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Natural builders, green architects, and environmentally aware designers of all stripes agree on the crucial importance of becoming intimately acquainted with the land and your building site as the first step in creating shelter. Learning a site takes time, and requires immersion in a place through all seasons and under all conditions. The best way to get to know a site and understand its characteristics and potentialities is to spend time there. Site planning, building design, systems design, and the construction process itself all flow from deep knowledge of the site.
The following is adapted from The Hand-Sculpted House: A Practical and Philosophical Guide to Building a Cob Cottage, by Ianto Evans, Michael G. Smith, and Linda Smiley, Chelsea Green Publishing.
It’s easy, but misguided, to think of a building as something we put on a site, rather than as a creation growing out of a place that already exists. Ecstatic architecture grows like a tree, responding to the nuances of the place where it develops and to the evolving needs of the dweller.
Selecting a building site is one of the most critical design decisions you will make, and should precede the rest of the design process. You can’t have a good building on a bad site. For the magic to flow, the building and site need to grow together, each improving the other, like an excellent marriage. A good site will make a house easier to build and satisfying to inhabit.
The wrong site can have long-lasting negative effects that are difficult or impossible to mitigate, both during construction and throughout the building’s lifetime.
Writers on natural building and sustainable design generally share a common set of guidelines about siting. These are adapted from TheNew Ecological Home by Dan Chiras.
1. Choose a site with good solar access. Solar energy is a vital component of sustainable shelter.
2. Consider wind currents and air drainage. These factors influence heating requirements, the potential for electricity generation, and gardening prospects.
3. Choose a sloping site for earth sheltering, which offers benefits ranging from energy efficiency to good air and water drainage to retention of flat land for other uses.
4. Seek favorable microclimates. Climate can vary dramatically over a site, with different microclimates advantageous or disadvantageous for different homesteading purposes.
5. Select a dry, well-drained site. Good drainage is important to prevent moisture problems in a building. Well-drained sites require little if any grading, which minimizes land disturbance, habitat loss, and the energy required to build a home.
6. Consider the soils on site. Select a site with stable subsoils. Like well-drained soils, stable subsoils minimize the risk of foundation and wall cracking. If you’re considering an earthen building, such as cob, adobe, or rammed earth, you’ll want to be sure that your site contains soils suitable for these purposes.
7. Avoid marshy areas. Wetlands are precious vanishing resource that need to be preserved. Even building near wetlands can damage them.
8. Select a site suitable for growing food. Providing at least some of one’s own food is an important choice that has health, financial, and environmental benefits.
9. Select a site that offers building resources, including earth, sand, stones, trees, straw, or water. Any materials harvested from the site decrease the energy required to build, and embodied in, your home.
10. Choose a site with a good water supply, because water is of course a vital need that you will have to supply one way or another.
11. Minimize ecological disruption. Any kind of construction damages the land, at least temporarily, creates havoc for the plants and animals already there, and can cause erosion problems. Such damage is often obvious and dramatic, but the damage caused by the ongoing existence and use of the building after it is finished cumulatively may be even worse (or it may be healing, if done right). Think through the lifetime of the building, how it will affect, destroy, alter, or improve its site ecology over several hundred years.
12. Don’t destroy beauty in your search for it. When siting a home, consider not placing it in the most beautiful spot on the property. As Christopher Alexander, coauthor of A Pattern Language, advises, “Leave those areas that are the most precious, beautiful, comfortable, and healthy as they are, and build new structures in those parts of the site which are least pleasant now.” Create beauty; don’t be an agent of its destruction.
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