Not long ago I went to see one of the greenest houses in the country. Bright, airy and beautifully designed it was also heavily insulated with no need for central heating. It gets almost all its energy from the sun – through solar electric and hot water panels – and by recycling the heat given off by its occupants and their electrical appliances through a sophisticated recovery and ventilation system.
A celebrity’s plaything somewhere in sunny Cornwall? Far from it. The house was one of two terraced rows of similar cottages in chilly Sunderland, one of the most deprived parts of Britain, and was to be used as social housing. No doubt its less well-off occupants will appreciate it more than any rich family would have done: Gentoo, the association that manages the city’s ex-council houses, estimates that its energy bills will be cut from the £680 expected for a house of this size to £68.
The houses, built to the rigorous Passivhaus standard, are striking testimony to how green architecture is beginning to emerge from its niche in Britain. It has been rather slow to do so. The first Passivhaus was built in Germany in 1990, and there are now more than 25,000 in continental Europe, though there are only a handful here. (Tomorrow sees the shortlist announcement for the first UK Passivhaus Awards.)
Building low-carbon homes is essential if the world is to get to grips with the growing climate and resources crises. Buildings consume 16 per cent of the Earth’s increasingly scarce freshwater and half, by weight, of all the raw materials wrung from its crust.
Green architecture is nothing new. Since the start of humanity people have built their homes with local materials, and designed them to make the best use of the sun and natural shelter, constructing whole communities to withstand extreme heat and cold. Indeed Vitruvius, the Roman forefather of architecture, explained how houses should imitate nature, by being constructed from natural materials in the same way birds build their nests. He also laid down how to design buildings to be energy efficient.
For centuries most buildings followed similar principles. The Renaissance texts of Serlio and Palladio adapted them to new times, while such designs as the New England saltbox and the English thatched cottage maximised the efficient use of energy. It was only after the Industrial Revolution, and the widespread use of fossil fuels that architecture diverged from sustainability. The trend reached its apogee in the age of cheap oil after the Second World War when the most resource-hungry structures in history – sealed against the elements with permanent artificial lighting and air conditioning – were built across the globe.
The pendulum began to swing back after the oil shocks of the 1970s, though some of the groundwork for the shift had been laid earlier: Ian McHarg’s Design with Nature, published in 1969, was a seminal text. It gained important context in 1987 with the publication of the Brundtland Commission’s Our Common Future, which popularised sustainable development. And it is now, finally, gathering pace. Governments are making green building mandatory. All new UK houses will be zero-carbon by 2016.
So expect some new architectural attitudes, or rather an adaptation of the traditional ones briefly jettisoned in the aberrant age of inexpensive energy. Buildings will be turned, where possible, to the sun with large widows to the south and small ones facing north to maximise its energy efficiency.
Locally sourced and recycled building materials will become more sought after. Insulation will be increased and the micro-generation of renewable energy – whether from solar panels or heat pumps – will be part of the package, as will the recycling of rain and grey water. Those houses in Sunderland are the shape of things to come.
The Telegraph’s Geoffrey Lean has been reporting on the environment for 40 years. Eco-builder Ben Law speaks to Andy Fryers at 11.30am on the Digital Stage [Event 2] at Hay Festival