This blog is an opportunity to express ideas about garden design, landscape architecture, and urban design.
As ecologies, climate and economies change, our health is impacted. We need to adapt our way of thinking, our way of life, our design methodolgies. Here we can share ideas and experiences of how best to design for the future
Monday 29 September 2008
Gayle Souter-Brown's design theory
As the credit crunch deepens, the need for our homes to be restorative retreats from the world becomes stronger. Sensitive Interior Design that integrates into the होम'sGarden Design will give best results.
Many eastern and southern european cultures design their homes around a central courtyard. This provides both security and light and air to every room in the house. Beautiful courtyards can make a home feel like a resort. Western cultures can re-create the effect by adding utility rooms, garages, even garden walls to the existing house.
Building regulations need to change, to legislate for minimum amounts of natural light (window size). Currently doctor's surgeries must have more natural light than our homes!
Natural light boosts our feel-good endorphins, and our general health. (That is why outdoor workers tend to have a more healthy lifespan than people who do not get much natural light.)
Natural light costs nothing in terms of energy use or carbon footprints. Yet so many new homes are built by developers using cheap, small windows.
It is possible to design new cost effective homes, even ones which fit within local historical vernaculars, but with larger, healthier, more environmentally sustainable energy efficient windows!
If you look at the peoples of the world and their general dispositions, those cultures who enjoy large amounts of natural light (and I'm not talking sunshine here, just light) are far happier and more content than those who do not.
The cost of mean, small windows is a depressed population who work less efficiently, love less passionately and live less enthusiastically, and have a higher carbon footprint, and increased energy costs from their increased use of artificial light.
Britain is a huge user of electricity, much of which is generated in gas fired power stations. It seems a simple solution to a whole load of problems to just increase the size of windows.
With larger windows in all new homes, we would use less artificial light, live happier, healthier lives, reduce our demands on the healthcare system and above all, feel better about life!
2 comments:
Many eastern and southern european cultures design their homes around a central courtyard. This provides both security and light and air to every room in the house. Beautiful courtyards can make a home feel like a resort. Western cultures can re-create the effect by adding utility rooms, garages, even garden walls to the existing house.
Building regulations need to change, to legislate for minimum amounts of natural light (window size). Currently doctor's surgeries must have more natural light than our homes!
Natural light boosts our feel-good endorphins, and our general health. (That is why outdoor workers tend to have a more healthy lifespan than people who do not get much natural light.)
Natural light costs nothing in terms of energy use or carbon footprints. Yet so many new homes are built by developers using cheap, small windows.
It is possible to design new cost effective homes, even ones which fit within local historical vernaculars, but with larger, healthier, more environmentally sustainable energy efficient windows!
If you look at the peoples of the world and their general dispositions, those cultures who enjoy large amounts of natural light (and I'm not talking sunshine here, just light) are far happier and more content than those who do not.
The cost of mean, small windows is a depressed population who work less efficiently, love less passionately and live less enthusiastically, and have a higher carbon footprint, and increased energy costs from their increased use of artificial light.
Britain is a huge user of electricity, much of which is generated in gas fired power stations. It seems a simple solution to a whole load of problems to just increase the size of windows.
With larger windows in all new homes, we would use less artificial light, live happier, healthier lives, reduce our demands on the healthcare system and above all, feel better about life!
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