 - 700 thousand. Average that wind generator number to 467 thousand bird kills. Then ask yourself this question: how much harder should bird preservation activists be working to get rid of these other sources? It's just third grade math. Communication towers: 6,600,000 / 467,000 = 14.13, so serious bird preservationists should be working over 14 times as hard to get rid of cell towers. Doing the same third grade math, they should be working 428 times as hard to get rid of cars, over a thousand times as hard to get rid of glass-skinned buildings, which are the ones most responsible for bird kills, and nearly six thousand times as hard to get rid of all cats in the US. So it's crystal clear that nobody complaining of wind generator bird kills is even the slightest bit serious about their protests.

Others object to the appearance of wind generators. Windmills have been used for centuries to power many useful endeavors, and many of them have been preserved for centuries beyond their useful lives because so many people love them. And the ones generating electricity today are far more elegant in their appearance than any of their predecessors. Because all of that could be discounted by the old "beauty is in the eye of the beholder" trope, I simply ask this: would you rather see coal generator smokestacks belching smoke instead?

How about solar power? There are solar farms all over which shade the ground so it can't produce a harvest of anything other than power, so solar farms aren't the best use of the land. I agree.

But why not shade other uses, such as parking lots? There are close to 15 million acres of parking lots in the US, and how often do you look for a shady place to park? Solar panel production varies widely depending on location, but averages neary a million kilowatt hours per acre per year in the US, so those 15 million acres would produce somewhere around 15 trillion kilowatt hours per year. US electricity consumption is just over 4 trillion kilowatt hours per year, so solar panels shading only a quarter of US parking lots would provide all the electricity we now need.

Wind and solar are currently the top sources, but there are others. Growing up in the Tennessee River Valley, I'm well aware what an economic boon it was (and still is) getting lower-cost electricity from hydropower. And for anyone with dam complaints, you should talk with your friends who love to fish, boat, ski, and do a host of other watersport activities on all those lakes upriver of the hydropower dams; they might have a thought or two for you.

Geothermal is a great source, and I built and installed my own geothermal system decades ago on our mostly-passively-powered house that had TVA-powered utility bills as low as $17 per month on the less extreme months of the year, so I have a thought or two for you on geothermal if you're interested.

Construction Energy

Construction is energy-intensive, consuming a double-digit percentage of total US energy use, and there's little that can be done to reduce energy use in the construction process itself. The best reduction candidate is the embodied energy in construction materials. Unfortunately, it's hard to get a straight answer from the building material industries as to the true embodied energy of their products. Go to a Greenbuild conference or an AIA National Confernece on Architecture and a short time on the exhibition floors shows that every single construction material industry is trumpeting their products as the greenest ever.

So if industry can't be trusted, what can we do about construction material embodied energy? I'd suggest a simple food-related test: how processed is it, how many ingredients does it include, and how far did it have to travel to get to your plate? Some construction products have to cross the Pacitic ocean several times to get from resource extraction to initial processing to element fabrication to assembly with other elements, to delivery to the point of sale, so travel alone is a big deal. And some materials such as aluminum require huge amounts of processing energy; today, the embodied energy of aluminum is about 20 times that of brick.

The aluminum industry's argument is "yes, but aluminum can be recycled, and recycling aluminum requires only 5% of the energy of its initial manufacture." This is true. But how much aluminum actually gets recycled? A Tale of Two Buildings paints a picture of building materials being recycled, repurposed, and reused with reuse being far better than recycling. More on this just below. Wanda and I recycle as noted elsewhere on this site, our reuse of everything from clothing to furniture often spans decades.

The greatest impact on energy of construction is one discussed very infrequently except on this site: building Lovable Buildings. If it can't be loved, it won't last. And the carbon impact of a demolished building is meaningless once its parts have been carted off to the landfill. The other voice most frequently making these points elsewhere is that of Clay Chapman, known as @1000yearhouse on X/Twitter, The measure that matters, according to Clay (and I) is life-cycle embodied energy, not just the initial embodied energy of materials arriving on a construction site for the first time. Design a building lovable enough and durable enough to last for the ages, and its impact per year is comparatively tiny.

Energy of Operation

The energy required to operate buildings post-occupancy usually dwarfs the construction energy, depending on how long the buildings last. The only time it's usually close is with short-lived throwaway buildings. Condition People First is the top principle on this page because nothing has greater impact on energy of operation than places and activities which de-fragilize people so they aquire a wider comfort range and can Live In Season.

Measures that allow humans to participate in the conditioning of a building, like closing heavy drapes before a cold winter evening, are a close second. HVAC equipment cycles off and on in a short range around the set point, whereas humans who have conditioned themselves to a wider comfort range operate their buildings around that substantially wider range of how they feel.

Transportation Energy

The energy required to transport construction materials and assemblies is covered in Construction Energy above, but there is another type of transportation energy that should be factored into the overall frugality of the building, and that is the transportation required to occupy the building. For example, if employees working at a building average a 1-hour round trip commuting to and from work because of the remote location of that place of business, that energy of transportation should be factored into the operational energy of the building, even though costs are externalized to the employees.

All measures which allow people to make a living in close proximity to where they're living reduce that transportation cost burden on those employees. Cities working to lower the employee transport cost burden should use that work as a recruiting tool because such measures reduce time away from family and cash out of pocket for those choosing to live there.

Water

Stewardship of clean air and water should be basic common sense, and guided by the costs of waste on your utility bill, and on your grocery bill. Bottled water is now a $50 billion industry each year in the US, with the great majority of those bottles thrown away rather than recycled. Meanwhile, there are far less expensive ways of enjoying clean water, such as water from the filter in our refrigerator.

Rainwater harvesting and reuse can be free versus the cost of a sprinkler system if you're inclined to tend your garden by hand, and both the sight and sound of water being transported from gutter to rain barrel via a rain chain can be entertaining. As for interior water use, I'm not a "shower scold"... just let your water bill be your guide.

Landscape irrigation is a frequent point of overuse on water, and because many utility companies meter it separately from domestic water use, you may be able to see how much it's costing you. The best solution is to use plant material acclimated to your region because those plants only need irrigation in their first year after planting; nature does the rest. And plants adapted to your place instead of fragile to your place have benefits that go far beyond water.

Outdoor Rooms

We have outdoor rooms at the top of the list of frugality tools because they are so essential to conditioning people first. And that importance is echoed by the fact that we have made it an Original Green initiative and Wanda and I are writing the Outdoor Room Design book. Check out Tales & Tools at the bottom of this page where there are a number of stories and resources covering a range of outdoor room issues and practices.

Reflective Roofing

There are few passive cooling devices more effective than reflective roofing. The Galvalume 5-V Crimp roofing on all these houses reflect 95+% of the sun's heat back up to the sky before it ever enters the building envelope. There are two categories of reflective roofing sorted by weight: light and heavy, naturally. These roofs are clad in light reflective roofing, as 5-V is most commonly available in 26 and 29 gauge metal. Heavy reflective roofing includes materials like the whitewashed concrete roof panels at Alys Beach on the Florida panhandle's County Road 30-A. This roofing reflects slightly less radiant heat because it is finished with white lime wash instead of the near-mirror finish of 5-V.

If anyone doubts the importance of reflective roofing, try this test next time you're flying somewhere. Most airports that do significant freight transport tend to be surrounded by many industrial buildings such as warehouses and other industrial uses. From above, you can clearly see that the roofs are almost all white. Because such buildings have very low-slope roofs, they cannot be seen from anywhere other than above, so unlike other roofs that need to be clad in ways that are a part of the character of the building as seen from the street, everyone agrees that these roofs have only two jobs: keep the rain out, and reflect the sun's heat before it gets in. So it's all reflective.

Laundry Eave

This is almost a good Laundry Eave, except for the fact that the eave doesn't stick out far enough. I coined the term and came up with the pattern design, which basically takes the clotheslines found for ages outside countless buildings all over the world, with the most notable absence being in the US, and extending an eave out over them so the clothes don't have to start drying all over again in the event of a rain shower.

Homeowner Associations (HOAs) have banned outdoor clotheslines in places across the US, apparently under the assumption that they're an indicator of residents too poor to be able to afford electric clothes dryers. Even Seaside, Florida's HOA bans them, in spite of Seaside's long tradition of doing things in more natural ways. But I've explored and found quite a number of them that snuck into well-hidden places around the backs and sides of Seaside buildings. This is likely because people have wised up to the fact that not only does natural clothes drying save electricity, but naturally-dried clothes tend to last years longer than those that are electrically dried.

Repair-Accessible Construction

The two strips of square stone pavers down the middle of this Alberobello shopping street are likely there to facilitate the repair of utility lines running under the street. The ability to easily get to an element needing repair and close up the opening easily once the work is done is a great idea in both urbanism and architecture as the cost of the work to pull up the tiles, move what is likely sand fill around the pipes or wires, then replace everything once the work is done is almost all labor as little or no materials are required beyond the fittings and connectors required in the repair. Frugal fixes have been around for ages, and have only one recent enemy, which has even acquired a hashtag: #StreetScar. This is the result of lazy utility companies that would rather rent digging equipment which usually requires opening a bigger trench, then throwing away the pavers once the repair is complete and patching the scar with asphalt, a process almost guaranteed to be more time-consuming and expensive.