Harold R. Hay: Solar Pioneer
(Page 10 of 17)
September/October 1976
By Mother Earth News Editors
Before we begin the design of a Sky-Therm house we always ask. "What materials and what energy forces do we have to work with on this particular site? " And then we try to use those materials and those forces so efficiently that the house will keep its occupants comfortable at all times with no additional input of energy at all.
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Now this is not the way that conventional homes are designed today. Our b uilders and architects have gotten into the habit of saying, "Well, let's put up a Cape Cod here and a ranch style over there and we'll use big window walls in both buildings." And then they j ust pump, pump in as much oil and electricity and natural gas as they need to heat those build ings in the winter and cool them during the summer. Instead of letting the climate help them design their structures they just build whatever happens to be in fashion at the time. And then they make the houses tolerably comfortable inside by consuming massive amounts of energy. They overpower the climate, instead of working with it.
PLOWBOY: But that can't continue much longer.
HAY: No, a day of reckoning is coming. We're running out of the fossil fuels that make today's wasteful way of life possible. Sooner or later, all the architects and builders are going to have to take the Sky-Therm approach to designing a house ... whether they know it yet or not. And, of course , once we begin to got back to a closer understanding of nature and man's relationship to the sun, we're automatically going to question a great many other ideas that are accepted today as part of the conventional wisdom. And we're going to start developing whole new concepts of who and what we are ... and why ... and what our rightful place in the universe really is.
PLOWBOY: From the way you say that, I've got a feeling you've already begun developing those new concepts on your own. Would you care to share any of them with us?
HAY: Well I'm still working on them. But my work with the Sky-Therm concept—with allowing the natural climate of an area tell me how to design a house—has led me into drawing certain conclusions.
I've come to believe, for instance, that our rate of technological advance now exceeds our rate of evolution. We've learned how to manipulate our physical surroundings to make ourselves comfortable almost anywhere on the earth's surface ... when, basically, there are certain parts of the world that we simply shouldn't be living in.
We're a Mediterranean—not an omniclimatic—animal. We belong in the earth's temperate zones ... but our technology has made it possible for us to heat the planet's arctic regions and cool its tropics enough to make ourselves comfortable there. That, in one sense, is what the energy crisis is all about. We've learned to use enough energy to make ourselves comfortable in areas that we're not really physically adapted to live in.
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