1. Design to satisfy real needs, as opposed to transient, fashionable or market-driven needs.
This house works as a one-off production to highlight the carbon-saving features that could be part of future housing, and brings together many systems that allow the house to have no carbon emissions but the architecture admits that some of the features may never be adopted into real housing design and will continue to be high-end and avant garde.
2. Design to minimise the ecological footprint of the product/material/service product ie. reduce resource consumption, including energy and water.
3. Design to harness solar income (sun, wind, water or sea power) rather than use non renewable nature capital such as fossil fuels.
The house harnesses energy from solar panels to generate its electricity and uses the heat created as a by-product to heat the house, meaning that the users don't have to use non-renewable energy means at all. As the solar panels create all the energy needed they do not need to look to wind energy but that could be another option.
4. Design to enable the separation of components of the product/material or service product at the end of its life in order to encourage recycling or reuse of materials and/or components.
The stairway uses already recycled material, such as the bannisters utilising timber leftover from a previous job and old scaffold tube and these components could be reused in other projects too.
5. Design to exclude the use of substances toxic or hazardous to human or other forms of life at all stages of the product/material/service product's lifecycle.
6. Design to engender maximum benefits to the intended audience and to educate the client and the user and thereby create a more equable future.
7. Design to use locally available materials and resources wherever possible (thinking globally but acting locally).
Locally sourced materials have been used where possible such as local clay tiles. If not then they are recycled if possible too.
8. Design to exclude innovation lethargy by re-examining original assumptions behind existing concepts and products/materials/service products.
9. Design to dematerialise products into services wherever feasible.
The data loggers provide the service of showing where the energy is being used the most, allowing adaptions to be made to those areas if needed.
10. Design to maximise a product/material/service product's benefits to communities.
The soiled roof will one day create a meadow of sorts on the property, which will benefit the local flora and fauna and will in a way benefit the community. I don't feel it benefits the community in a direct way, though perhaps serves as an advert for sustainable architecture.
11. Design to encourage modularity in design to permit sequential purchases, as needs require and funds permit, to facilitate repair/reuse and to improve functionality.
12. Design to foster debate and challenge the status quo surrounding existing products/materials/service products.
I feel that this project challenges preconceptions of how an environmentally friendly house would look, and shows that you can live luxuriously nonetheless.
13. Publish eco-pluralistic designs in the public domain for everyone's benefit, especially those designs that commerce will not manufacture.
14. Design to create more sustainable products/materials/service products for a more sustainable future.
Although this building is a one-off, the knowledge and technology will only improve in the future, meaning that many more like this and better could be constructing following this as a blueprint. This will contribute to a more sustainable future as more households switch off from conventional non-renewable energy sources and see the benefits of living sustainably. Although the start up costs for a project like this would be very high, the fact that there are no energy bills mean that every year the house would pay back a little bit and the owners would be impervious to energy price hikes.
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