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My mother's an architect who specializes in old homes and historic renovation. She harps on this point constantly. The environmental techniques of yesteryear in

My mother's an architect who specializes in old homes and historic renovation. She harps on this point constantly. The environmental techniques of yesteryear involved design elements like you mentioned, orientation, and also siting vis-a-vis water, hills, woodlots and neighboring building. To build a house otherwise would reduce the occupants' comfort. That kind of expertise, at one time common, has now been mostly lost. Sure, you can find it in books, but to effectively apply all those principles in concert to a particular design, that is high art. Mother's architecture blog: http://jgrarchitect.blogspot.com/ http://jgrarchitect.blogspot.com/

Mz 17y ago
Kudos to your mom (and can you give me any pointers on getting my kids to promo my sites? <wink>). I decided some years back that I wanted to do work having to do with the built environment. I reviewed some majors related to that and settled on Urban Planning as my long-term goal. I decided I needed a bachelor's in Environmental Studies as a foundation for that so as to not build the next Aswan Dam --which met all stated goals beautifully (like controlling all that icky annual flooding -- you know, the thing that made Egypt "the jewel of Nile" for millenia) but had a few minor unexpected side effects, like a schistosomiasis epidemic (because controlling the flooding allowed snails, the vector for this parasitic infection, to flourish unchecked), dramatically increasing use of commercial fertilizer on Egyptian farms, and such a huge rate of silt build-up behind the dam that the lifespan of the dam will end up being far shorter than initially expected. I think it's a shame that design of our built environment is so often intellectually disconnected from the natural environment which serves as the foundation for all our built stuff (not just buildings but also other infrastructure).

Mz 17y ago

Kudos to your mom (and can you give me any pointers on getting my kids to promo my sites? <wink>). I decided some years back that I wanted to do work having to do with the built environment. I reviewed some majors related to that and settled on Urban Planning as my long-term goal. I decided I needed a bachelor's in Environmental Studies as a foundation for that so as to not build the next Aswan Dam --which met all stated goals beautifully (like controlling all that icky annual flooding -- you know, the thing that made Egypt "the jewel of Nile" for millenia) but had a few minor unexpected side effects, like a schistosomiasis epidemic (because controlling the flooding allowed snails, the vector for this parasitic infection, to flourish unchecked), dramatically increasing use of commercial fertilizer on Egyptian farms, and such a huge rate of silt build-up behind the dam that the lifespan of the dam will end up being far shorter than initially expected. I think it's a shame that design of our built environment is so often intellectually disconnected from the natural environment which serves as the foundation for all our built stuff (not just buildings but also other infrastructure).