The House We Live In: A Series on Building the Sustainable Home in Tucson, Arizona
In 1878, Western Union circulated an internal memo, informing the staff that “This ‘telephone’ has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a practical form of communication. The device is inherently of no value to us.”
In 1913, when Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring premiered in Paris, there were near-riots. The work was innovative and nothing like what the audience was used to; they didn’t know how to process it.
In 1936, the New Yorker published Clifton Fadiman’s review of Faulkner’s great novel Absalom, Absalom! that included the following: “Seriously, I do not know what to say of this book except that it seem to point to the final blowup of what was once a remarkable, if minor, talent… this is a penny dreadful tricked up in fancy language and given a specious depth by the expert manipulation of a series of eccentric technical tricks. The characters have no magnitude and no meaning because they have no more reality than a mince-pie nightmare.”
In 1984, the Supreme Court decided Sony Corp. v. Universal City Studios. Universal City had sued Sony, maker of the Betamax, predicting that technology allowing people to record broadcasts would seriously damage the motion picture industry.
It’s human nature, I suppose, to be resistant to change and skeptical of the unfamiliar. It’s natural to believe that the way we have been successfully doing things is the right way. Of course, if this attitude always prevailed, there would be no innovation, no modernism, no internet, no electric guitars, no hybrid cars.
On a spectrum of resistance ranging from riots through skepticism to curiosity to enthusiasm, reactions to my house project—the specifics of how we intend to accomplish its energy efficiency, rather than the concept itself—have yielded quite a lot of skepticism, some curiosity, and, occasionally enthusiasm. But this part of the country has its “green building” traditions. Most of the time if I’ve told someone local I’m building a sustainable house, they ask me if it’s a straw bale house.
It isn’t.
Some then ask if I’m using insulated concrete forms (ICFs). I’m not using those either. From that point, local builders we’ve talked with have mostly been puzzled. Those are the two ways we build sustainable houses here. They work well. Why wouldn’t you use those concepts?
The short answer is because rather than starting from the model of how others have solved these problems in this climate, we started from first principles, with all the tools and materials currently available as our range of possibilities. My project isn’t the next incremental step in the techniques that are widely used; it’s a different technique entirely, arrived at through complex calculations using local climate data, detailed analysis of materials.
I hadn’t really grasped the impact of this until I started talking to builders. Several of them have been intrigued and excited by it; it could really work, and work better than the usual ways. Others have been put off by it. They don’t trust it. It’s the difference between continual refinement through experience and careful planning in advance using computer models to approximate optimal performance on the first go.
This is not to say that nobody’s ever build a house like this. It has been done successfully all over the world. It just isn’t familiar to the local scene.
It reminds me of something I’ve seen in the legal world. Often, rather than starting with a blank document, a lawyer faced with writing a motion, or a Judge who must issue an order, will start with one from a similar case, and go from there. Rarely do we start with a blank page and consider with no model what the best way to present an argument is. I think that’s a loss, and it leads to stagnation in the law.
Of course, it would be foolish to disregard past successes. If I wrote a brief from scratch and never looked at how others had done it before I filed it, I wouldn’t be doing my job very well. Similarly, a huge goal of our conversations with builders in recent weeks has been to get their input about the advisability of various aspects of the house based on local experience. But I think Matthew and I were both surprised by the confusion and skepticism we encountered. They aren’t saying it won’t work (and indeed, we’re pretty sure it will—math does actually work).
There’s surely a balance to be struck, in brief-writing, in invention, in architectural design, between time-tested techniques and pure, start-from-scratch thought. We are searching for that balance now. My great hope is that the start-from-scratch design, incorporating some aspects that experience has taught us to embrace in this desert, will yield something with all the strengths of both approaches. It will have the benefit of fresh, clean thinking not bound by history, but it will not be deaf to the wisdom of centuries of experience. And it will be an example of creative thought that might move the state of the art forward in some small way. We are young. We are ambitious. We’re going to give it a try.
