N° and issue date : 130701 - 01/07/2013Circulation : 13273 Page : 55Frequency : Monthly Size : 93.06 %FXmag_130701_55_7.pdf 1245 cm2

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THEHOUSE THAT WASTE BUILT Made entirely of discarde materials , the Brighton Waste House is not only a reseach project and a test bed but a focus for a crucial change in culture not only in the building industry but also in everyday life ,

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-LT aving just spent 10 days directing the seminar programme at the

_FL Grand Designs Live exhibition , I have accumulated a number of reasons to be cheerful about the general direction in which sustainable design , and sustainable building in particular , is going . In my many rants on this and related subjects in these pages I' ve usually concluded that ' It' s All About Behaviour Change' , my dears . Concoct as many sustainable materials and processes as you like , but if people don' t use them in a sustainable way then they ain' t sustainable . Simple.

And when we put our own overtly sustainable behaviour under scrutiny ,

it' s both uncomfortable and revealing. Perhaps the most acute discomfort of all comes when we examine our habit of throwing stuff away . As architect Duncan Baker-Brown , of BBM Sustainable Design and the Brighton Waste House , is fond of quoting :

`There' s no such thing as waste . Just stuff in the wrong place.' ( It' s not his own coinage , but apparently comes from

Anatomy of the original House That Kevin Built , for Grand Designs Live in 2008

THINK PIECE

Treehugger , the hugely influential American blog promoting all things green , sensible and sustainable. )

Among the presentations of the aforesaid seminar programme there were many dealing with sustainable design ,

energy and resource efficiency ,

' closed loop' systems and a host of ideas about the best ways of building to minimise the effect on our overburdened planet . The familiar One Planet Living rubric was dusted off and given its usual airing you know , the one that says if we all lived like the Americans we would need five planets' worth of resources to support us ( don' t be smug about the USA - if all humans lived as we do in the UK we' d still need three whole Earths ) - and the week' s proceedings were punctuated with exemplary schemes and well-intentioned projects.

These days the ' Grand Designers' themselves , the folk who have actually been on the telly building their dream homes

, are almost without exception

' ea ) warriors' ; nothing will do for their heat , light and water than exploitation

FXmagazine.co.uk July 2013 55

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N° and issue date : 130701 - 01/07/2013Circulation : 13273 Page : 56Frequency : Monthly Size : 93.06 %FXmag_130701_55_7.pdf 1245 cm2

Website: http://www.fxmagazine.co.uk

ofthermal mass , ground or air-source heat

pumps , rainwater harvesting and solar panels " whether straightforward water heating ,

photovoltaic or even PVT , the latest clever ( but not very effective ) combination of the two. And as for materials , `go local ' is the order of the day " right down to Kevin McCloud '

`Man Made Home' shed , built in a wood

from oak felled on the site. What we found in terms of overall trends

was that a great number of these sustainable technologies are still in sore need of development ; they mean well but they don' t work all that well . Ground and air-source heating is a case in point ; the basic technology is pretty sound , but installations often fail to come up to the mark because of shortcomings in the skill base of the installers or the lack of adequate control systems and software . It' s an area of the building industry still very much in its infancy ,

and exhibitions such as Grand Designs Live are an opportunity both for consumers to get up close and personal with the latest innovations and listen to people who have blazed the trail. There is even now a very small ' installed base' of buildings and projects from which to glean experience and information , and any attempt to rationalise , collate and relay said information is of immense value.

Set somewhat aside from all this cautious optimism is Duncan Baker-Brown' s House of Waste project , currently on a site in the purlieu of the University of Brighton . The house itself goes back to Grand Designs Live 2008 , when it was known as The House That Kevin Built ,

and went up from scratch to finish in five days on a site outside the ExCeL centre during the exhibition itself . It had to come down of course

,

being but one of the attractions of a temporary exhibition , but its value as a demonstrator of efficient building materials and processes led to a new lease of life for it , thanks to BakerBrown' s vision and persistence.

As a lecturer and researcher at the University of Brighton he had already been a major initiator of the Pavilion for 2011' s graduating architecture students , which was built entirely from waste off the nearby site where the new American Express building was going up . Why not , went the thinking , rebuild THTKB , as it became known , at the university , but made

As the house takes shape it becomes apparent that apart from the research value it carries , there is a deeper value springing from the challenge...to the attraction of the new

( mostly ) of waste? It would automatically act as a research project , a test bed , and a focus for the crucial change in culture that needs to pervade not just the building industry but ordinary people' s everyday behaviour . It also wasn' t

going to be easy acquiring and adapting the multitude of bits and pieces that go into the making of a house " a sheet of ply is after all a sheet of ply , and if it' s knackered already it isn' t going to be much use . Likewise taps ,

wiring , plumbing and the like. Which is where Cat Fletcher and Freegle'

comes in . Australian expat Cat has been working in this area for years , driven by her passionate belief that almost everything can be reused , repurposed , recycled or freecycled. ( Apparently the word freecycle' has been copyrighted by an American organisation of that name , which , as she points out , is kind of against the spirit of the thing. ) She has been working tirelessly collecting , collating ,

organising and checking a vast array of improbable junk , including for instance large numbers of VHS tapes , which apparently make good insulating material.

As the house takes shape on its university site " it' s the same shape as the original , but adjustments have to be made to accommodate the variations determined by the ad-hoc nature of the materials " it becomes apparent that apart from the research value it carries , in the sense of performance testing of unlikely components there is a deeper value springing from the challenge to current preconceptions and attitudes about the attraction of the new.

New isn' t necessarily desirable ; just because

it' s clean and shiny doesn' t mean it' s any better. Of course there are a million examples where new is indeed better ; it' s demonstrable that a car

with 100 ,000 miles on the clock isn' t as good a proposition as one with 100 . But what' s

important is that if the 100 ,000-mile one can be fixed and made to run another 100 ,000 miles ,

we don' t need the 100-mile one at all . We don' t need to make it , we don' t need to mine or manufacture or collect the materials for it , we don' t need the complex and sophisticated mechanisms of production and distribution. Fan belt broken? Use an old pair of tights.

The Waste House is a project whose significance , thankfully , goes a lot farther and deeper than an ad-hoc roadside repair . There is a design process here , after all . What' s

interesting is that it demands that said process asks a whole new batch of questions . We don' t say :

' OK , the windows here are 800 x 1200 ,

let' s spec them up and order.' What we say is :

`We were planning on 800 x 1200 windows on this floor but we' ve got a load of 600 x 1500 ones . What design adjustments will we have to make?' There' s something beautiful about doing it that way round , responding to what' s possible and what' s available rather than forging ahead with mass-produced components.

The logical progression , of course , leads to the dismantling of modem manufacturing ,

to a completely new approach to product design that allows for component renewal and replacement , even perhaps to a transformed attitude among consumers that values the reused against the brand-spanking new . That' s

pie in the sky mostly ; the road to such radical

culture and behaviour change is a long one. It' s also not a new idea , and many

manufacturers have for a generation now been working on a product ' philosophy' , if you like ,

that lays responsibility for the entire life of the product at their door " where consumers don' t

really own something outright , they are just using it until it goes back where it came from. Poor countries know all about keeping cars going with old tights or making sandals out of worn-out tyres.

All we have to do to render this one single planet able to support us is change our minds. It' s a much , much bigger project than it sounds ;

but the University of Brighton and Duncan Baker-Brown , along with a host of like-minded helpers and supporters , are creating a powerful focus for that mental transformation . May there be many more . D3

Not finished , but looking very much like a house

The archrtectur%% student creh wit * - vs Duncan Baker-Brown and model of the House of Waste , a project supported by many organisations and companies

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