if theres one thing that really pissed me off from my 3 years of architecture i took in high school it's learning about how we used to have all these little techniques to maximize or minimize heat or warmth and now we just merrily abandoned all those to have the same copypaste style buildings everywhere that are often INCREDIBLY unoptimized to the local weather and climate so we can just throw more money at our heating and cooling bills
Right???
I recently saw a headline in a british newspaper about 'this one manor house has so many hacks for climat econtrol without hvac!' and it was just... "orient the building and windows to catch or deflect the sun", which is something I learned just living in southern california and having a bedroom on the west side of the house.
Most houses that are older than the McMansion boom are oriented to catch the most HEAT. That's why bedrooms are on the west and south sides of the house usually. Because people used to worry about the cold more than the heat, in most places!
I read a lot of midcentury plan books and most of them are still oriented in this way, despite saying the plans can be mirrored.
Colonialism has fuelled this idea of people ignoring the true seasons of their biome in favour of just using "winter/spring/summer/fall" for everything, everywhere. But that's not how all of the world works, and so that's not the environment we should build for in the desert, the everglades, the pacific northwest, etc.
Houses should not be commodities or investment portfolios. Houses should be for the people that live there, and should be anchored to THAT reality, that biome, and those plants and weather patterns, as well as the materials available in that environment. And we should make use of hills and build into the sides of them--that will regulate the temperature of our house much better than sticking it on top of the hill!
With a warming planet, it behooves us to build for coolth, not warmth; we should look to indigenous architectural styles from hot places for cues on what will help keep the building cool without needing expensive HVAC systems. Sinking the house down even a few inches into the ground will help cool it off, so will going back to using lathe and plaster and other "mud" building materials, building into hills, and being mindful of wind currents and using breezeways and window alignment to create breezes--my childhood home was like this and stayed surprisingly cool even in 100F California summers, because the breezeway was oriented to catch the south-to-north winds, and opening all the windows and doors meant it sucked the air through the whole house. The deep eaves of California-style houses act as awnings and shield the windows from the sun, keeping the house shaded and cool even without trees surrounding the house (which is dangerous in fire-prone environments like most of california!). Mud walls are extremely effective in desert environs, as well as being very cheap--and plaster is a kind of mud btw, so is stucco and adobe. All very good cheap building materials used in deserts all over.
At the Irvine Arboretum there's a museum house that was built and oriented so that a small breeze always circulates through the house from down to upstairs. It's amazing to witness!!! All because the builders used to care about that sort of thing.
Building codes are written largely to ignore environmental concerns in favour of just sealing the house up hermetically into this yucky box, and I think they need a bit of looking at because of it, because some times "updating to code" actually makes things worse. I am one for following safety rules, but the thing is sometimes you have to update them as you learn new information about safety--which includes the health of the planet and the humans using the building.
#nuance re: trees near homes being a fire risk bc presence of trees reduces risk of fire in the first place in most arid areas but yeah
Yes there's definitely nuance, I am not exactly able to cover all biomes everywhere in a single post by a single human being.
But there are other problems with having trees very close to a building, from roots breaking apart the foundation to the tree getting sick or damaged in a storm and its limbs becoming at risk of falling on the house. There's a lot of reasons having a tree too near your house is a bad idea--I've lived through a lot of them. This doesn't mean not having trees around at all, though, just keeping them a good distance from your house, and minding you prune them so they grow symmetrically and aren't in any danger of overbalancing, as well as being ready to cut them down carefully should they get sick or too hurt to safely stand up. We have a tree right now that got so damaged in a storm it's in danger of destroying our garage, and many tiny saplings that are too close to our house (the squirrels planted them, and squirrels are not known for their landscape design).
#also adobe and stucco are becoming very expensive bc they are becoming popular w/gentrifiers šāāļø at least in my area
That doesn't mean they are expensive to produce, however. That's an artificial price.
It sounds like you have a lot of information to share, @pomodoriyum, and I would invite you to share it more completely when you have the time because it sounds like really valuable information.
