A note about sustainable building practices:  

​

​

​

​

​

 

In the hastily industrialized development of America, we mostly veered away from extant, traditional building practices that were inherently “green” (but considered slow or primitive or overly custom when relying on natural materials - in our hubris). Instead we leaned on a (temporary) abundance of commodity materials, the development of central air conditioning, and the expansion of plastics to make our buildings cheaper and faster to construct.  The price paid over time (in energy consumption, maintenance and replacement, and to our health) has been astronomical.  Nowhere is this more evident than in arid and desert environments, to which populations are increasingly pushed and in which resources are more and more scarce.  Advancements and standardizations in green building materials (or a return to? see: Pueblo architecture and Earthship Biotecture) make building sustainably less custom (read: expensive) and more viable.  While Plains House makes use of several historic green building standards (e.g. passive and thermal cooling, solar heat gain) and some new and more urgent (e.g. solar panels, water reclamation, and fire resistance), it is also designed to be built with structural components that are more sustainable (for various reasons):  stabilized adobe brick, insulating concrete forms “ICF/ICCF” (Earth Friendly Block, Mikey, Faswall), hempcrete, and structural insulated panels “SIPs”.  These materials each offer a unique range of benefits like decreased weight and therefore reduced shipping costs, lessened waste when designed to standard dimensions, fire ratings of up to 4 hours, use of recycled material, and even CO2 absorption/storage. In all cases, thermal performance is greatly increased, and in a climate that is becoming more extreme and more unpredictable, this is exceptionally important.

 

Plains House is a perfect case study for the comparison of some of these structural building systems.  A series of four Plains Casitas on the landscape might be rendered in four different materials and clad in four different exterior coatings/screens, in essence becoming a long-term teaching experiment.  Beyond conducting structural makeup trials, the organizing principle of a central core may also be leveraged to learn even more.  What gains would we see if this core were a courtyard/lightwell, a thermal chimney, or a well-insulated cistern?

 

Plains House is a completed design for a hypothetical scenario, but in many ways, it is more diagram than blueprint; it provides a base point for an idea (minimalistic, off-grid getaway in a remote desert environment) that can be translated to varying locations and constructed with whichever materials make the most environmental and economic sense on the specific site.  It is the genesis of an overarching ethos for StBo Studio, dubbed “Archetypes,” which posits that good sustainable design is regionally-specific and good experiential design is site-specific.  An Archetype provides a regional diagram that can be molded to fit a particular site without straying too far from proven vernacular techniques and formal expressions, a departure from which would likely result in a home with less sustainable and experiential efficacy.  At a minimum, an Archetype is a refined curation of guiding principles, a circumvention of continuous reinvention, and a reminder that sustainable building practices have endured because they work and experiential design is special because it is emotionally transformative.