David Wright: Passive Solar Design
(Page 11 of 16)
September/October 1977
By Travis Brock
PLOWBOY:
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This "brand-new, revolutionary architecture" the you and a few others are currently developing, then, isn't new and isn't revolutionary at all. You're just rediscovering who most traditional cultures learned hundreds or thousands years ago.
WRIGHT: That's it! Commercial energy has been so inexpe sive and easy to use for the past 50 or 100 years that we've sl into the habit of solving all our problems with brute forc We've been putting up the same Cape Cods and ranch houses
California that we build in Maine. And then we just pump in as much air conditioning or as much heat as we need to make them all comfortable.
But the days of low-cost commercial energy are drawing to a close, and we're all becoming more and more energy conscious. As a result, some of us-Steve Baer, Bruce Anderson, and me, to name a few-are rediscovering the philosophy of what I'd have to call "climatic design" . . . the philosophy that most traditional cultures have followed . . . the philosophy of designing each building specifically for the region and the climate in which-even the particular site on which-it will be located.
And the more I dig into this concept, the more I'm amazed by how earlier peoples used it. Not just in Tunisia or here in our Southwest . . . but in Egypt, the Near East, China, India, even Europe. They all used climatic design and passive solar energy and the other ideas that I'm exploring.
The traditional farmhouses in France, for instance, had big stone arches that faced south to catch the winter sun and they worked just fine. Then along came the French equivalent of our Rural Electrification Administration with its easy use of fossil fuels, and all that stopped. The French farmers started orienting their houses' arches any damn way they pleased and now they've pretty well forgotten what those arches were built for in the first place.
It's been that way all over the world and a lot of good, traditional wisdom has been more or less bypassed and forgottenblasted away with fossil fuels-during the last 50 or 100 years. Some of us "revolutionary architects" aren't doing anything now but going back and rediscovering little parts of that traditional wisdom.
PLOWBOY: it easier or more difficult now than it was to make those old ideas work in the first place?
WRIGHT: Oh, easier . . . by far! As we learn to swallow our pride and look back and draw from history, it becomes increasingly apparent that the really hard work has already been done. Got a problem positioning your house in this kind of climate? Here's how someone solved it 500 years ago. Having trouble fitting a passive solar system into that set of conditions? Just try this solution from 2,000 years in the past.
Actually we have a much better chance of making some of those old ideas work now than the people did who invented them. That's because we currently have all these really nice things like glass and insulation and so on to work with that they didn't have. Some of the old ideas that were just marginal 1,000 years ago can be made to work really well now with our modern materials. That's what I call a proper use of technology.
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