Building Green quotes my Sustainability — At the Tipping Point? article in their recent posting on Passive Survivability: A New Design Criterion for Buildings. (Another aspect of future-proofing; more to come on that soon.)
Here’s an excerpt:
In some ways, the failure of conventional buildings to maintain
survivable conditions can be thought of as a failure of design. ‘If
they lose only electricity,’ notes building researcher Terry Brennan,
of Camroden Associates, Inc., in West-moreland, New York, ‘few
buildings in the U.S. can provide as much comfort as my backpacking
tent; if the gas lines and water lines go, the situation is even
worse.’Some strategies for passive survivability can be found by
looking back at our building heritage — vernacular designs that were in
place before electricity and readily transportable fuels became
available. The wide-open and well-ventilated ‘dog-trot’ homes of the
Deep South are examples, as are the high-mass adobe buildings of the
American Southwest.The house designs of some animals display even better examples of passive survivability….
Thanks to Arthur Young of iGreenBuild for the tip!
