Sustainable Compromises: A Yurt, a Straw Bale House, and Ecological Living

5. Design

33 5 Design There is no way around it; in building either a house or a life there’s going to be compromise. “While I’d like to build the perfect house,” Sam Clark writes, in his book Independent Builder: Designing and Building a House Your Own Way, “it makes more sense to me to design and build the pretty-efficient, largely non-toxic, mildly recycled , partially timbered, semi-great house.” I learned a lot from his book. He writes about the use of “pattern languages” in designing a beautiful, comfortable, and useful home. The idea is to have a list of simple rules and to apply them as patiently and consistently as possible. Instead of deciding “I want a ranch style home” and designing something from there, you make a list of the characteristics that are common to human history’s most beautiful, functional, and comfortable buildings. You then create a set of design rules based on those characteristics . These rules cover such things as indoor sunlight, passageways , ceiling height, and interior walls. In this way, you begin to design your house based on what works, what is beautiful, and how you live. The style of the house evolves, rather than having been chosen from the outset. An example could be making the common, more “public” spaces in a small house as large as possible; if the common area feels 34 Design large, then the entire house will feel large as well. One good way to make the public room seem even larger is by having a lot of windows that provide sunlight and a nice view. Voila! Our small house would have a large public room with south-facing windows. Instead of thinking about what we wanted the finished house to look like, we designed our house from the inside out. This way of thinking led us to study the way Linda and I lived and how we wanted to live. As a result we knew our house would have quiet personal spaces where we could get away and be alone. We decided , because of our advancing age, we wanted to make our house wheelchair accessible as well. I began to apply a set of principles that would help to guide me in every decision: Make it simple—simple to build and simple to live in. Simplicity gives a structure its beauty. Make it integrated. The house’s structural elements should serve multiple goals such as passive solar heating, natural lighting, insulation , and so on. Make it energy efficient, inexpensive to maintain, easy to build, and durable. And at every stage of design and construction, I should consider both the long-term and short-term environmental implications of every decision. As I was slowly figuring out what kind of house we would build, I explored the land we had chosen as a building site. Any free moment would find me scrambling through young beech trees, their whiplike branches slapping against my arms, or whacking through weeds and brambles. I carried an old-fashioned compass and tape measure, taking measurements as I moved over the land. At night I drew crude topographical scale maps of the area on big sheets of freezer paper. I used these to help me envision where exactly 35 Design to put a modest-sized house that took the best advantage of natural sunlight. I hired experts to evaluate the land: foresters to tell me about the woodlot, excavators and septic builders, carpenters and concrete workers. As we walked the site together, I scribbled their advice in a notebook. One cool day I stood at the site, with a stocky, good-natured man named Harold. He was a concrete contractor and was sizing up the site for me. I wanted his opinion about the cost and difficulty of getting concrete trucks in and out and what it might take to put in a foundation. I told him I was interested in building a sustainable home, and he perked up. “You could build with ICFs,” he said. I was trying to decode the acronym when Harold helped me. “Insulated Concrete Forms,” he said. He explained a system of building using box-shaped frames that are later filled with concrete. The frames are made of polystyrene, an efficient insulation. Like some kid with a set of Legos, you stack the blocks to create the perimeter wall. Once they are filled with concrete, they create a...