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Sustainability continued...

The importance of natural lighting and ventilation

Another bad habit of the last century was the tendency to design certain types of building, typically offices and shops  in deep plan forms which rely on artificial lighting and ventilation.  Clearly we need to return to designs which limit buildings depths sufficiently to allow natural light and air to penetrate them effectively.  Window proportions are particularly critical in this respect.  In contrast to the wide, shallow glazing common in modern commercial buildings, the tall, narrow shape of a typical traditional window throws light and air deep into a room while keeping the glazed area and therefore both heat loss and heat gain to a minimum.

Embodied energy

This is another area in which modern building is often less sustainable than its predecessors.  Materials like steel, aluminium, cement and plastic use a great deal of energy in both their manufacture and their transport over long distances from factory to site.  Stone, brick, clay tiles, lime and wood in contrast can be produced relatively locally in an energy efficient way.  Embodied energy is also saved by using second-hand materials, which often have the bonus of a particularly attractive appearance.

Second hand clay tiles were used to roof our houses in Luccombe

which won the national Design in the Countryside Award in 1992.

Conservation of the natural landscape

Not only has modern low-density development gobbled up unnecessarily large areas of farmland and natural landscape, but modern roads, designed with only speed, capacity and safety in mind, often ride roughshod over it, completely destroying its shape and character.  Good, dense planning retains much more landscape automatically, but it should also incorporate streets of shapes and gradients which respect existing land forms.

A steep, curving street in our scheme for a site in central Tiverton between the Town Hall and the river Exe.

Renewable energy sources

If the patterns of new settlements and buildings are based on the principles outlined above they will be fundamentally sustainable and as such will provide a suitable context for the provision of energy sources which are either renewable or make no more than modest demands on our scarce resources.  The technology involved in many renewable sources is relatively new, so deciding on which to adopt is not usually simple.  Probably the main criteria must be effectiveness, payback period and scale.  For example, their payback period currently makes solar panels providing water heating more viable than photovoltaic arrays, while large wind turbines on open hillsides or out at sea make much more sense than small ones in sheltered urban settings.  It is also important to take wider implications into account.  The use of biomass systems on a large scale, for instance, may well make unacceptable demands on land which would otherwise be available for food production, and it may well not be possible to guarantee future supplies.  Ground source heat pumps, which are extensively used in Sweden, seem one of the best small scale systems

Beauty

In conclusion we should draw attention to a key aspect of sustainability which is usually forgotten.  If what we build is ugly, people are only too anxious for it to be demolished as soon as possible, whereas if it is beautiful they soon grow to love it, and want to preserve it.

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