Frugal Buildings

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Frugal Buildings

Frugal buildings can be considered frugal in eight aspects: The first three are their frugality with the energy to construct and operate buildings, and the energy of transportation associated with the occupation of the buildings. Next are frugality of materials to construct, the recycling of the materials of construction and operation, and our stewardship of the water and the air that surrounds the buildings. Finally, frugality extends both to how we conserve the nature around us, and also how we conserve our own wellness. Specifics of these eight aspects of Frugality are as follows:
Proponents of Gizmo Green profess their concern with energy required to construct buildings. But Gizmo Green was born from a fascination with all things technical. Its practitioners therefore prefer highly-processed high-tech materials over traditional materials. The problem is that traditional materials generally contain much less embodied energy per pound than the high-tech ones. So while Gizmo Green makes some contributions to reducing energy required to construct buildings by calling for materials extracted and regionally, living traditions do the same, and they also prefer materials that have been processed less, embodying less energy.
Energy required to operate buildings is the measuring-stick of Gizmo Green. Here, proponents of Gizmo Green have made large contributions. Unfortunately, those contributions focus heavily on the mechanical operation of the buildings, and because machines have a lifespan much less than a durable building, they will eventually break down and need to be replaced. Our recent track record has been one of continually better machines, so it could be argued that eventual breakdown is actually a good thing since it requires the machine to be replaced with a more efficient machine. But buildings created from living traditions that condition space first by passive means are more certain to work for the life of the building because passive means are not dependent upon any particular technology.
Transportation energy is nowhere on the Gizmo Green radar screen. The New Urbanism, however, has been developing methods of producing places where people can walk to work, to shop, to school, and to play for decades. Transportation energy is an essential component of any serious conversation on true sustainability.
Gizmo Green is rightly concerned with building from rapidly renewable materials or recycled materials. Living traditions did this for millennia out of necessity, because a tradition that lived long enough to be passed down for generations obviously could not be built with materials that ran out in short order. The difference is that living traditions more easily use low-tech materials because they have no predisposition to the aesthetics of high technology.
Methods of recycling today have been almost completely defined by the proponents of Gizmo Green, and there is no known downside to this. Credit should be given where it is due.
The Gizmo Green is also highly concerned with our stewardship of the water and air around us, and rightfully so. There are two downsides. Within buildings, when mechanical systems which are the heart of Gizmo Green fail or are somehow compromised, then the entire building is likely to perform very poorly if at all until the parts arrive and the technician is able to install them. We have all likely experienced a mechanically-conditioned building rendered uninhabitable when its systems fail. The second downside is that the Gizmo Green’s near-religious regard for water in its current form does not allow urbanism. The greatest cities on earth are almost all built along a manmade hard edge of a river, a lake, or an ocean. This allows close contact of humans to the water, therefore making the city a more enticing place for people to live compactly, leaving more of nature untouched.
And that is a perfect segue into the next aspect of frugality, which is our stewardship of that which remains natural around us. The Gizmo Green is again rightfully concerned with this issue, and addresses it in a number of ways, such as the avoidance of light pollution, recycling rather than consuming new construction materials, encouraging brownfield redevelopment, encouraging renewable energy, etc. The New Urbanism protects the environment by enticing people to live more compactly in order to leave more of nature untouched, and to pollute less by driving less. Living traditions have always been based on making do with the materials and craft sets that are available regionally, and doing things in the least invasive way.
The final aspect of Frugality is that of conserving our own wellness: at least wellness of body, likely wellness of mind, and possibly even wellness of spirit. Gizmo Green addresses primarily chemical aspects of wellness, such as the use of low-VOC building materials and proper ventilation to remove indoor pollutants. The New Urbanism addresses physical wellness by encouraging walking, and also wellness of mind by allowing for the creation of community again. Living traditions fulfill a broad range of wellness roles too comprehensive to list here that can best be encapsulated within the notion of engaging each person in a living process of achieving a sustainable way of life.
Frugality, as the last foundation of sustainable buildings is considered the entirety of sustainability by many in the popular green movement. This is unfortunate. Not only is Frugality only one of eight foundations of sustainable places and sustainable buildings, but it is only partially addressed by Gizmo Green today, as illustrated above.

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Frugality Principles

Thrifty use of energy and other resources is central to much of today's sustainability discussions, but there is a flaw: most of those discussions are all about how our machines can help us consume less. Yes, when a problem calls for machines, let us use the best machines we can find or develop. But the unspoken part of the equation is this: what can we do to change ourselves, and how do those impacts compare to the impacts of our machines? This section addresses both.

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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.

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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.

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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 multiple engineers 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.

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Renewable Energy Sources

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Energy of Construction

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Energy of Operation

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Energy of Transportation

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Embodied Energy of Construction Materials

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Alberobello, Italy shopping street in late evening

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.

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Tales & Tools

These ideas support the Frugal Buildings foundation of the Original Green. The Tales are on Original Green Stories, while the Tools are in Original Green Resources. Several of these ideas support other ideals, foundations, and the Living Tradition Operating System because the Original Green is massively interlinked, so you'll see them listed wherever appropriate.