Designing Ecological Habitats - Gaia Education

tHe 12 principles of traDitional builDing 55
on sustainable management of woodlands.
2) Local Materials
A Scotsman observed to me that in his home village, every house was built
of materials gathered within 400 yards (metres) of its site. This rule seems
almost universal for simple buildings, due to the cost and difficulty of
transporting building materials over long distances. As traditional societies
broke down following industrialization, and more recently following
engagement with the world financial system, the first visible changes to
traditional dwellings are often imported or manufactured materials. High
value buildings, however, such as churches and cathedrals, frequently used a
range of materials imported from across a wide region. Thus we find churches
across the UK using Caen stone, a limestone from Normandy, and Purbeck
marble, a hard stone from the south coast of England. In each case, heavy
materials were transported by water, a low-energy method of transporting
heavy materials over long distances, but one which was nevertheless very
expensive and limited in its use.
3) Build Up, Don’t Dig Down
Nature has provided us with an abundance of natural sites and each one,
with the exception of swamps within and near which we should not build,
has its own degree of slope, from gentle to steep. Traditional building adapts
to a variety of slopes without destroying natural contours. A good rule,
explained to me by an elderly architect, is to place the main floor plane just
above the highest point that it intersects on the site. This makes sure that
water running down the slope cannot enter the main rooms. We should not
level ground by cut and fill, a method only made available in recent years by
oil-powered excavators, but sit our buildings as far as possible on the natural
slope. Clearly we must excavate our footings down to solid material, but we
need not move enormous quantities of earth so that our building sits on an
artificial ground plane. Rather, we should enjoy the opportunity to elevate
the main floor and the possibility of providing undercrofts and basements
naturally accessible from the lower level. On steeper sites, we will find the
happiest relationship to the ground if the long axis of the building is parallel
to the contour. These simple rules explain the effortless grace with which
traditional buildings sit on the ground.
4) Timber and Wood
In the traditional landscape, woodland comprises between a sixth and
a third of the available area. Woods are not wild nature, but a resource
carefully managed over the long time by each village, or more recently, by
woodland management agencies of government. The key is to emphasise
the difference between ‘timber’ and ‘wood’. Timber is a large section of a