Ecohouse: A Design Guide is a big book to read straight through. Whether you read it from front to back or dip into specific chapters depends on who you are and why you are reading it. In any case, Ecohouse is loaded with interesting and important — shocking, disturbing, inspiring, and enlightening — information, as well as very useful and practical technical guidance for building with both the health of our planet and the health of people — individuals, families, and communities — in mind.
This edition, for those who have not read the first and second, includes the introductions to all three. They are themselves well worth reading. In the introduction to this edition, Sue Roaf writes that the "theoretical concerns over climate change and fossil fuel depletion" covered in the introduction to the first edition were, by 2003, "firming up with the emerging reality of more extreme climate events and growing publicity over the issue of 'Peak Oil'." That is when the second edition was published. So why a third edition now?
Roaf provides several reasons for this new edition, and sees a fourth edition on the horizon. For one, "[e]ven in America the cozy talk amongst the educated architects of 'Sustainable Buildings' has turned to discussions of how we design for 'Passive Survival' in our own homes, when the power fails and the storms menace." Behind this not-so-veiled reference to America's lagging response, the point is that people are, in the face of irrefutable evidence of climate change, beginning to heed the calls for action.
Secondly, there are now politicians around the world who are beginning to take notice because of the "growing economic impacts of climate change." And finally, more to the point in terms of the content of this edition, it has become clear that the technology to survive already exists. "What we desperately need now," Roaf writes, "is the 'Eco-society' that will enable the necessary changes to happen in time to ensure that everyone, especially the vulnerable, can 'future-proof' themselves against what lies ahead." This edition serves as a technical guide and inspiration to that end.
Sue Roaf, PhD was brought up in Malaysia and Australia, and studied at Manchester University, the Architectural Association, and Oxford Brookes University. Roaf has spent ten years in Iran and Iraq, working as a landscape architect, studying building technologies, and teaching at the University of Baghdad. She has been a professional Training Adviser for the Oxford School of Architecture and is now Visiting Professor and Architectural Consultant at both the University of Arizona and the Open University in the UK. Significantly, she designed and built her own ecohouse in North Oxford in 1995, a fact to which I will return. In addition to writing Ecohouse, she has also written Closing the Loop: Benchmarks for Sustainable Buildings and Adapting Buildings and Cities for Climate Change: A 21st Century Survival Guide.
Five of the fourteen chapters in Ecohouse are a bit more on the conceptual side — "The form of the house": "The building as an analogy"; "The environmental impact of building materials"; "Pushing the building envelope"; "Building-in soul"; and "Health and happiness in the home." Yet even these contain various concrete examples, complete with illustrations and captioned photographs. Though all readers would be well advised to read the entire book, even if not all at once or in sequential order, these are arguably the chapters with greatest appeal to the lay reader or eco-enthusiast, as well as to the architect or builder just learning about eco-architecture. But the other chapters — "Ventilation"; "Passive solar design"; "Photovoltaics"; "Solar hot water systems"; "Using water wisely"; "Small-scale wind systems"; "Hydro power"; "Ground source heat pumps"; and "Lime and low-energy masonry" — contain a healthy amount of technical information and guidance, including formulae, charts, graphs, floor plans, diagrams and illustrations, and photographs. Less technical readers may find some of these a bit tiring on the brain.
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