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The New Independent Home
by Michael Potts
from chapter 7 :
Recovering from an Edifice Complex |
Many lessons can be drawn from the recent history of the American home. In the last fifty years, houses have doubled in size while family sizes have dwindled; from this we infer that modern houses are twice as big as necessary, and thus more expensive to build and keep comfortable. Commodity housing makes large, even grandiose, gestures toward habitability without managing to create homeyness: two-story entries, unused rooms, wall-to-wall carpet, long hallways, enormous picture windows, all contributing to "curb appeal" or the attractiveness of home-as-commodity when viewed from the street. These gestures frequently aggravate the adversarial relationship between the house and natural events like the sun's rise and fall, its seasonal declination, and the march of the seasons; occupants must be comforted instead by the hum and roar of the big HVAC (Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning) unit.
Starting in 1978, in reaction to the rising cost of comfort, houses have been built like space capsules, tightly sealed to conserve heat, isolated from the harsh outside environment . . . but certainly not made any smaller! Considering only energy, tightness is a good trend, but can easily be overdone. Most houses contain a witch's brew of volatile compounds, including original materials manufactured using synthetic glues and persistent chemicals, to which we add the smells and effusions of everyday activities such as cooking and bathing. Excessive tightness, resulting in too little exchange of air with the outdoors, can create an unpleasant and even toxic environment.
By seeking ways to connect ourselves and our living spaces to the pageant of weather and seasons, by involving ourselves in flux rather than denying its existence at great expense, we can design nature and flexibility into our home spaces. A properly oriented independent home invites interaction between indoors and outdoors. Independent home residents derive most of our comfort directly from the sun, opening doors and windows, controlling sun and shade, and we enjoy a participatory style of occupancy as well as a much smaller monthly energy bill.
As you design, remember that siting, space, and services in most conventional houses are arranged for wholesale development and speedy construction. From the beginning, the developer's strategy is to eliminate eccentricities and singularities in order to produce the greatest number of salable generic houses with minimal building costs. These are mistakes you need not repeat: Parcel boundaries and roads maximize density without regard for residential privacy or the dictates of the land. Sites are typically bulldozed into submissive flatness. Showy exterior features produce awkward room shapes and door, window, and closet placements. Kitchen and bathroom plumbing may share a wall, not because there is inherent sense to this arrangement based on the dynamics of the family that will live here, but because it is cheaper to build with all plumbing components consolidated in a single wall. This strategy improves resource efficiency, both in terms of the plumbing and the cost of hot water, but only when the arrangement suits the family.
As in the negotiation between site, family requirements, and the ability to pay, compromises between ease of construction and livability must be made mindfully. Reckoned over the life of our home, how much more initial cost can we justify for plumbing, windows, and other expensive aspects of the house that suit us perfectly? Can heady design and an acceptable additional installation cost eliminate recurrent operating costs? How do we recovering suburbanites learn to apply the criteria we use to evaluate the merits of most consumer commodities -- suitability, ease of use, and effectiveness of function -- when designing a prospective home?
As a direct consequence of generations of carelessness and ignorance, those who continue to live with commodity housing have become a restless culture. When they are at last overwhelmed by the unsuitability of a house, they move: In 1998, the average American family moved once every five years. In 1992 we lived places longer, seven years. Clearly something is going terribly wrong with American housing.
In contrast, independent home builders are stable; of more than fifty householders interviewed in 1993 for the first edition of this book, only two have moved. As might be expected, some of their pioneering experiments work well, and some were wrongheaded. Almost every independent home builder freely offers advice about how to do better next time. And because these houses are ours, built with our own hands, we experience no qualms about ripping out wrongness and trying again.
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