What Are the Alternatives?

The problem isn’t with the modern house; it’s with our concept of what a house is supposed to be. A modern house is designed to be mass-producible and serviceable with standardized parts so that it can be easily constructed, sold, altered, and resold. Those are great properties for a commodity, but have nothing to do with the mission of a house. Once we remember that a house’s job is to be a conduit and filter between an exact environment and an exact group of people, our course is clear: each act of building needs to grow out of the site it inhabits; it needs to work with the environment and climate that surround it; and it needs to fit its inhabitants like a glove—quite literally, because both a glove (clothing) and a house are augmentations of the human body. Put simply, the creation of a house is something that each of us has to be involved in on an intricate and personal level.

This, then, is the real “alternative” in green building. It isn’t a specific technique or material, but simply a change in perspective. It means getting personally involved, so that your house is the symbiosis of where you live and who you are.

How do you accomplish this? First, the negatives: most of us don’t have extended experience with a specific environment and climate, or a clear cultural context, or, to be blunt, a clear personal identity. We don’t know enough about where we live or who we are, so we don’t know what to build or how to build it. The positives: we still have the big brains and creative drives that our ancestors used to find their elegant solutions in specific situations. Once we regain the respect for the magical confluence that is a truly specific house, we’ll amaze ourselves with our own sublime solutions.

© Clarke Snell, 2005