5 Factors of Good Building

The world of high-performance housing has inspired amazing standards for better housing. From standard homes to premium builds, there are better and better guidelines available to reduce energy use. The thing that we don’t really ask though is this; “Is building a less bad house the same as building a good house?”

While reducing energy use has had an effect, the materials used to do so are making that work counterproductive. What if we aimed for a Comfortable Building practice that can be carbon-sequestering and reduce energy use at a higher capacity? We should approach every aspect of the house with regard to how it self-sustains and gives back. Once again we should wonder how much good we are actually doing.

If you cut out one of three daily visits to a fast-food drive-thru do you call that a good diet?

There are common pitfalls in these less bad constructions, we go into detail about one of those, water in walls here. Too good to be true materials are still being used as miracle solutions. Just search “Sprayfoam fire test” to see how less bad is outright scary.

There is not a miracle solution at the end of this. Real good takes complex systems working together to generate the holistic system to create a home that gives back more than it takes. Organizations like The Living Building Challenge are approaching this with that whole picture thinking. They use the example of a flower to illustrate this point. A flower gives back more than it takes and has the added benefits of beauty, seemingly just for fun. Approaching a house like the human body, systems on systems, is our go-to example. Every system in the body has a function that serves the whole. Taking this approach requires taking a closer look at every piece of the system and assessing it against this do good, not just less bad model.

There are passive homes doing this well. There are neighborhoods taking this idea and innovating it for their community. As we looked we found that there wasn’t a good example created to the specifics of a climate like Phoenix, so we got to work.

So we started with the space itself.

We looked at how nature manages these conditions.

We looked at early structures.

We use products with minimal impact wherever possible.

We learned that extreme air sealing boosted the performance of our insulation by at least 4 times while keeping that pallet of water out of our walls.