Eco-Minimalism

This is a concept which has only fairly recently made it onto the sustainability agenda. It is a reaction against the somewhat lecturing and moralistic version of sustainability which has been promoted for some time. It is against the complicated technological fix, and looks for the simpler underlying message.

As an Architect I am often involved in the specification and budgeting of people’s house renovations and extensions, and I find that they are torn between the amount of works they can do, the quality of materials they can use, and the increasing pressure to integrate sustainability or eco-measures into the building.

I naturally share a lot of people’s enthusiasm for sustainability. Who doesn’t want to be kind to their environment? But the way that it is rammed down people’s throats and people are guilt-tripped into putting some expensive technology on their roof which they need to spend years paying for, or at the cost of the house they really want, has to be misguided, however well-intended.  The way that it is presented with a religious-like fervour makes me uncomfortable, and you are made to feel like a doubting unbeliever if you question any of the current dogma!

I feel that more people could get on board with this agenda if it was more transparent, and if we were encouraged to do what we can rather than guilted into making a token gesture.

The rise of sustainability

Sustainability has been an increasingly important issue in architecture over the past 50 years. It started life as an alternative lifestyle for people who were disillusioned with the city and wanted to get back to nature. Over the years it has become more mainstream and being environmentally responsible has been acknowledged as the thing to do. It was a part of our culture as early as the 1970’s, when the TV show The Good Life portrayed it as an admirable all be it somewhat idealistic goal, but it has gradually increased in popularity. One key reason is that the rising cost of energy since then, which has made it more motivating, i.e. there is now a carrot as well as a stick.

The government has tried to encourage us down this route, again with a carrot and a stick, in the form of regulations (the stick) and subsidy (the carrot). The value of the carrot has been questionable, and as the value of the subsidies are steadily reduced to reduce government expenditure, they are getting less effective. The Green Deal has largely proved to be a failure because take-up was so low, but the government’s targets were wildly ambitious whilst funding was reduced, so it was never going to happen. The building regulations however, have gradually enforced ever greater insulation of properties, and as we need to comply to get permission to build anything, it has been very effective. Our new-build homes now lose 6 times less heat than traditionally-built houses.

There is a great deal of scepticism about sustainability in the construction industry. We were seeing lots of buildings in the architectural press which had great ideals of sustainability, but which failed to live up to the ideals. Huge energy savings were being promised, which never materialised and the investment never paid off. In the industry, we were also sceptical of the eco-aesthetic which was developing. Lots of glass, solar panels and wind turbines were cluttering up our houses, which look clumsy, and seemed to dictate a new architectural style of “Eco-Architecture”. While this is fine in some locations (particularly remote ones) in cities where you have neighbours, and especially in areas with a particular architectural character, slapping a load of solar panels on the roof looks incongruous. If Eco-Architecture is going to be mainstream, it needs to work in our cities.

The photo above is of a scheme in Beddington, South London which gained a lots of awards. It has great eco-credentials, but it also has a very obvious Eco-Aesthetic, which is not to everyone’s taste and really make it stand out in it’s surroundings. Whilst blending in is not always the right thing to do, coming along to a dinner party with a mohican, rings and tattoos is not really is not really going to win you many friends either.

I also found it frustrating when I read books about Eco-Architecture, because they tend to describe all the technologies available in a lot of detail, but with little information about why each should be installed, and which were not worthwhile. There was no objective advice on what was most suitable. In real life, every job has a limited budget and we need to be economic with the financial resources we have. Increasing the budget for sustainability reduces the budget for floor area, which is usually the priority, and even when the occasional project comes along with a  generous budget and sustainability high on the agenda it is still hard to know which is the best way to achieve the requirement. How far do you go? When do you stop? As sustainability is only ever part of the brief, with a lot of other requirements like as natural light, views, functional layouts and certain rooms competing for the budget, it often ended up losing out to the others.

Eco-bling

Eco-Bling has registered enough with the public consciousness to have been recently added to the Collins English dictionary as “Equipment that is energy-efficient but less effective than simpler technology”. Solar panels, wind turbines and green roofs give the appearance of being sustainable, but often under the surface they are not as green as they appear. So there is a healthy scepticism from the public as to what Eco really means, and other more derogatory terms are used like “Telly-tubby Architecture” referring to the popularity of green roofs in this sector and “Greenwash” which is doing something to appear green whilst covering up something else which is not green at all.

To deal with this negative stereotype, some people in the sustainability movement have tried to make it more transparent and accountable, and Eco-Minimalism is a move in this direction. It is a term coined in a book I read recently, which calls for this as opposed to Eco-Bling.

Howard Liddell of Gaia Architects, wrote a book called “Eco-Minimalism: The Antidote to Eco-Bling”, where he assigns all of the various environmental strategies into the camps of Eco-Bling or Eco-Minimalism. This practice is not some Eco-Sceptical practice, they are hard-core Eco-Warriors who have been designing buildings since the 80’s which would come into the category of “experimental”. They have been building Eco-Architecture in Scotland since 1984. Rather surprisingly, his approach is very common sense, which is refreshing to an otherwise sceptical Architect.

His very brief book describes some of the more hair-brained Eco buildings which were built whilst people were still experimenting with what worked and what didn’t, and outlines the basic lessons learned. The most popular strategies are Passivhaus (a German building standard which involves super-insulation, air-tightness and Mechanical Ventilation with Heat Recovery – MVHR), Solar panels (both Photo-voltaics – PV and Solar Thermal – Hot Water), Combined Heat and Power (CHP), Heat Pumps, District heating systems, Wind turbines, Green roofs, Reed beds, Recycling of Rain and Grey water (all water from inside the house except foul drainage), Passive solar energy, Biodiversity and Sustainable drainage.

Solar panels, CHP, District systems, Wind turbines, Green roofs, reed beds and water recycling are all described as Eco-Bling, whereas Passivhaus, Passive solar energy, Biodiversity and Sustainable drainage are described as Eco-Minimalism. The thing which is common between the Eco-Minimalst strategies is that they are simple and passive, not requiring a lot of ongoing maintenance, and reducing performance over their service life. Eco-Minimalism is an integral part of a building. It does not require a particular design style, and so can be applied to any building.

Clean, Lean and Green

Planning authorities have picked up on the fact that sustainability is a murky world of broken promises, and although Sustainability statements were required as part of a lot of large planning applications, a lot of these were very woolly. So after looking into the efficacy of the different sustainability strategies, they came up with a sustainability hierarchy which they termed Lean, Clean and Green (listed in order of priority).

Lean involves using less energy, Clean involves distributing that energy cleanly, and Green involves using renewable energy sources. Lean (i.e. less) energy consumption involves the basics, and so includes insulating to a high standard, achieving a high level of air tightness and eliminating thermal bridging, as well as reducing electricity consumption by using low power appliances and lights. Clean involves avoiding the inefficiency of the power distribution network by producing power locally, (i.e. CHP – Combined Heat and Power) but this is usually provided on a neighbourhood scale so it is not applicable to an individual home. Green involves renewable energy, and includes solar panels, wind turbines etc. So after their own research, they found that passive strategies were far more preferable to active ones.

This kind of hierarchy sets out what the priorities are in terms of sustainability, and so we can look at buildings and consider whether their green credentials live up to the promise. The impressive Strada tower in London (opposite) might be an unfair example, but it wears it’s Eco-credentials on it’s sleeve. The huge wind turbines on the roof provide up to 8% of the electricity usage for the building. However, if we look at the priorities for a building, we can see that insulation and air-tightness (i.e. reducing energy consumption rather than providing renewable sources for that energy) should really have been exhausted first before resorting to the wind turbines. And is the building super-insulated and air-tight? No. So it means that the wind turbines are essentially a huge piece of Eco-Bling. It is still noble to have made an attempt to be more green, but the way that it is done needs to be more rational.

What makes an Eco-House?

So how should we build our new Eco-houses? It is clear that we need to focus on the basics. It involves getting the heat loss right down, as close as possible to zero. It then involves adding MVHR to ventilate your extremely air-tight and insulated homes in an efficient way. We can add technologies on to get electricity or water heating from a renewable source, but this should only be an extra once the basics have been put in place.

Eco-Minimalism is about making Eco-Houses which are not visible from the outside, which still meet the needs of modern life, but use dramatically less energy to do so. Any terraced house, flat or semi in the country can be an Eco-House. But the only way of telling this is from the heating bills. The sustainability is built into the building, and as a part of the building it will last as long as the building. And as it is passive, it continues to function throughout the life of the building with little to no maintenance.

Eco-houses certainly should not have a “look”, and you will not know them by their solar panels, but they are super-efficient down to their bones. An Eco-house is a polite neighbour and you might not even know that it was an Eco-house at all. In this photo one of these terraced houses is a near zero energy Passivhaus retrofit project, but which one? It’s impossible to tell from the outside, because it’s only an Eco-House on the inside, in the guts and the bones. On the outside it’s just a normal house on a normal street. The only way you could tell is if you could see the heating bills!