No Tech Magazine

The Greenest Building Is The One Already Standing

"Until now, little has been known about the climate change reductions that might be offered by reusing and retrofitting existing buildings rather than demolishing and replacing them with new construction. This groundbreaking study concludes that building reuse almost always offers environmental savings over demolition and new construction. Moreover, it can take between 10 and 80 years for a new, energy-efficient building to overcome, through more efficient operations, the negative climate change impacts that were created during the construction process." Read more.

The Sustainable Urban Dwelling Unit (SUDU)

The 'Sustainable Urban Dwelling Unit' (SUDU) in Ethiopia demonstrates that it is possible to construct multi-story buildings using only soil and stone. By combining timbrel vaults and compressed earth blocks, there is no need for steel, reinforced concrete or even wood to support floors, ceilings and roofs. The SUDU could be a game-changer for African cities, where population grows fast and building materials are scarce.

Timbrel Vaulting Using Cardboard Formwork

Lara Davis, Matthias Rippman and Philippe Block from the Swiss BLOCK Research Group at the ETH Zurich University have taken the centuries old timbrel vaulting technique one step further by incorporating high-tech design tools (software and CNC fabrication) and low-tech materials (cardboard boxes and wooden palettes).

Find pictures and the research paper here or see the summary below.

Building with Mud and Steel Frames

Building with mud and steel frames is an interesting hybrid between industrial and non-industrial technologies. Two examples:

"Kazakh architect and artist Saken Narynov created a superstructure able to host what we could call an adobe vertical city. In fact, the structure is used as a matrix that can be more or less densely filled with multifamily habitation units. The traditional earth based material thus hybrids with the steel structure in a very unusual and interesting way and the space resulting between the habitation units and the structure is beautifully occupied by mazes of staircases and elevated pathways."

"The design recalls recent works by the Chilean architect Marcelo Cortes, who employs a steel meshwork onto which mud is sprayed, but on a far greater scale. Cortes has developed a "quincha metalica", a form of traditional quincha construction (mud and straw packed between a bamboo or wood frame) that uses a steel frame work."

How to Build a Medieval City

The "Dictionnaire raisonné de l’architecture française du XIe au XVIe siècle" is an overwhelming reference work consisting of 9 books (some 5,000 pages in total) on medieval and renaissance architecture in France. It is written in French, as you already suspected, but the detailed illustrations make it worthwhile for all architecture and history devotees. There is really all you need to know to build, for instance, a gothic cathedral, including the gargoyles. The work appeared in 1856 and was written by Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, an architect known for his restorations of medieval buildings. The separate volumes can also be found on the Internet Archive.

Building with Pumice

"This book represents a first-ever attempt to explain and illustrate how the volcanic material pumice can be processed using simple technologies suitable for developing countries. In Germany, the first wall-building brick made of pumice and a slow-hardening binder (milk of lime) dates back to the year 1845. That marked the starting point of a local pumice-based building industry in volcanic regions of the Eifel Mountains, where pumice deposits were abundant. As time passed, the material's market area expanded steadily. Today's pumice industry in the Rhineland operates large production facilities and has enough raw material reserves to last beyond the turn of the century at the present rate of production. Pumice, an extremely light, porous raw material of volcanic origin, can be found in many parts of the world, including various developing countries with areas of past or present volcanic activity. In some countries, volcanic ash (with a particle size of less than 2 mm), pumice (with particle sizes ranging from 2 to 64 mm) and consolidated ash (tuff) are traditionally used, on a local scale, as versatile building materials."

"Building with pumice" (pdf-version), Klaus Grasser & Gernot Minke, 1990. More links: 1 / 2. Thanks to Zeltia González Blanco.

Movable Shading Structures

A house can be cooled in two ways. You can try to get rid of the incoming solar heat using air conditioning. Or you can try to prevent the sun from entering the house. The last option can be achieved by movable shading structures. The French house on the picture was built in 2009 by Karawitz Architecture. Its shuttered bamboo skin can be used to keep the sun out in summer. The shutters can be opened in winter, exposing the large south-facing windows. The house, which stands in Bessancourt (not far from Paris), has no active heating or cooling system. Info + pictures. Via Build it solar. Thanks to Paul Nash. Related: Window orientation and shading.

Window Orientation and Shading

"In sunny southern locations, protecting your windows from the sun is an important component of good window management. The first step is to know how the sun moves through the sky and to orient the building and place the windows in it so as to minimize direct solar admission through your windows." Read more.

"Sustainable By Design provides a suite of shareware design tools to calculate the right dimensions and placing for your specific location, wherever you are.

• SunAngle: our premier tool for solar angle calculations.
• SunPosition: calculates a time series of basic solar angle data.
• Sol Path: visualization of the path of the sun across the sky.
• Window Overhang Design: visualization of the shade provided by a window overhang at a given time.
• Window Overhang Annual Analysis: visualization of window overhang shading performance for an entire year. 
• Overhang Recommendations: suggested climate-specific dimensions for south-facing window overhangs
• Light penetration: visualization of the penetration of sunlight into a room
• Louver Shading: visualization of louvered shading system performance for an entire year.
• Vertical Fin Shading: visualization of a vertical fin shading system performance for an entire year
• Window Heat Gain: calculation of monthly heat gain through windows.
• Panel Shading: visualization of the shading of rows of flat panel collectors throughout the year."

Interesting follow-up at Treehugger.

Low-tech Vertical Garden in Ibiza, Spain

"Jardín vertical low-tech en Ibiza" by Spanish architects Urbanarbolismo. The garden acts as a sound barrier between a club's outdoor central courtyard and nearby appartments. The ceramic elements - used as a planting medium - are placed so that irrigation water can easily enter from above. No automated irrigation systems are required. Urbanarbolismo makes use of local plant varieties.

Innovation & Tradition: The Complete Works of Hassan Fathy Online

"Since antiquity, man has reacted to his environment, using his faculties to develop techniques and technologies, whether to bake bread or make brick, in such internal psychological balance with nature that humanity historically lived attuned to the environment. Man's creations were natural when built of the materials offered by the landscape. Learning to manipulate clay, stone, marble, and wood, man penetrated their properties, and his techniques gave expression to his aspirations toward the divine. In architecture, environmental harmony was known to the Chinese, the Indians, the Greeks, and others. It produced the temples of Karnak, the great mosques of Islam, and the cathedral of Chartres in France."

"With the advent of the industrial revolution, the inherited techniques and perfected knowledge of creating, using handmade tools, were lost and are now forgotten. Energy-intensive mechanized tools have diminished man's personal, cellular contribution to the fabrication of objects, the building of structures, and the growing of food. The lesser the challenge for man to imprint his genius, the less artistic is the product. The resulting economic and political disturbances are visible today. Production of beauty, once the prerogative of millions, is replaced by industrialization, even of bread, under the control of a minority of owners. The negative consequences of the industrial revolution have disturbed the natural organization of the divine concept for humanity."

"Sixty years of experience have shown me that industrialization and mechanization of the building trade have caused vast changes in building methods with varying applications in different parts of the world. Constant upheaval results when industrially developed societies weaken the craft-developed cultures through increased communications. As they interact, mutations create societal and ecological imbalance and economic inequities which are documented to be increasing in type and number. Profoundly affected is the mass of the population, which is pressured to consume industrially produced goods. The result is cultural, psychological, moral, and material havoc."

"Yet it is this population that has an intimate knowledge of how to live in harmony with the local environment. Thousands of years of accumulated expertise has led to the development of economic building methods using locally available materials, climatization using energy derived from the local natural environment, and an arrangement of living and working spaces in consonance with their social requirements. This has been accomplished within the context of an architecture that has reached a very high degree of artistic expression."

Quoted from: "Architecture and environment" by Hassan Fathy, a noted Egyptian architect who pioneered appropriate technology for building in Egypt, especially by working to re-establish the use of mud brick (or adobe) and traditional as opposed to western building designs and lay-outs.

Fathy demonstrated how elements from vernacular Arab urban architecture, such as the malkaf (wind catch), shukshaykha (lantern dome) and mashrabiya (wooden lattice screen), could be combined with the mud-brick construction traditionally practiced in Nubia in Upper Egypt to form a distinctive, environmentally and socially conscious building style that linked the use of appropriate technologies with co-operative construction techniques and the guiding thread of tradition (source).

All his wonderfully illustrated books can be found online, free to download (in English, French & Arabic). Via TECTONICAblog (Thank you, Zeltia).

The Blackfoot Indians

More than 1,400 Walter McClintock glass lantern slides at the Yale Collection of Western Americana, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

"Pittsburgh native Walter McClintock graduated from Yale in 1891. In 1896 he traveled west as a photographer for a federal commission investigating national forests. McClintock became friends with the expedition’s Blackfoot Indian scout, William Jackson or Siksikakoan. When the commission completed its field work, Jackson introduced McClintock to the Blackfoot community of northwestern Montana. Over the next twenty years, supported by the Blackfoot elder Mad Wolf, McClintock made several thousand photographs of the Blackfoot, their homelands, their material culture, and their ceremonies. Like his contemporary, the photographer Edward Curtis, McClintock believed that Indian communities were undergoing swift, dramatic transformations that might obliterate their traditional culture. He sought to create a record of a life-way that might disappear. He wrote books, mounted photographic exhibitions, and delivered numerous public lectures about the Blackfoot."

Below some pictures of their homes.

The Changing Rural Habitat

"The changing rural habitat, volume one: case studies" & "The changing rural habitat, volume two: background papers", Brian Brace Taylor, 1982.

Engineering for the Ecological Age: Lessons from History

"Engineering for the ecological age: lessons from history" (video) by John Ochsendorf. Skip the extremely irritating introduction to the speaker and start at 10:50. Via Ecodemica. Related: Tiles as a substitute for steel: the art of the timbrel vault & Timbrel vaulting in South Africa. Photo: Michael Ramage.

Birch Bark Sauna

Birch bark has been used in Finland for centuries as a construction material and as material for making small objects like baskets and shoes. One of birch bark's features is good thermal insulation. The surface is water repellent and it can be gently washed with water. Some components of birch bark also protect it from decomposing.

Finnish architects Teija Losoi, Anne Varsamäki and Ilari Pirttilahti used the technique to build a lightweight sauna - basically a huge traditional birch bark basket turned upside down. The light walls are supported by a wooden structure that is hidden inside two layers of braided birch bark. More pictures: 1 / 2 / 3 / 4. Thank you, Zeltia !

Why Older Buildings are More Sustainable

"In the late 14th century, England's King Richard II commissioned a new building, College Hall, at Oxford University. The carpenters who built College Hall knew that the massive oak beams spanning the great hall's ceiling would probably need to be replaced in a few hundred years, so next to the building, they planted a row of oak seedlings from the trees they used for the beams. Sure enough, the beams needed to be replaced about 300 years later, and the new carpenters had mature oaks right there, ready to be milled and turned into new beams."

Greening Main Street Buildings (more). The picture shows an example of a recessed entryway - a characteristic common to many traditional commercial buildings that helps prevent hot or cold air from rushing inside when a door is opened.

Once more, hat tip to Lloyd Alter.