David Wright: Passive Solar Design
(Page 12 of 16)
September/October 1977
By Travis Brock
PLOWBOY: Our prevailing attitude seems to be that technology isn't any good unless it comes up with a very complicated solution to a problem.
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WRIGHT: Yes, I know. And it takes a lot of energy to make complicated, intricate things work the way they're supposed to. That's why I hope our civilization is finally getting to the point where it can start to relax a little and detune.
We've been operating with this insane idea in our heads that, somehow, we must always "fight the elements" . . . that we must use our technology to bludgeon our way through life. But that's simply not true. What we should be doing is just relaxing and interacting with the elements.
We've really lost the art of living gracefully in our environment. Look at the way we "develop" a housing tract: First we go in with bulldozers and knock down all the trees. Then we plop in a bunch of little crackerbox houses-or worse, fiberglass and aluminum mobile homes-so that they're oriented to an arbitrary grid of streets . . . instead of to the natural terrain, solar fall, prevailing winds, etc., of the site. And then we use machines-space heaters and air conditioners-and a very large amount of commercial energy to make them comfortable.
This is all so unnecessary! Everything we really need is already at our fingertips. All we have to do is learn to convert it to our use, instead of waste it the way we've been doing. Why cut down all the trees and then cool those new houses with air conditioners? Why pipe in all that commercial energy from 500 miles away when-on the average-there's already something like .1-1/2 times more solar energy falling on the roof of an energy-efficient single family dwelling . . . than is needed for all the heating, cooling, cooking, etc., that goes on in that house?
PLOWBOY: We're rich-and don't know it.
WRIGHT: Exactly.
PLOWBOY: OK, tell me: How would you change the way our society "develops" a tract of land. Or better still, since you've now designed 30 or so houses in seven or eight different states, tell me how you go about designing a residence so that it "cashes in" on its site's available resources . . . whatever those resources may be.
WRIGHT: It doesn't matter whether you're building in British Columbia or Saudi Arabia, Maine or New Mexico. Start off by doing everything you can-given the conditions at hand-to passively condition your new living space.
PLOWBOY: Position the house on its site to take maximum advantage of the micro-climate, let the site and that microclimate help determine the building's shape, build the structure like a thermos bottle with its insulation on the outsidejust under the weather skin-and as much of its thermal mass as possible inside, put big panels of double-pane glass on the south side of the residence to admit the low winter sun and construct an overhang over those windows to shade out the high summer sun, use some sort of movable insulated shutters to regulate the amount of solar energy that enters the house on an hour-to-hour basis, and so on. Right?
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