Good Building
The Terrain
50 years ago houses were uncomfortable and wasted resources. We launched into decades of increasing air sealing and insulation, optimizing over and over on a handful of metrics.
It worked. A house built today uses a fraction of the energy of one built in 1975, and that's no small achievement.
At a Cost
We favored synthetic materials for their higher performance metrics. Each round tuned the house closer to a set of numbers and left it less room to be wrong.
We were trading robustness for efficiency. The risks increased and the improvements diminished. This can be seen in materials like sprayfoam. It's everywhere now, maybe in your walls.
The Trade
This isn't just a story about houses. Take the early waterproof jacket. It kept us far more dry and comfortable than the waxed canvas and wool it replaced, but at the cost of a temporary solution full of forever chemicals.
It's a trade most of us would take again without the knowledge we have gained since. We took the same path with our buildings, at the scale of a house instead of a jacket.
Reframe
We have now come full circle. Natural materials like sheep's wool and wood fiber are understood far better than they were. A few new synthetics offer the best performance without the downsides.
We know how to put them together. Almost everything is still pointed the other way: the materials, the supply chains, the habits.
Our Ethos
But it doesn't have to be this way anymore. We can expect more robust lives and buildings.
We do this through our 5 Factors of Good Building: health, longevity, social equity, carbon and lastly efficiency.
One of our most useful frameworks of Good Building is our Do Not Use list, which we provide for free.
Build your Do Not Use list
Do Not Use list is in hand, now what?
We recommend you take a look at our stories.
There you will find honesty about what it takes to build. We don't sugarcoat it, we embrace it and let it tell our stories.