Design For Limited Planet Living With Natural Energy

Enlarge Image Image Gallery

Article Tools

Image Gallery

Print

E-mail

Comments

RSS

Issue # 46 - July/August 1977

This feature excerpted from Design for aLimited Planet by Norma Skurka and Jon Naar, copyright © 1976 by Norma Skurka and Jon Naar, reprinted by permission of Ballantine Books (a division of Random House, Inc.) . . . available from any good bookstore for $5.95 (or from Mother's Bookshelf for $5.95 plus 75¢ postage and handling).

While most everybody else is still just talking about the problems of the energy crisis, a few folks—such as the natural-energy leaders featured in a little book called Design for a Limited Planet —have quietly gone ahead and changed to cleaner, more basic, and less costly (in terms of both the individual and the planet) ways of heating and cooling their homes. Here, three of those pioneering families tell how they built their solar homes and describe what it's like to live on more intimate terms with Ole Sol.

"We live beneath an umbrella of nature . . . oaks, birches, maples."

Sydell and Steven Lipson (who was working in his father's florist shop in New Haven, Connecticut) wanted to build a "live-in" greenhouse—one large, plant-filled space that would get most of its heating from the sun. They had seen the experimental house with transparent plastic walls that architect Mark Hildebrand had built for himself in the woods, and they asked him for a refined version that could be bank-financed. The Lipsons' 4-acre plot is next to a forest preserve in the conservative township of Hamden, Connecticut. Their "street-conscious" neighbors "didn't want a bomb on the street," says architect Hildebrand, so the design of the house had to be appropriate to the community.

His design for the Lipsons' house appears to run counter to energy-saving theories because three walls of the house are transparent. They are made of two sheets of hermetically sealed polyvinyl chloride (PVC) plastic with an air space in between. Hildebrand had first seen the "pillow" walls used in Colorado and had tried it out on his own house before adapting the technique for the Lipsons' house. "I was experimenting with industrial materials to replace timber construction and thought of plastic because it was economical," he explains. The PVC he chose had good standards for longevity and visual clarity. But the material, used commercially for packing and wrapping, is thought of as disposable and, if subjected to stress, can become brittle and crack.

RSS | Comments | E-mail | Print