In Ancient Building Principles, we discussed the building principles of annualized geo solar, thermal diffusivity, and thermal mass; and how ancient buildings, such as the Navajo’s Hogan and the Roman’s hypocausts, utilized these building principles.
In this post, I’ll examine key aspects of building today, and why few builders incorporate these time tested building principles.
During pre-industrialization, homes were built predominately by the resident, or by the residents’ community. Today, homes are built largely by a builder for purchase. Similarly, building styles used to be based on regional materials. Today, nearly every known building material and architectural style are available to builders.
This shift in who builds the buildings changed the fundamental focus from creating lasting assets to quick profits, with the construction industry becoming profit driven. The major factors to increasing profits include reducing material costs and construction time, while increasing specialized knowledge and salability.
This change in building, from lasting assets to quick profits, also brought a change in material selection. During pre-industrialization, building materials consisted primarily of natural materials, such as mud and clay, stone and brick, and fibrous plants for lumber, thatch, and fabric. Industrialization brought such building materials as concrete, metal, glass, plastic, foam, and composites.
Along with these new building materials, industrialization saw the rise in stick frame construction and cheap fossil fuels. Industrial logging provided cheap lumber from America’s large forests. Cheaper materials offered higher profit margins, and gave America its current stick frame construction industry.
As materials changed from mud, clay, stone, and brick, to mostly timber construction; so also changed the ancient building principles of solar and thermal mass utilization, to forced heating and cooling; establishing the standard in American construction.
During this shift, some builders kept the ancient principles alive through rammed earth construction, straw-bale construction, and many others. Known as alternative or green, builders using these ancient principles were few in number, and took more labor and time to build; making these buildings unavailable to the majority of homebuyers.
The C.O.R.E. Technology utilizes these same ancient thermodynamic building principles through our unique systems’ building, with fewer materials and construction time, and an easy to implement system for existing builders. The C.O.R.E. Technology creates homes that heat and cool themselves, are mass producible, and offer the best of both worlds: economy and ecology, through the seamless integration of technology and nature™.