Designing Ecological Habitats - Gaia Education

Dr. Matthew Hardy introduces Module 1 with his 12 Principles of Traditional Building.
As Secretary of INTBAU (International Network of Traditional Building, Architecture and
Urbanism) for eight years, Matthew was instrumental in raising global awareness to the
need for reviving the wisdom embodied in traditional forms and practices. His 12 Principles
read like a veritable testament, akin to Holmgren’s 12 Principles of Permaculture, and we
might expect they will become core subject matter in architecture programs across the
globe. If you’re not familiar already, please take a look at the influential work Matthew
spawned at www.intbau.org and continues today with the sister organization, the
Prince’s Foundation for the Built Environment – www.princes-foundation.org
The 12 Principles of Traditional
Building
Matthew Hardy, Ph.D. – Council for European Urbanism,
London
Introduction
As we face a future more uncertain, more crowded and with both dwindling
resources and reduced energy available in order to manipulate those
resources, it may be sensible to assess what the traditional buildings of the
past can teach us. The past may be a guide to our future in two of these key
principles. Like the past, the future is likely to be a time of reducing resources,
and it will almost certainly be a time in which energy is increasingly hard to
find and correspondingly more expensive. We might also feel that one thing
that the future will not have in common with the past is huge population
growth, with its associated pressures on space, water, farm land and urban
building plots. 1 I hope to show in the following article how all of these issues
have been dealt with, with elegance and economy, in traditional building.
I list these issues as 12 fundamental principles:
1) Closed Building Energy Cycle
Traditional building systems operate using a closed energy loop. For example,
lime is created by burning limestone or clays using a renewable resource,
wood, and the resulting hydrated lime is set using water. The set lime can
be returned to hydrated lime by re-burning. Broken bricks can be ground up
and added to the lime mortar mix as a pozzolanic agent to improve setting
and durability, 2 as can the ashes used to burn the limestone in the first place.
This is a completely closed energy circle, as the CO2 produced by burning
wood is reabsorbed by the trees in the next growth cycle. This system relies