Architecture books are insane to read. People spend an absurd amount of energy on what a style encompasses or how to follow a technique or a trend. Dogma everywhere.
Building a home is not about that at all. It is about Quality of Life.
What is Quality of Life (QoL) in a home? There are basically a few parameters:
- Room temperature
- Air quality
- Soundproofing
- Maintenance
Throughout a year and seasons, you want to never be cold or hot, you want to breath clean, healthy air, and you don’t want to hear noises from others. And then, you don’t want to have to spend too much time or effort managing said home. Maintenance needs to be low.
That is, I believe, what every single human being on earth is trying to reach in their homes regardless of background and location.
Those four points are intimately connected: to achieve well-controlled room temperature, you need an airtight building. To get an airtight building that allows healthy air quality, you will end up with a few materials that can do that, and even fewer than also allow good soundproofing. And if you can use green material, even better, but that’s another constraint.
Nonetheless, there are an infinite amount of combination here due to local material availability, local zoning and building codes, local climate, etc. The devil is in the detail, always.
The thing that never changes is that Room Temperature, Air Quality and Soundproofing are the goals.
Maintenance is a side goal but is HUGE. People completely forget about that one when planning their dream home, which is why they end up with far too big houses and unsustainable utility bills. We don’t have to.
By using very old techniques and/or high tech ones, from designs allowing airflow to modern heat pumps, we can reach maintenance-free homes with $200/year utility bills. That is why I want to build new so much! Most people buy a home and are blind to their bills. It might be $90 this month and $356 the next. I don’t want that. I want very predictable bills.
I want Quality of Life. We can all have it. It’s all doable.
It’s beautiful.