Posted by David Hamilton on March 17th, 2010
The attached New York Times article, brought to our attention by Bundoran Farm residents (and not-so-big-house afficionados) John Foraste and Grady Lewis, follows the debate over Lotus founder Mitch Kapor’s proposed home in Berkeley, California. Berkeley has its own scoring system, to evaluate the environmental responsibility of new home construction. The article examines how the physical footprint impacts the ecological footprint of construction.
Clearly, two things are true: First, a ten thousand square foot house bristling with carefully designed systems is more responsible than the same structure without. Second, that high-tech, high-green house probably isn’t nearly as “sustainable” as a conventionally-constructed 1,600 square foot cottage on the same site, if you account for embodied energy, carbon and other resources.
At Bundoran Farm, the custom home design process has resulted in a broad range of home sizes and shapes, most of which are modest in scale, given the average new home on a comparably spectacular site (and of course there is no comparable site). Bundoran Farm requires new construction to meet Earthcraft criteria, and at least two owners here have elected to go further, to LEED, and LEED Silver.
An under-examined element the Times article, which we see as a major driver in home design, is the increasing imprecision of the term “home.” As my wife and I designed and built our home (about five years ago), we found ourselves with a program of approximately 2,300 square feet, just about dead on the average new American home and maybe a hundred feet larger than my parents’ home, built in 1970. But upon examination, our home, like many of the homes being designed and built at Bundoran Farm, is a bit more than my parents’ or grandparents’ definition of a home.
My wife, a telecommuting professional, has simply outsourced her physical office from a highrise in downtown Los Angeles to the third floor of our home. When I’m not at Bundoran or other Qroe projects, I’m essentially running a business there as well. While we’re working, a nanny cares for our youngest son downstairs, so throw in a “daycare” as well, and we end up with a multi-use, 24-hour building. Virtually all of our friends in high-tech and creative industries have living quarters at least this complex, and to me, the debate over size and sustainability points up the inadequacy of zoning (uhhh… is that Residential, or Office?) as much as the difficulty of environmental scoring.
Like just about every problem we look at, we find that it’s a bit more complex than the shouting might indicate. One lesson is clear: to be sustainable, you have to be thoughtful. Good construction is preceded by good design, and a precondition for good design is serious and searching thought: What will I do here? How will I live? What do I need?
Filed under: General
Indeed, size is an integral part of the equation of building green. And size should be driven by need – and common sense.
This reminds me of the Hummer (remember them?) v Prius debates. If you only need a passenger car, a well designed and well built sedan (which I still think the Prius is) makes a lot more sense than a vehicle (which is really a truck) that is excessive and harmful to the environment. Yet, if you’re hauling tons of stone, you’ll clearly need a Mac truck.
Most of this is just common sense or – as Grady Lewis recently put it so well – common sense refined. I think we’re in need of a cultural shift where we think small or – at the very least – sensibly.