I have edited this post to remove images that could be subject to copyright and have provided links instead.

Patrick Sisson, a writer I have long admired at Fast Company, writes Want to live forever? There’s a house for that, all about “longevity architecture.” He describes it as “less about making an aesthetic statement than it is about bodily optimization,” but I have something to say about that.

This is a new name for what I have long described as “healthy homes.” Sisson name-checks our historic precedents, including Alvar and Aino Aalto’s Paimio Sanatorium and Richard Neutra’s Lovell Health House. I discussed both in my last post on healthy design: Minimalism is not a style; it’s a prescription.

The new Longevity Architecture is popular with the very rich. Sisson quotes the CEO of the International Well Building Institute (which had a wellness real estate spinoff years ago):

“An important part of this context is that longevity feels like the new luxury good,” says Rachel Hodgdon, IWBI’s CEO and president. “The billionaire’s quest to live forever, the notion that self-care, quality experiences and mindfulness and wellness can extend not just our lifespan, but also our health span.”

But this is my first problem with the concept. Sisson points to a Sotheby's luxury outlook report which focuses on 262 Fifth Avenue where “a big part of the marketing pitch includes expansive wellness features, including air filtration, radiant-heated flooring, fresh air recirculation on an hourly basis, and Lutron systems that allow exacting control over environmental factors.”

But I have written about this building and said: “262 Fifth pushes unsustainability to new heights.” It is so thin and so tall, “I cannot even begin to estimate the upfront and operating carbon footprint per square meter or per occupant, but it is going to be outrageous.” I complained,

“If the cost of this building was only measured in money, one might just say, who cares, it’s their money, if they want to live in something like this. But it’s not just money; it’s carbon dioxide emitted while making the concrete, steel, aluminum and glass, and it’s being emitted now. The rich might be able to afford the real estate, but the rest of us can’t afford the carbon.”

So the billionaire owners get to sit inside with their fresh air, water, and circadian lighting while poisoning the world. I concluded, “This is why we need a big honking progressive upfront carbon tax to put a real price on the environmental cost of these kinds of buildings.” Yet it can be marketed as “longevity architecture.” Longevity for who? I think that is a bit of a contradiction.

Then there is the work of Kas Bordier, the founder of Mavi, a design consultancy, who says, “Longevity architecture should become a standard for the industry, with people looking at the health rating of the space the same way as the energy rating.” I totally agree. She also built a terrific website, Longevity Architecture, describing “the science and design of built environments that measurably extend human healthspan, cognitive performance, and biological resilience.”

“Longevity Architecture is the practice of designing buildings and interiors that actively support human health over a lifetime. It brings together what we know about light, air, sound, temperature, materials, and spatial design to shape spaces that help people think better, sleep better, and age more slowly.”

I have spent some time reading her essays, and they should be read widely. She understands the difference between thermal comfort and thermostat control, the importance of dealing with noise, and pitches Passive House:

“Passive House is not a luxury specification. It is a rational economic decision with compounding health returns. The 4 to 6% premium buys measurably better air, measurably better acoustics, measurably better thermal stability, and measurably lower operating costs for the lifetime of the building. The case is no longer theoretical. It is empirical, economic, and increasingly urgent.”

Where it all falls down.

It’s all wonderful stuff- fresh, clean air, filtered water, healthy materials, biophilia, quiet and comfort. What Kas Bordier and the other promoters of longevity architecture don’t seem to mention is the single main cause of reduced longevity: falls. Mavi has 129 factors covering “every domain measurable” and none of the ten domains deal with fall prevention or mobility.

According to the CDC, “unintentional falls are the leading cause of injury and injury death among adults aged ≥65 years.” Roughly 1 in 4 older adults falls every year — over 14 million people — generating about 3 million ER visits and 1 million hospitalizations annually. In 2024, 43,020 older Americans died from preventable falls, 55% of which happened in the home.

Click here to see the living room

But if you are serious about longevity, you have to deal with this. So let’s look at the model residence where “Kelly Hoppen sets the interior language. Kas Bordier sets the longevity specification,” starting with the living room. First of all, there is only one silly chair that would be impossible to get out of, and the rest are sofas. When you get older, chairs are preferred.

“Sofas, couches, and benches usually have a single, shared seating surface and may lack armrests on both sides. For seniors with limited mobility, couches can be difficult to get into and out of. Individual chairs with armrests offer the most support and safety when standing up or sitting down.”

Boomer billionaires don’t have limited mobility yet; they have gyms and coaches. But many likely will at some point. So many of the furnishing choices, from the sofas to the stools in the kitchen, are wildly inappropriate for older people.

Click here for a walkthrough of the apartment

Then there are the colours. The seating is beige, the walls are beige, the carpet is beige, everything is beige. When you get older, you need a bit of contrast. One study, Contrast Sensitivity Impairment is Associated with Limitations of Physical Functioning and Activities of Daily Living Among Older Adults, found:

“Contrast sensitivity or the ability to distinguish objects from their background is an important yet overlooked component of visual function. While routine eye exams assess visual acuity using high-contrast letters, they do not evaluate contrast sensitivity, a key aspect of vision required for detecting subtle differences between objects and their background.”

Contrast sensitivity impairment is associated with a 50–60% higher hazard of incident mobility and stair-climbing difficulty. And here we have a sea of beige and almost no contrast anywhere.

Then there is the question of the effect of all this circadian lighting. I have been discussing the importance of natural light, circadian rhythms, and appropriate colour temperatures for years, most recently when I complained about my classroom. I have also written Boomer Alert: You Need Better Lighting to Compensate for Aging Eyes, noting that “the older eye loses some sensitivity to short wavelengths ("blue light") due to progressive yellowing of the crystalline lens.”

This is your eye as you age. The lens is going yellow and cuts out 72% of the blue by the age of 80. The rods in our eyes, which deal with low-level light, are sensitive to the blue-green end of the spectrum, yet our fancy lighting in this apartment is dialling back the blue light to give us very warm 2700°K and the output levels to 250 lux. Meanwhile, we are looking at all this beige furnishings through beige lenses; I’m surprised we can see anything at all.

Circadian lighting is wonderful; I invested in Hue RGB bulbs in my house so that I could tune them for the right light at the right time. But where many people have thermostat wars, spouse Kelly and I have colour temperature wars. My aging eyes want the light white and bright; she is a few years younger and wants it warmer and dimmer. Douglas Steele, in Circadian Lighting: a Neuroscientist’s Perspective, explained:

“The idea that there can be a “specific recipe” for human-centric lighting that can be universally applied to all persons is unrealistic because of the tremendous variability between individuals based on age, setting, genetics, environmental factors, individual physiology, and personal behaviors such as coffee or alcohol consumption, ambient lighting preferences, and undesired exposure from other ambient light sources. While many of these factors could potentially be accounted for as models such as these become increasingly sophisticated, no effort has been made to do so.”

We are talking about longevity, about designing for older people. If you design an entirely beige room full of armless sofas with warm low circadian lighting, you are going to have older people falling down, and that doesn’t do much for longevity.

Click here to see stair in hallway

I should stop, but nobody should put a circular stair in a home designed for longevity. There is a reason that they are generally banned in exit stairs; they are dangerous. Your left foot has a different tread run than the right foot, and your brain has to figure this out, and when your brain gets older, it gets harder. You need a proper handrail, not just the top of a wall. And according to AARP, you need 300 lux, not 250.

Click here to see main ensuite bathroom

And don’t get me started about freestanding killer bathtubs with thin walls and no grab bars.

I am very impressed with Kas Bordier’s Longevity Architecture website. After reading about all these billionaires, it is a pleasure to read her essay on The Equity Question, where she makes the point that everyone should have these benefits.

“If the evidence is correct (that indoor environmental quality measurably affects cognitive function, disease risk, sleep quality, and biological aging) then the distribution of building quality is, in effect, a distribution of health. And that distribution is profoundly unequal.”

And her conclusion, which I agree with:

“The challenge for longevity architecture is to resist the temptation of exclusivity. If the discipline serves only those who can afford it, it will have failed its most important test. The measure of its success is not the quality of the best buildings, but the quality of the average ones.”

But when I look at the longevity lessons translated into the finished interior shown on her site, I am worried that it all sounds lovely but does not reflect the hard reality: this is a dangerous design, one giant beige trip-and-fall hazard. Being a billionaire doesn’t protect you from that; ask Ivana Trump. It is the antithesis of longevity architecture and design.

A recent article in Better Homes and Gardens asks, Is Minimalism Back? It talks to three designers who say things like “To keep your minimalist space from looking boring, add layers. “It is a must,” says [designer Meeshie] Fahmy. “Think knit or chunky throws on the sofa, pillows with texture, and a light neutral pattern for interest.”

BHG then shows an image of a kitchen with a gas stove, a wood floor, and a loose rug, at which point I got the sense that they really don’t know what minimalism is, where it came from, and why it is so important now, a hundred years after it started.

Minimalism is defined by Architizer:

“Minimalism emerged in the mid-20th century as a reaction against the ornamentation that characterized earlier 20th-century architectural styles, such as Classical Revival and Art Deco. It reduces architecture to its basic forms, embracing the “less is more” principle that architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe popularized. Minimalism focuses on clean lines, simple forms, and minimal ornamentation, allowing for spatial clarity.”

But it was not a style; it was a prescription for healthy buildings in a time when tuberculosis was rampant, scientists had figured out what causes it, but had no drugs to deal with it. Biatriz Colomina writes in X-Ray Architecture:

“Modernity was driven by illness… Nineteenth-century architecture was demonized as unhealthy, and sun, light, ventilation, exercise, roof terraces, hygiene, and whiteness were offered as means to prevent, if not cure, tuberculosis.”

Paul Overy wrote in Light, Air and Openness:

“Dirt and dust harboured germs that must be destroyed by fresh air and sunlight. Homes should be cleaned thoroughly every day, and windows and doors opened each morning to let in the sun and air, to destroy the germs. Heavy drapes and curtains, thick carpets and old furniture with decorative features that harboured dust and microbes should be thrown out and replaced with simple, easily cleaned modern furniture and light, easily washed curtains.”

This was the start of minimalist design. As Columbina notes, white walls, expansive glass, clean lines, and the absence of ornament were all medical protocols derived from tuberculosis sanitaria before they became iconic modernist and minimalist architecture and interiors.

So you don’t want chunky throws on the sofa or layered pillows with texture. In fact, you don’t want sofas; Miës van der Rohe designed lightweight tubular furniture which could be “easily moved by anyone and because of its sled-like base it can simply be pushed across the floor.” He wrote:

“It therefore promotes comfortable, practical living. It facilitates the cleaning of rooms and avoids inaccessible dusty corners. It offers no hiding place for dust and insects and therefore there is no furniture that meets modern sanitary demands better than tubular-steel furniture.”

Kitchens, in particular, should be designed like hospitals. One architect noted in 1933:

“The kitchen should be the cleanest place in the home, cleaner than the living room, cleaner than the bedroom, cleaner than the bathroom. The light should be absolute, nothing must be left in shadow, there can be no dark corners, no space left under the kitchen furniture, no space left under the kitchen cupboard.”

Hence my complaint about the kitchen in BHG- if you care about health, you don’t have gas. If you care about cleanliness, you don’t want a wood floor and a rug.

Minimalism is all about health. We now know about the dangers of particulates, so we don’t want carpeting or stuffed furniture where PM2.5 can settle and be resuspended when we sit or walk on them. One study found that babies crawling on carpets were inhaling 8 to 21 times as much fungus, particulates, or bacteria as a person walking. “Crawling induces resuspension of floor dust from carpeted flooring, creating a concentrated and localized cloud of microbial content around the infant.”

You don’t want all those cushions and pillows and throws, often made of synthetics. Another study found “Indoor airborne microplastics represent emerging pollutants of fast-growing concern that are especially important as potential invaders of the human respiratory system, reaching the alveoli of the lungs and finally entering the circulatory system and other tissues.”

Then there are bacteria, viruses, fungi, and parasites- and the rise of Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR). The World Health Organization says, “Antimicrobial resistance is outpacing advances in modern medicine, threatening the health of families worldwide.” Designers forgot about fighting disease with design when antibiotics were introduced, but it’s time to remember all those minimalist tricks.

“WHO estimates that bacterial AMR was directly responsible for 1.27 million deaths in 2019 and contributed to nearly five million deaths globally. Without action, experts warn, resistant infections could cause an estimated $3 trillion in global GDP losses per year by 2030.”

Our minimalist and modernist heroes were dealing with tuberculosis, and we have to worry about this too. Drug-resistant TB is on the rise. And thanks to the anti-vaxx movement, other diseases that we thought were beaten are coming back with a vengeance.

Dealing with AMR means giving bugs no place to hide, having surfaces that are easy to clean, and having furniture that’s easy to move.

Of course, there are many other, important things to worry about if we are going to design healthy buildings, including ventilation, insulation, comfort, light and air. But we have to re-learn the lessons that Duiker, Bijvoet, Aalto, Chareau, Miës, Neutra, and Le Corbusier taught us: minimalism is not so much a style as it is a prescription for healthy interiors that don’t harbour PM2.5 from wildfires or bacteria we don’t have antibiotics for, or microplastics and PFAS that float into the air every time we sit down on that fluffy sofa.

And we must never forget my favourite theory of everything: the vast number of aging baby boomers need minimalism. Studies such as Fine Particulate Matter Air Pollution and Lung Function Among U.S. Older Adults “highlight the negative impact of PM2.5 on older adults’ lung health.” Aging lungs are subject to cellular senescence. “Many of these age-related changes can impair the normal function of the respiratory system and its capability to respond appropriately to potential pathogens that are encountered daily.” This is why older people are more susceptible to pneumonia, flu, and COVID.

One designer tells BHG, “Often, when a homeowner chooses minimalism, the warmth and soul that come with a more expressive and personalized aesthetic get lost.” A hundred years ago, designers didn’t want much warmth and soul. They wanted a different aesthetic, as described by Paul Overy: “designed not only to be easy to clean but to appear to be spotlessly clean- potent visual symbols of hygiene and health.” I suspect this kind of extreme minimalism will be making a comeback.

In a recent post about the transition from open hearth to closed stoves, I was criticized in the comments for dumping on men for resisting change, but men have been pretty consistent about this for 150 years. I have been studying the history of the modern kitchen for my hopefully upcoming book, The New Manual of the Dwelling, and thought I would excerpt a bit from it over the next two posts.

The history of the modern kitchen is a history of women — architects, activists, engineers, and journalists. Most of these women who designed or wrote about kitchens over the last 150 years had one goal: to make cooking as efficient as possible so that women would be free to do other things. None of them particularly loved cooking; some of them didn’t even know how. Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky said, “I designed the kitchen as an architect, not as a housewife.” Lillian Gilbreth was a psychologist doing time-motion studies and considered her time “too valuable to be devoted to actual labour in the home.” Some wanted to get rid of kitchens altogether; they are not as well-known as the efficiency experts, but in many ways are more interesting. Here is Part 1: The women who thought that homes shouldn’t have kitchens.

Melusina Fay Peirce

Zina Peirce is described by Dolores Hayden in The Grand Domestic Revolution as “an angry housewife, who rebelled at what she called the ‘costly and unnatural sacrifice’ of her wider talents to ‘the dusty drudgery of house ordering.” In a series of articles in the Atlantic Monthly in 1868, Peirce argued that back in Colonial days, men and women were essentially partners, with women making significant economic contributions to the family by helping with crops and producing cloth, clothing, soap, candles, and other necessities.

Then the men went off to factories or other workplaces, where they earned the money used to buy all these things. Women were now totally dependent on men and the money they brought home.

Peirce complained that “for healthy, educated, intelligent adults by the millions to be supported by the extra toil of the rest of the community, as educated women are now, is a state of things entirely contrary to the natural division of labor . . . the most fruitful source of disorder, suffering and demoralization.”

Peirce believed that women should be economically self-sufficient and emotionally independent of men, and should earn money for their labour. She would solve this with “cooperative housekeeping,” where all domestic work, cooking and child rearing would be done by organizing cooperatives among themselves, and then charging their husbands for these services. Hayden writes:

The association would charge retail prices for cooked food, laundry, clothing, and provisions — cash on delivery. Yet because of the economies of scale in this system, achieved through the division and specialization of labor, and through increased mechanization, charges to households would be reasonable. It would enable many housewives to find time to use their broader talents.

Peirce proposed changes to architecture and to urban design, where houses would be built in small groups around the central headquarters of the cooperative housekeeping society, which, in addition to kitchens and nurseries, would have libraries and a gymnasium, all separated by moveable walls so it could be opened up for a party.

Peirce tried to practice what she preached in Cambridge in 1870, with a hundred Harvard wives showing up and promising to join the cooperative. Unfortunately, their husbands were uncooperative. Hayden writes:

Women were struggling with their husbands’ animosity, according to Peirce. “What!” said one man she described as a distinguished Cambridge abolitionist, “my wife ‘cooperate’ to make other men comfortable? No indeed!” Another husband complained that the directors came too often to his wife’s house for meetings, and on one occasion, he was furious because he had to wait for the end of a meeting before his wife would sew on a button for him.

Later, Peirce designed and patented an apartment house with common areas on the lower floors and apartments (without kitchens) above. However, her ideas were really just too far ahead of their time; in many ways, they still are. I love Dolores Hayden’s conclusion of her chapter on Peirce:

Peirce took several incompatible popular ideas of her time — technological development, consumer cooperation, female separatism, and women’s clubs — and forced each to its logical conclusion. Capitalists could not accept her ideal of nonprofit cooperation. Cooperators could not understand her feminist separatism. Conservative advocates of “women’s sphere” found her emphasis on women’s economic power distasteful, while advocates of women’s legal rights were frustrated by her insistence that women deal first with the issues raised in their domestic lives. In sum, she had a genius for making everyone uncomfortable, because she attacked the interlocked oppression of gender and class in a new way.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Many writers, including Siegfried Giedion, have discussed “the servant problem” and assumed that most people had servants.

They did not; Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote in 1917 in The Housekeeper and the Food Problem,^⁠ “In our country, it has been estimated that only one woman in sixteen keeps even one servant. In the great majority of cases, the wife and mother is also the domestic servant.” Women were trapped in servitude; she complained that men abandoned women to “the chamber-work and scullery work of the world . . .all that is basest and foulest . . . grease, ashes, dust, foul linen and sooty ironware — among these her days must pass.”

Gilman thought cooking was archaic and outdated, and that the preparation of food should be outsourced, just like the sewing of clothes was by this time.

“It should be recognized that the preparation of food is no longer a domestic industry. It is no more an integral part of home life than is the making of cloth, once so exclusively feminine and domestic that the unmarried woman is still spoken of as a “spinster.” So perhaps might the term “cookster” be applied to women long after they have escaped that universal service.”

Gilman thought that the way to solve this was to get rid of the kitchen altogether and get our dinner from a centralized kitchen that would be run like a business.

“Take the kitchens out of the houses, and you leave rooms which are open to any form of arrangement and extension; and the occupancy of them does not mean ‘housekeeping.’ In such living, personal character and taste would flower as never before… The individual will learn to feel himself an integral part of the social structure, in close, direct, permanent connection with the needs and uses of society.”

She imagined apartment buildings in cities where women could combine careers and child raising:

The spatial setting for feminist motherhood, according to Gilman, was the feminist apartment hotel, with private suites without kitchens and complete cooking, dining, and child care facilities for all residents which permitted them to combine jobs and motherhood.

There are problems with Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s vision; it was for white women only. She was a racist and eugenicist, and thought black people could be trained to serve. (see Meg Conley for more on this) But she was not alone in believing that the way to liberate women from the kitchen was to eliminate it.

Alice Constance Austin

In 1915, Alice Constance Austin designed a socialist community with kitchen-less houses. Dolores Hayden describes it in Pioneering Women of American Architecture:

“Drawing on the communitarian socialist tradition in the United States, the Garden City movement in England, and the feminist consciousness of her time, she proposed a city of kitchenless houses. She believed that dwellings without kitchens would free women from the drudgery of unpaid domestic work and that the substantial economies achieved in residential construction of this kind would permit the development of extensive public facilities, including community kitchens and kindergartens.”

She proposed a system that puts Uber Eats and DoorDash to shame: each home was connected to a central kitchen via a network of underground tunnels. Little electric railway cars would deliver dinner and take back the dirty dishes. Laundry would also be picked up and returned through the tunnel system. Hayden notes:

“Austin’s designs emphasized economy of labor, materials, and space. She criticized the waste of time, strength, and money, which traditional houses with kitchens required, and the “hatefully monotonous” drudgery of preparing 1,095 meals a year and cleaning up after each one.

Again, the idea was to “free women from the drudgery of unpaid domestic work.” Like Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s vision, Austin’s community was for white people; Meg Conley writes,⁠“Applications to become a member of the commune were open exclusively to white socialists. The commune’s founder didn’t think it was ‘expedient to mix the races in these communities.”

Alexandra Kollontai

Fans of modern architecture are familiar with Moisei Ginzburg’s 1928 Narkomfin building; it influenced Le Corbusier’s designs for the Unité d’Habitation. It famously had no kitchens in the units, but instead had shared dining facilities. This reflected the thinking of the People’s Commissar for Welfare- Alexandra Kollontai.

Kollontai was born into a wealthy family but was radicalized early. She complains in her 1920 essay that women bear a triple burden of factory work, housework and childcare:

“The woman who is wife, mother and worker has to expend every ounce of energy to fulfil these roles. She has to work the same hours as her husband in some factory, printing-house or commercial establishment, and then on top of that, she has to find the time to attend to her household and look after her children. Capitalism has placed a crushing burden on woman’s shoulders: it has made her a wage-worker without having reduced her cares as housekeeper or mother. Woman staggers beneath the weight of this triple load.”

While in her grandmother’s time, women worked at home all day doing domestic labour, spinning cloth, and churning butter, she didn’t need to do that anymore.

“Nowadays, what working woman would think of making her own? In the first place, she doesn’t have the time. Time is money, and no one wants to waste time in an unproductive and useless manner. Few working women would start to pickle cucumbers or make other preserves when all these things can be bought in the shop.”

Kollontai wanted to liberate women from their domestic slavery and make their lives richer and happier. Lenin supported Kollontai and wrote in A Great Beginning, “Petty housework crushes, strangles and degrades … chains her to the kitchen. The real emancipation of women, real communism, will begin only where and when an all-out struggle begins…against this petty housekeeping.” Trotsky wrote in 1924: “Washing must be done by a public laundry, catering by a public restaurant, sewing by a public workshop.”

Unfortunately, Stalin disagreed with this, calling it “leftist excess” and “utopianism.” There were no more constructivist modern buildings, and women were stuck with their triple burden. Kollontai complained that “the revolution has brought rights for women on paper, but in fact has only made life more burdensome for them.” However, she came to toe the Stalinist line and died of old age, unlike many of her radical contemporaries.

And to this day, women still mostly bear the triple burden of cooking, childcare, and work.

Today, from Toronto to Tokyo, you can buy ready-to-eat foods just about anywhere. The supermarkets are filled with fresh and frozen dinners. Uber Eats and DoorDash will bring you anything you need in a few minutes. For many people, especially in homes with working women, the kitchen is now little more than an unpacking, reheating, and snacking station. It’s not what Gilman or Kollontai envisioned, but it is a world where women can be, as Peirce imagined 150 years ago, “economically self-sufficient and emotionally independent of men” and have the option not to cook. Some will complain that this is awful; I am not looking forward to the comments.

I wish we had Austin’s tunnels to take all the dishes back. I wish we had a replicator from Star Trek and could just order up Tea, Earl Grey, Hot or a sundae. But we don’t. At least these alternatives are reducing that triple burden, and that’s not a bad thing for those who need it.

Next, the designers: Catherine Beecher, Christine Frederick, Lillian Gilbreth and Grete Lihotzky.

Originally written in 2023; redated to come up first in the queue.

While wrapping up the draft of my new book tentatively titled “The Story of Upfront Carbon,” I prepared to export it from my beloved Scrivener writing program to the horrid Microsoft Word that my publisher uses. I looked back at my previous book ideas sitting in Scrivener, which I started and pitched but never got published for some reason or another, probably because I never could pay much attention to them when writing full-time for Treehugger. My first was to be a history of the bathroom, then one on healthy homes, and then when the pandemic hit, I tried to roll them all into one, which I called The New Manual of the Dwelling, a play on Le Corbusier’s Manual of the Dwelling published in 1927. I have decided to serialize it here every Friday; Charles Dickens did this with his books for reasons explained by Professor Joel J. Brattin:

“Publishing his novels in serial form expanded Dickens’s readership, as more people could afford to buy fiction on the installment plan; publishers, too, liked the idea, as it allowed them to increase sales and to offer advertisements in the serial parts.  And Dickens enjoyed the intimacy with his audience that serialization provided.”

I like the idea of expanded readership, encouraging subscriptions (starting in May! $5 per month!) and comments, and this is a subject that I think will encourage comments and discussion, if not the occasional scream. So here goes with Chapter 1:

Towards a new architecture was the English title for Le Corbusier’s Vers une architecture, a collection of essays written for a magazine starting in 1921. In a chapter extolling the virtues of airplanes, he notes that everything about an airplane “lies in the logic which governed the enunciation of the problem and which led to its successful realization.” It is a machine for flying. Le Corbusier believed that a house should be a machine for living, with every part as useful and as well-resolved as the airplane. In this chapter on airplanes, he also included barely a page and a half of “an urgent appeal to architects; they should have The Manual of the Dwelling printed and distributed to mothers of families and should demand the resignation of all the professors in the architecture schools.”

This short Manual of the Dwelling holds up rather well 90 years later, with advice like “keep your odds and ends in drawers or cabinets” or “if you want to see bad taste, go into the houses of the rich. Put only a few pictures on your walls and none but good ones.” Then there is “teach your children that a house is only habitable when it is full of light and air, and when the floors and walls are clear.” Or the last:  “Bear in mind economy in your actions, your household management and in your thoughts.”

In Le Corbusier’s beloved airplanes, everything was about efficiency and economy; pilots then and now had to know the weight of everything and the exact amount of fuel to get that plane and its contents to its destination. Airlines today spend billions on new planes that squeeze out the most passenger-miles per pound of fuel.  If you didn’t have enough fuel, you had a serious problem.

Today, we have a different kind of fuel problem- we have to stop burning it, we have to stop releasing the carbon dioxide that is cooking the planet. That means thinking about radical efficiencies, rethinking both the design of our houses and where we put them.

Le Corbusier was also thinking about design in the aftermath of the flu pandemic and the ongoing tuberculosis crisis that spawned the modern movement. Although some see the light at the end of the Covid-19 tunnel, we may well face yet another crisis of antibiotic resistance or a different pandemic.

We have always depended on our homes, which, as Le Corbusier noted, are “a shelter against heat, cold, rain, thieves and the inquisitive." But today, the heat, cold, and rain are changing around us. The methods that we have used to stay warm or cool inside are now contributing to the problems outside. The thieves and the inquisitive are not kept out by mere walls and locks, and the coronavirus has demonstrated that there are new threats to our health and wellbeing that we have never considered in our home design.

Le Corbusier was right; a house is a machine for living.  Today, we have to build a better, more efficient machine.  That’s why I will try to update The Manual of the Dwelling for a different time. Can we fix this problem before it’s too late? One last airplane analogy from Le Corbusier in 1927:

The airplane shows us that a problem well stated finds its solution. To wish to fly like a bird is to state the problem badly… To invent a flying machine having in mind nothing alien to pure mechanics, that is to say, to search for a means of suspension in the air and a means of propulsion, was to put the problem properly: in less than ten years, the whole world could fly.

It took a world war to change the airplane in 10 years, and we are in a dire crisis now to cut our carbon emissions in half in less than 10 years and to zero in 30. That is the problem, not particularly well stated.

Consider what follows to be a manual for understanding the homes we have today, and what they must become – resilient in the face of change, supportive of our health and well-being. Efficient but, more importantly, sufficient – just what we need to be happy, healthy, and comfortable.

Next week: Chapter 2- What is comfort?

The last time I saw my friend Monte Paulsen alive was in Denver in 2023 when he was doing a test run of his three-hour lecture on Passivhaus design in a heating world. He called for “windows with purpose”-

“Over-glazing brings high heat loss, overheating, storm damage, and costs more. Only place a window where it has a specific purpose and where it is the best solution to serve that purpose. Common purposes: light, view, ventilation.”

Today, we have LED lights and mechanical ventilation. We even have TV screens where you can choose your view. So, what is the purpose of a window?

200 years ago, this would have been a silly question. Windows were a hard-working, carefully thought-out piece of climate control. They were often double-hung so that they could be tuned to maximize ventilation. There would be two in every room for cross-ventilation. They had operable shutters for shading, security and privacy while still maintaining ventilation. There was an overhanging cornice to keep the rain off. There might be a sheer drape inside to cut glare and heavy drapes for keeping in the heat in winter. They were tall to let light deep into the room. But they didn’t come down too close to the floor; glass was expensive, and you didn’t make the window any bigger than it had to be. This was a hard-working, carefully thought-out piece of climate control. There is not a motor to be seen, and 200 years later, it still works.

Today, window size and design are primarily a matter of aesthetics, and designers make them too big. This is a problem as a good window is thermally worse than a bad wall. Windows are expensive, and they have high upfront carbon emissions. Which brings us back to Monte’s question: What is the purpose of a window? How do you address Monte’s three common purposes?

Light

Historically, glass was expensive and came in small pieces, assembled into windows with lead strips. In most homes, openings were sealed with shutters, if they were sealed at all; before chimneys were developed in the 16^th century in England, you needed a lot of fresh air and openings to let the smoke out. It wasn’t until the 17^th century, with the introduction of crown glass in^⁠1 that we got bigger panes and sash windows^⁠2 and it took until the 18^th century to get our double-hung “six over six” windows that became almost the standard.

Now, windows could admit lots of light, and the introduction of chimneys and stoves meant that buildings and homes could be sealed, giving us comfort as well. Alas, like solar power today, they didn’t work at night. But in the daytime, it was plentiful and free. In England, it is even protected as “ancient light.”^⁠3 Artificial light, on the other hand, was incredibly expensive; according to research by William Nordhaus,^⁠4 awful and smelly tallow candles cost 40 cents in modern money per 1000 lumen-hours; a decent sperm-whale oil light cost $1.60 per thousand lumen-hours in 1855. Edison’s electric filament bulb changed everything, dropping the price to 6 cents by 1990.

However, that Edison bulb still needed lots of electricity to run, and until recently, most of that electricity came from burning coal. Throughout the energy crisis, architects and engineers developed elaborate schemes for maximizing daylight, including light shelves, light tubes and pipes, and even fibre optics to bring daylight into interior spaces.

There are studies^⁠5 recommending we “Replace artificial light with daylighting and use lighting sensors to avoid demand for lumens from artificial light.” But that is no longer true; we have to change the way we think about the modern window and daylighting.

Light-emitting diodes (LEDs) and cleaner electricity turn everything on its head; running a thousand-lumen LED costs a tenth of a cent in 2024 dollars per thousand lumen-hours, probably half that in Nordhaus’s 1996 dollars. It’s essentially free. A window, on the other hand, is not free; you might get the light, but you also have heat loss or heat gain. I tried to do the math and figure out how much a window admitting a thousand lumens cost in terms of additional heating or cooling, and it was beyond me; I put the question to engineer Nick Grant, who responded:

"Quite possible that modern LEDs could be more efficient than windows, but I’d take that as a reason not to overdo the windows rather than to avoid windows! In terms of doing the sums you could prove anything depending on assumptions. Despite my banging on about efficiency and sufficiency, I’m partial to the odd window placed for a Zen view or mid-winter sunbeam that does nothing for heating or daylight but lifts the spirits.”

Circadian Rhythms

Nick, the engineer, makes a very un-engineer-like point. One reason that daylight lifts the spirits is it changes through the course of the day and our bodies and minds respond to this. Helen Sanders and Pekka Hakkarainen wrote in 2014:^⁠6

“Over recent years, a large amount of data has accumulated demonstrating the harmful effects on human health due to lack of daylight and exterior views. The human body’s circadian rhythms not only manage sleep-wake cycles, but also many other important biological functions of the body such as hormone production, weight management, and immune systems. The production and suppression of melatonin is key to the regulation of these functions, and this is triggered by the light-dark cycles of daylight.”

This was confirmed in 2017 with the Nobel Prize for Medicine, given to Jeffrey C. Hall, Michael Rosbash and Michael W. Young for figuring out circadian rhythms. From the Nobel announcement:

“The biological clock is involved in many aspects of our complex physiology. We now know that all multicellular organisms, including humans, utilize a similar mechanism to control circadian rhythms. A large proportion of our genes are regulated by the biological clock and, consequently, a carefully calibrated circadian rhythm adapts our physiology to the different phases of the day. Since the seminal discoveries by the three laureates, circadian biology has developed into a vast and highly dynamic research field, with implications for our health and wellbeing.”

In his recent book, Constructing Health, architect Tye Farrow notes the importance of natural light:

“One compelling study connecting light with human performance compared the test scores of more than 20,000 students, primarily on the West Coast of the United States. It found that students with the most balanced daylight in their classrooms performed 20 percent better in math tests and over 25 percent faster on reading tests than students in classrooms with poor lighting or glare."

As Debra Burnet, a daylighting designer and specialist on the impact of daylight on human health and well-being, noted in Construction Specifier, “Daylight is a drug, and nature is the dispensing physician.” We need that drug, even in our bedrooms.

Biophilia

The term Biophilia was coined by psychologist Erich Fromm and popularized by E.O. Wilson in his 1984 book “biophilia.” He described it as “humanity’s innate response to nature and connection to natural systems.” It means "love of life" and suggests that there are significant health benefits to being able to see plants and trees. I thought it all a bit touchy-feely until I interviewed architect Tye Farrow, who studied neuroscience as well as architecture and writes:

"Experiencing nature—in ways as simple as a stroll in the woods—is proven to improve physical and mental health in myriad ways. The natural experience lowers blood pressure, reduces heart rate and muscle tension. It reduces anxiety, increases emotional resiliency and boosts the sense of well-being. Architecture and design that is inspired by nature and the natural world can bring these health-promoting advantages to visitors. Examples include the use of natural light, natural materials, and shapes and structures that are reminiscent of natural spaces."

Richard Neutra preached “bio-realism” to capture “the inherent and inseparable relationship between man and nature.” He tried to make windows disappear so that inside became outside, often supporting the roof with a “spider leg” way outside of the building so you couldn’t tell where it started and where it ended. I would argue rather that a window should act like a picture frame.

Happiness and connection

Fascinating research^⁠7 by Kiran Maini Gerhardsson and Thorbjörn Laike in Sweden found that windows provide much more than light and air;

"Windows represent an enjoyment of the home and fulfil much more than physical needs. They must allow sufficient personal control over fresh and cool air, sound, sunlight, streetlighting and privacy."

Interviewees preferred natural light "because it varies, increases room brightness and improves mood." The authors conclude:

There is much more to such experiences than the satisfaction of physical needs (modulating indoor temperatures, blocking exterior noise or enabling visual tasks). Perceiving a room to be adequately daylit, pleasant and spacious seems to be equally essential, and a view of the world outside brings information to inhabitants. However, windows also need to screen the gaze of people outside from peering in, moderate bright sunlight during the day.

Ventilation

When I was a baby, my mother would put me in a hamper out on the fire escape of her Chicago apartment to get my daily requirement of fresh air, even in the middle of winter. Once, the cleaning woman in the apartment upstairs dumped a bucket of dirty water out the window and soaked me; I almost froze to death. But it was a common belief that children should be aired and that people should sleep with the windows open, even in winter. Doctor Benjamin Spock, whose 1946 book “Baby and Child Care” was the bible for bringing up boomers, wrote:

Changes in air temperature help tone up the body's system for adapting to cold or heat. A bank clerk is much more likely to become chilled staying outdoors in winter than a lumberjack. A baby living continuously in a warm room usually has a pasty complexion and may have a sluggish appetite.

My mom believed all this. Before I was born, my parents lived in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and my mom had a brand new Studebaker convertible. She also had a bum knee from a ski accident and found walking painful, so she would put my sister in the back seat and drive around Fort Wayne with the top down in the middle of winter- my dad would get calls at work about his crazy wife. But she believed Dr. Spock:

Cool or cold air improves appetite, puts color in the cheeks, and gives more pep to humans of all ages.... I can't help but believe in the tradition.

Where did the tradition come from? Dr. Spock probably got it from Dr. Luther Emmett Holt, who wrote “The Care and Feeding of Children”^⁠1 in the 1890s. Dr. Holt prescribed "airing" of babies and children, keeping rooms very cool, and sleeping with windows open unless it is below freezing. Airing the baby meant dressing her up and opening all the windows, even in winter, starting when the child was a month old. His book was written as a Q and A:

Of what advantage to the child is going out? -Fresh air is required to renew and purify the blood, and this is just as necessary for health and growth as proper food.

What are the effects produced in infants by fresh air? -The appetite is improved, the digestion is better, the cheeks become red, and all signs of health are seen.

Dr. Holt had firm ideas about temperature:

At what temperature should a nursery be kept during the day? -Best, 66° to 68° F., measured by a thermometer hanging three feet from the floor. Never should the temperature be allowed to go above 70° F.

At what temperature during the night? -During the first two or three months, not below 65° F. After three months the temperature may go as low as 55° F. After the first year it may be 50° or even 45° F.

Then there was Dr. Joseph Edwards, who believed we should all live in tents, or as close to it as possible. In his book, How We Ought to Live^⁠2, he writes:

“I am sure we would all enjoy better health, if houses were unknown, and we lived in tents or in the open air, as animal life in a state of nature is accustomed to do.”

Where today, architects and Passivhaus nerds try to make houses as airtight as possible, Edwards wanted them leaky, certainly not to Passivhaus standards: "Natural ventilation by means of window and door cracks, the porous walls etc, will change and purify this air three times in the course of an hour."

And windows? Too much is never enough.

“Large windows and large doors will help much to make a healthy house. You cannot have them too wide and too high. You remember what I said about tent life. The larger you make your openings, the nearer will your house approach a tent.”

Then, we have the response to the Influenza pandemic of 1918. In Europe, we had the sanitarium movement and the birth of modernism, with Aalto, Le Corbusier and Pierre Charreau promoting light, air and openness; Neutra brought it to America with his Lovell Health House. But there was also the Fresh Air Movement, which advised citizens to "Keep your bedroom windows open [to] prevent influenza, pneumonia [and] tuberculosis." According to heating expert and author Dan Holohan^⁠3, engineers designed heating systems “for the coldest day of the year with the wind blowing and the windows open”

Of course, there was a price to pay for this in coal, and there is a price to pay today in energy losses and carbon emissions. Natural ventilation also isn’t helpful when the outside air is dirtier than the inside air from PM2.5 emitted from car exhaust or forest fires.

Natural ventilation also doesn’t really work unless you have cross-ventilation. As Ted Kesik’s drawing shows, a single window opening, as shown on the bottom left, means there is very little effective ventilation.

It is also no longer enough in a heating climate; as Monte Paulsen noted, “every multi-family building requires external shading as well as mechanical cooling to remain habitable in the coming decade.”

My mom listened to Dr. Spock, but today, we should all be listening to Monte Paulsen.

Upfront Carbon and Windows

Today, we can build our homes out of wood and straw, but our windows are still made of glass. In commercial buildings, the frames are often made of aluminum. They all have higher upfront carbon emissions than just about any other building product.

This is true whatever the frames are made of; it’s just a matter of degree. According to the BEAM calculator, a double-glazed window with a wood frame emits about 72 kg of CO2 per square meter; vinyl frames are at 86 kg/m2; wood with aluminum cladding, a very popular high-end window frame, are even greater at 99. They are all high.

Most high-performance windows are now triple-glazed, which makes the frames and hardware chunkier and heavier and increases the amount of glass by 50%. According to the BEAM calculator, this cranks the wood frame window up to 85, vinyl up to 99, and aluminum-clad wood up to 112 kg/m2. Higher, but percentage-wise, not that much, about 12%

They are all high, and what matters is not how good but how much. In my favourite study by Hannes Gauch, “What really matters in multi-storey building design?”^⁠4 it is all about the window-to-wall ratio.

“Decisions concerning windows are most influential for heating and cooling loads, especially the window-to-wall ratio. While higher window-to-wall ratios decrease all three efficiency metrics, windows with lower U-values (triple and quadruple glazing) entail higher costs. This suggests a non-negligible trade-off between energy efficiency and construction costs.”

Choice of window frame material, coatings, double or triple glazing, or gas fill all matter, especially if you are aiming for the tough Passivhaus standard. However, you can’t get around the fundamental truth; the main determinant of the upfront carbon of windows is their size.

Heat

Windows have been considered a source of heat forever, but architects got serious about it a hundred or so years ago. Tony Denzer writes in his book The Solar House:

“ I begin in the 1930s because the solar house is a distinctly modern concept. Surely it is fascinating to study the sun-responsive features of some ancient and premodern vernacular buildings, and it is not incorrect to observe that "our building history is a history of solar architecture," as Richard G. Stein has written. Still, the phrase "solar house," first used in 1940, specifically describes a building that uses solar energy for space heating in a deliberate critical and creative manner.”

An important early example known to many architects was Frank Lloyd Wright’s 1942 Solar Hemicycle or Jacobs II house. It was an early attempt at the “mass and glass” formula where south-facing floor-to-ceiling windows admitted sunlight, which would warm the floor and stone walls. Double-glazing didn’t exist so even with heavy curtains, the house cooled off at night. Denzer writes that the family would all get dressed in the bathroom, the only room with a radiator.

Things got better in the late forties when Libby-Owens-Ford invented Thermopane and promoted it with booklets like Solar Houses: An Architectural Lift in Living. Denzer writes:

Promoting the solar house served a powerful self-interest for Libbey-Owens-Ford-they would sell "acres more of glass." In a thorough conflation of public education and marketing, the booklet advertised an insulated double-glass unit called "Thermopane." Commercial motives aside, Thermopane legitimately constituted a major technological advance. Previously, with single-pane windows, large glass areas proved impractical in most regions because of heat losses at night. By reducing those losses, Thermopane made it feasible for homebuilders in cold climates to use more glass.

This drawing was drilled into our heads: south facing windows with a proper roof overhang and thermal mass in the floor was the way you design a house, to maximize the sholar gain.

Mass and glass would continue to be an important strategy for solar homes when they were all the rage among hippie architects in the seventies, even though Rob Dumont, who built the Saskatchewan Conservation House (a prototype Passivhaus) definitively proved that insulation worked better. As building science expert Joe Lstiburek noted,

“Let me remind you youngsters…‘light and tight’ beat ‘mass and glass’… We learned a bunch of things in the 1970’s and 1980’s with thermal mass. Wait for it…thermal mass is not insulation…it just stores and releases energy.”

Notwithstanding the work of Rob Dumont, the Passivhaus people still calculate the heat from the sun as an energy source, as this 2010 drawing with no shading demonstrates. They don’t have the heat loss problem that Frank Lloyd Wright had with our modern triple-glazed windows with thermally broken frames; today, overheating is becoming the bigger problem.

In the end, we probably shouldn’t think of windows as a source of heat; as engineer Nick Grant has noted, windows can cause “overheating in summer, heat loss in winter, reduced privacy, less space for storage and furniture, and more glass to clean.” He suggests that “size and position are dictated by views and daylight.” It’s a tough call; here is how Libby-Owens Ford sold it in 1946:

Aesthetics

So far in this section, we have discounted the use of windows for solar gain, ventilation, and even lighting; we’re down to carefully framed views of vegetation for biophilia and the sky for circadian rhythms. So what’s left? What is the purpose of a window? Martin Holladay of Green Building Advisor wrote in 2015^⁠5 that window size “should be limited to that necessary to meet the functional and aesthetic needs of the building.”

It turns out that every extra square foot of glazing beyond what is needed “to meet the functional and aesthetic needs of the building” is money down the drain. In a way, this advice is liberating: it compels the designer, secure in the knowledge that no technical or functional issues are at play, to think about aesthetic issues — and that’s almost always a good thing.

Actually, no, it’s not. Because when designers think about aesthetic issues, they tend to make the windows too big. Small windows with poor proportions can look terrible! But bigger windows increase costs, reduce energy efficiency, and crank up the upfront carbon emissions. That’s why engineer and Passivhaus consultant Nick Grant says windows can cause “overheating in summer, heat loss in winter, reduced privacy, less space for storage and furniture, and more glass to clean.” He suggests that “size and position are dictated by views and daylight.”

This can be problematic. Professors Jo Richardson and David Coley^⁠6 note that there is often resistance from designers: “If an architect starts by drawing a large window, then the energy loss from it might well be so great that any amount of insulation elsewhere can’t offset it. Architects don’t often welcome this intrusion of physics into the world of art.”

Sometimes, the math of Passivhaus forces architects to use smaller windows, and the architects have to get clever to compensate.

Mikhail Riches with Cathy Hawley pulled it off with the Stirling Prize-winning Goldsmith Street project. RIBA noted: "To be certified Passivhaus, the windows had to be smaller than the proportion in a Georgian or Victorian terrace, so the architects have used a set-back panel around the windows to give an enlarged feel.”

When I was touring Passivhaus buildings in Innsbruck, I saw many different attempts at dealing with smaller windows in big masses. Here, a frame of a different material surrounds an almost random placement of windows, which are themselves broken up into smaller panes.

Or we could just throw out those traditional ideas about proportion, scale and aesthetics. Christine Murray wrote in Dezeen, "It's time for architects to choose ethics over aesthetics.”^⁠7

Most architects are blase when it comes to climate change. I've often been told, "designing a building to last one-hundred years is the most sustainable thing you can do". Not only is this untrue, it's dangerous nonsense….. What is the point of firmness, commodity and delight in the face of crop failure, nothing to drink, or breathe? Forty per cent of insect species are in decline; if we lose them all, we have no pollination – nothing to eat – and the entire ecosystem collapses due to starvation. What matters is now, not whether your stone facade is still standing at the fall of mankind.

Professors Richardson and Cole, in their discussion of affordable efficient housing,^⁠8 call for “a revolution in what architects currently consider acceptable for how houses should look and feel. That’s a tall order – but decarbonising each component of society will take nothing short of a revolution.”

We have recently seen a bit of an aesthetic revolution, thanks to the Passivhaus movement. In a Passivhaus building, every bump or jog is a possible thermal bridge, and every square inch of glazing is accounted for- if you make a window bigger here, you might have to add more insulation there, or you might not hit the numbers and get to be certified Passivhaus. This has led to a new aesthetic of simple forms and what appear to be almost random window sizes, but that is, in fact, designed from the inside out.

Or is it a new aesthetic? Christopher Alexander wrote in A Pattern Language, “On no account use standard doors or windows. Make each window a different size, according to its place.”

UK architects Architype do this with their affordable housing, where they really don’t have a choice but to make windows of different sizes, according to use and place. Did they read A Pattern Language? Alexander also writes, “To feel safe on the upper storeys of a building, one wants more enclosure, smaller windows, higher sills- and the higher off the ground one is, the more one needs these psychological protections.” Here, we see bigger windows with lower sills on the main floor and smaller and higher windows above. All in a simple form.

Quebec architect Evelyne Bouchard does much the same thing in her own house in Quebec; she points to the asymmetrical window layout, saying she designs from the inside out.

I personally have come to appreciate this revolution in how buildings look. Others are not so sure about it being abandoned. Witold Rybczynski asks,^⁠9 “Why is architectural symmetry so satisfying?” It certainly has a long history.

“Symmetros is a Greek word, and ancient Greek architecture used symmetry as a basic organizing principle. As did Roman, Romanesque, and Renaissance. Indeed, it is hard to think of any architectural tradition, Western or non-Western, that does not include symmetry. Symmetry is something that Islamic mosques, Chinese pagodas, Hindu temples, Shinto shrines, and Gothic cathedrals have in common.”

Perhaps I should have been an engineer rather than an architect, but I see beauty in the asymmetry of windows designed around the need for light and view rather than repetition and symmetry. Bring on the aesthetic revolution!

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¹ https://www.gutenberg.org/files/15484/15484-h/15484-h.htm#Airing

² https://books.google.ca/books?id=N1YNAQAAMAAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=how+we+ought+to+live&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiokPKy7YTrAhVFgXIEHa7nDgAQuwUwAHoECAEQBg#v=onepage&q=how%20we%20ought%20to%20live&f=false

³ https://heatinghelp.com/store/detail/the-lost-art-of-steam-heating/

⁴ https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0306261922018426#ab005

⁵ https://www.greenbuildingadvisor.com/article/reassessing-passive-solar-design-principles

⁶ https://theconversation.com/labours-low-carbon-warm-homes-for-all-could-revolutionise-social-housing-experts-126329

⁷ https://www.dezeen.com/2019/03/28/opinion-christine-murray-climate-change/

⁸ https://theconversation.com/labours-low-carbon-warm-homes-for-all-could-revolutionise-social-housing-experts-126329

⁹ Slate https://slate.com/culture/2008/05/why-is-architectural-symmetry-so-satisfying.html

¹ https://www.thenbs.com/knowledge/windows-glass-glazing-a-brief-history

² https://www.thenbs.com/knowledge/windows-glass-glazing-a-brief-history

³ In the 90s when I was a real estate developer, a neighbour with a very old building tried to claim “ancient light” in Toronto, since the law existed in Ontario until 1890 and his building was older. He got laughed out of court but I thought he had a case..

⁴ https://www.nber.org/system/files/chapters/c6064/c6064.pdf

⁵ https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-021-01219-y

⁶ https://www.constructionspecifier.com/should-daylight-admissions-be-mandated-through-building-codes/

⁷ https://journal-buildingscities.org/articles/10.5334/bc.120

Based on Le Corbusier’s Manual of the Dwelling, this is a series where we develop a manual for understanding the homes we have today and what they must become – resilient in the face of change, supportive of our health and well-being. Efficient but, more importantly, sufficient – just what we need to be happy, healthy, and comfortable.

I have been writing about bathrooms for years, most recently about bidet toilet seats. So much is written about bathroom design, but almost nothing about a bathroom’s comfort, safety, or functionality. Or we talk about the entire room and never get into the details of a specific fixture, like the bathroom sink.

My wife Kelly and I hate our bathroom sink. Not its location in the hall between our sleeping area and the shower; I have done that in every house I lived in, not in homage to Le Corbusier, who famously did it in the entry of the Villa Savoye, but because it is practical, it can be used when someone is on the toilet or in the shower. I used to move an old china pedestal sink, much like Le Corbusier’s, from house to house.

This sink is terrible because of its shape and size. I didn’t think it would be a problem because nobody in North America actually fills a sink; they wash in the stream of water from the faucet. Alexander Kira noted in his 1966 book, The Bathroom, that this is the only effective wash method.

Proper rinsing (and cleansing) can be achieved only by using clean running water rather than a pool of water unless, of course, it is changed several times during the process. Since, in fact, the overwhelming majority of people today (94%) regularly wash their hands under a stream, this is not as much of an issue as it was in the past when the habits established during the era of the hand-filled washbasin still prevailed.

Yet, as Kira notes, the basic design of our bathroom sink is based on those hand-filled basins of 150 years ago; they just added faucets.

94% of Americans may wash their hands in the stream, but many still have separate taps. I was dismayed by the brand-new washrooms at the Royal Botanic Garden in Edinburgh- two taps and no stopper. How the hell do you wash your hands in this? If there was a stopper in a public washroom, would you use it? I got complaints from Caledonia when I asked, Why do the Scots have such terrible bathrooms? But this is seriously non-functional. (read more about this at the cleverly named bathroom site, The Privy Counsel.)

But even when the hot and cold are combined, modern sinks are problematic. Kira continues:

Most conventional lavatories (the American term for bathroom sink) are unfunctional since they are still nothing more than the old-fashioned wash basin fitted up with a water supply and drain and take no cognizance of the fact that when water was supplied, it changed our habits totally. Almost without exception, the water source is obviously intended solely for filling the basin… The result is that it is virtually impossible to get one’s hands under the stream and that one is forced to assume a tiring and uncomfortable posture because of the low heights at which lavatories have been traditionally mounted.

Having read Kira, I made the vanity higher and placed the faucet a foot above the sink so that there was lots of room. But I picked a small squarish bowl because I knew its function had changed to where it functions simply as a drain. I forgot about the later chapter where Kira writes, “toothpaste and spittle have a tendency to adhere tenaciously to a dry surface and require deliberate cleaning or a continuously washed surface, such as might be provided by some form of self-rinsing lavatory.” Our sink has corners and crannies that are hard to keep clean, and it is so small that the counter is covered in water and tenacious toothpaste.

Kira was by no means the first person to think of a self-rinsing sink. Around 1928, Alvar Aalto designed the sinks for the Paimio Sanatorium with a sloping back to minimize splashing, self-clean, and be silent. Please also note how high the faucet is to make it easy to get your hands under it. Rain Noe of Core77 quotes Aalto:

"…Incredibly small details can be used to alleviate people's suffering—[For example, the] washbasin. I strove to design a basin in which the water does not make a noise. The water falls on the porcelain sink at a sharp angle, making no sound to disturb the neighboring patient, as in the physically or mentally weakened condition, the impact of the environment is heightened."

I have never understood the point of double sinks in a bathroom, but Aalto made a case for it, along with a separate sink for spitting. According to the Paimo Sanitorium website, “The wash basin designed by Aalto was of a special type, and its structure made it possible to be used with as little noise as possible. In Paimio Sanatorium, every patient had their own wash basin, which at that time was a hygienic solution, even a luxury.”

I also liked the idea of a separate place to spit; I have often thought bathrooms should have a separate sink for brushing teeth so that we are not spitting into the sink that others will be using. But given that nobody is using the sink as a washbasin and are instead treating it as a drain, the dental sink is superfluous.

Kira designed a sink where the water came out of a spout and arced over to fall on a bump in the sink so it would be self-cleaning.

My doctor has a brand new office with what’s called an ICS or Infection Control Sink, which doesn’t splash and is self-cleaning.

“This sleek, modern and compact design received a Green Good Design 2013 Award from the Chicago Athenaeum: Museum of Architecture and Design and The European Centre for Architecture Art Design and Urban Studies and goes well with modern décor. You'll find American Standard Commercial Sinks wherever durability, dependability and beauty are on call. In hospitals, prisons, schools, ballparks and hotels, from main street to industrial boulevard, American Standard stands proud.”

Hospitals and prisons get all the well-designed, practical stuff, but what about homes? If I were doing my bathroom today, I would absolutely buy this sink.

However, Alexander Kira might have some trouble with it; he noted that “inadequate storage space in the bathroom has long been a major shortcoming.” He calls for at least a square foot of flat surface, and notes that with the increasing prevalence of electric toothbrushes and water-piks, (writing this in 1966!) There needs to be wiring and storage built in right behind the sink. The TV is a nice touch, too.

It shouldn’t be so hard; put the vanity height at 36”. Pick a sink that is easy to clean. Pick a faucet with lots of room between it and the sink. Make it big enough to catch everything. Put lots of storage right behind it. But good luck trying to find all this.

It makes me crazy; we have so many visions of the future of the bathroom, and they always have wonderful electronic screens built into the mirrors to tell you about your health, and then the sink is at knee height, and the toothbrush is on the counter. But nobody ever thinks about how a sink should actually work. It’s time we did.

Last April, I proposed a series of weekly posts called The New Manual of the Dwelling, a play on Le Corbusier’s Manual of the Dwelling published in 1927. I then produced exactly one post and got distracted, as is my wont. However, my post last week about kitchen islands was very much in this vein, so I am picking it up again, looking at parts of a home or building, starting with windows.

A recent blueskying by Jeremy raised the question of whether we need windows at all, particularly in bedrooms. It’s a good question in this modern world when you consider the traditional functions of a window, which are numerous. I looked at how they used to work in a Treehugger post.

“In 1810 glass was really expensive, so even though there was not much artificial light, they made windows as small as they could and still get enough light to see. They were double-hung so that you could tune them for maximum ventilation. They had shutters for security and privacy while maintaining ventilation, and interior sheer blinds to cut glare. There is an overhanging cornice to keep the rain off so that they would last longer. There would be at least two in every room for cross-ventilation, and heavy drapes in for keeping the heat in during winter. This was a hard-working, carefully thought-out piece of climate control. There is not a motor to be seen and 200 years later, it still works.”

But this isn’t the case anymore. We have better technology.

Light:

Windows are like solar panels, useless at night! We have LEDs now that can do the job 24-7. Some say that light from windows is free, but it’s not; you have heat loss and heat gain and the expensive window to pay for. LEDs are so efficient that they might well be cheaper.

Ventilation:

It only occurs when the window is open, which in many parts of the world is only part of the year. The outside air now is often dirtier than the inside. Architects and designers forgot how to design for natural ventilation years ago; even when they provide opening windows, there is no cross-ventilation, and they are almost useless, like Ted Kesik’s image on the lower left. We might well be better off with good quality mechanical ventilation with heat recovery ventilators and MERV 13 filters.

Heat:

For decades, from Frank Lloyd Wright through the Passive Solar designers in the 70s, designers tried to use large south-facing windows and a “mass-and-glass” approach to heat their homes with the sun. It often didn't work; When Frank Lloyd Wright did it in the Jacobs Hemicycle House, he didn't have double glazing, and the house would lose all its heat at night, even after the owners installed heavy curtains. In "The Solar House," Tony Denzer writes that the family would all get dressed in the bathroom, the only room with a radiator. A 2010 study covered by Martin Holladay of Green Building Advisor found that “south-facing windows are so expensive that the value of the heat gathered by the windows is too low to justify the cost of the windows.” Holladay concludes: “Every extra square foot of glazing beyond what is needed “to meet the functional and aesthetic needs of the building” is money down the drain.”

Aesthetics:

The problem with Holladay’s conclusion is that few tools in the architect’s aesthetic toolbox are more important than windows, and aesthetics are now driving this bus. Bigger windows often make better-looking buildings, and architects are often lost when they have to make them smaller. When the Province of Ontario put limits on the wall-to-window ratio, the architects couldn’t cope and started adding decorative elements, jogs, and bumps that probably ate up much of the energy savings from smaller windows. They can’t cope in Munich, either, with the ugliest building I have ever seen.

Professors Jo Richardson and David Coley make the case:

“If an architect starts by drawing a large window, then the energy loss from it might well be so great that any amount of insulation elsewhere can’t offset it. Architects don’t often welcome this intrusion of physics into the world of art.”

What is the purpose of a window?

The title of this post is a riff on a lecture Monte Paulsen of the Climate Ready Buildings Group gave in Denver at the Passive House Network Conference, covered earlier here. Monte noted:

“Over-glazing brings high heat loss, overheating, storm damage, and costs more. Only place a window where it has a specific purpose and where it is the best solution to serve that purpose. Common purposes: light, view, ventilation.”

Engineer Nick Grant says much the same thing: windows can cause “overheating in summer, heat loss in winter, reduced privacy, less space for storage and furniture, and more glass to clean.”

Given that I have already dispensed with light and ventilation, I suggest that in the end, it mostly comes down to view, to our connection with the outside. But this is critically important for several reasons:

Circadian Rhythms

We are seeing more and more windowless apartments and hotel rooms. There is no right to natural light for workers, who can spend eight hours a day or more in windowless offices or factories and get no exposure to natural light. Helen Sanders and Pekka Hakkarainen wrote in 2014:

Over recent years, a large amount of data has accumulated demonstrating the harmful effects on human health due to lack of daylight and exterior views. The human body’s circadian rhythms not only manage sleep-wake cycles, but also many other important biological functions of the body such as hormone production, weight management, and immune systems. The production and suppression of melatonin is key to the regulation of these functions, and this is triggered by the light-dark cycles of daylight.

This was confirmed in 2017 with the Nobel Prize for Medicine, given to Jeffrey C. Hall, Michael Rosbash and Michael W. Young for figuring out circadian rhythms. From the Nobel announcement:

“The biological clock is involved in many aspects of our complex physiology. We now know that all multicellular organisms, including humans, utilize a similar mechanism to control circadian rhythms. A large proportion of our genes are regulated by the biological clock and, consequently, a carefully calibrated circadian rhythm adapts our physiology to the different phases of the day. Since the seminal discoveries by the three laureates, circadian biology has developed into a vast and highly dynamic research field, with implications for our health and wellbeing.”

As Debra Burnet, a daylighting designer and specialist on the impact of daylight on human health and well-being, noted in Construction Specifier, “Daylight is a drug, and nature is the dispensing physician.” We need that drug, even in our bedrooms.

Biophilia

The term Biophilia was coined by psychologist Erich Fromm and popularized by E.O. Wilson in his 1984 book “biophilia.” It means "love of life" and suggests that there are significant health benefits to being able to see plants and trees. I thought it all a bit touchy-feely until I interviewed architect Tye Farrow, who studied neuroscience as well as architecture and writes:

"Experiencing nature—in ways as simple as a stroll in the woods—is proven to improve physical and mental health in myriad ways. The natural experience lowers blood pressure, reduces heart rate and muscle tension. It reduces anxiety, increases emotional resiliency and boosts the sense of well-being. Architecture and design that is inspired by nature and the natural world can bring these health-promoting advantages to visitors. Examples include the use of natural light, natural materials, and shapes and structures that are reminiscent of natural spaces."

See my interview of Tye on Youtube here.

Other social and psychological functions of windows

A wonderful Swedish study published in Buildings and Cities—"Windows: a study of residents’ perceptions and uses in Sweden"—looks at the many roles that windows play and the way people use them, exploring "daylight, the visual connection to the outside and the role of windows in the home during the day and night." It found that windows connect us to our community and society.

"Windows, transparent in both directions, enable the environmental conditions (social connection) to support the basic need for relatedness. For example, by following ‘window blind etiquette’, people show they care for others or want to be accepted by others. Autonomy is represented by participants’ own decisions on when to adjust daylight controls (blinds, curtains, external shades) to improve sleep, daylight or privacy.

I covered this in greater detail in Treehugger here.

Solutions: 1. Frame the windows

This is where it gets complicated. We want to reduce the window-to-wall ratio but still have acceptable aesthetics. I wrote earlier in Treehugger that I loved what PietriArchitectes did in Aubervilliers, France, putting a picture frame around the small windows. Picture frames have historically been considered an enhancement; picture frame historian Suzanne Smeaton wrote that “design elements echo and reinforce composition.”

Architect and passive house consultant Rob Harrison did this in the Park Passive House in 2013 by NK Architects, who wanted a big vertical window. Rob wrote: “I proposed, and as you can see, NK Architects executed my idea of chamfering a set of deep-set punched windows instead of the tall fixed window on the bay, using CFC-free polyiso to maintain a decent average R-value in the assembly."

If you can’t get the window proportion you want, there are still tricks like Mikhail Riches with Cathy Hawley pulled off with the Stirling Prize-winning Goldsmith Street project. RIBA noted: "To be certified Passivhaus, the windows had to be smaller than the proportion in a Georgian or Victorian terrace, so the architects have used a set-back panel around the windows to give an enlarged feel.”

Solution 2. Rethink our standards of beauty

When I first saw Architype Architects’ Callaughton Ash, an affordable housing project, I thought it demonstrated how simple forms and careful window choices were the solution to building efficient, affordable homes. The windows varied in size, and placement was determined by what was happening inside, not how it looked from the outside. I wrote in my review of the project:

“Windows are such an important architectural and aesthetic element, and hard to do when you are limited by cost and the math of Passivhaus, especially when starting with a box; it takes a good eye to pull it off. But instead of treating a window as a wall, as so many modernists do, think of it as a picture frame around a carefully chosen view. Or, as Nick Grant suggests, "size and position are dictated by views and daylight."

Back in the day when we had Twitter, I would have applied Bronwyn Barry’s hashtag, #BBB- Boxy But Beautiful.

Evelyne Bouchard of Tandem Architecture Ecologique gets this too; I wrote for Green Building Advisor: “Bouchard admits that most of her houses look similar on the exterior, i.e., “kind of boxy.” They are all about 20 to 24 ft. deep to allow the low winter sun to hit the back walls, and there are no fancy details. She also points to the asymmetrical window layout, saying she designs from the inside out.”

Windows are hard.

I have often written about windows and always try for a boffo finish. I can’t think of a better one than I have written before, so from my Treehugger post, Windows are Hard.

“The rules haven't changed in 500 years:

Keep the windows as small as you can get away with and still let in the light and views you want, with an eye for proportion and scale. And keep it simple.”

From my Treehugger post, Is LED Lighting More Energy-Efficient Than Daylighting From Windows?

“The Turkish playwright Mehmet Murat Ildan wrote, “Your desire to be near to window is your desire to be close to life!” They are wonderful things that should be in every habitable room. But we should measure their impact in well-being and happiness—not watts or lumens.”

From Green Building Advisor’s Rethinking Window Size:

Windows are complex, multifunctional, carbon-intensive, expensive, difficult to get right, and too often, designed primarily for aesthetics. I concur with the findings of professors Richardson and Coley: We must change how we look at the aesthetics of buildings and “drive a revolution in what architects currently consider acceptable for how houses should look and feel. That’s a tall order, but de-carbonizing each component of society will take nothing short of a revolution.”

This is part of a series where we develop a manual for understanding the homes we have today and what they must become – resilient in the face of change, supportive of our health and well-being. Efficient but, more importantly, sufficient – just what we need to be happy, healthy, and comfortable.

In her book X-Ray Architecture, Beatriz Colomina writes:

“Modernity was driven by illness. The engine of modern architecture was not a heroic, functional machine working its way across the globe, but a languid, fragile body suspended outside daily life in a protective cocoon of new technologies and geometries. It is the difficulty of each breath and therefore the treasure of each breath: the melancholy of modernity.”

The illness was tuberculosis. After Robert Koch figured out that a bacillus caused Tuberculosis back in 1882, and after the First World War and the Spanish Flu epidemic of 1918, Doctors knew what caused many diseases but didn’t have the drugs to deal with them. So essentially, they and the architects of the time fought disease with design. Colomina continues:

“Nineteenth-century architecture was demonized as unhealthy, and sun, light, ventilation, exercise, roof terraces, hygiene, and whiteness were offered as means to prevent, if not cure, tuberculosis. The publicity campaign of modern architecture was organized around contemporary beliefs about tuberculosis and fears of the disease. In his book The Radiant City of 1935, Le Corbusier dismisses the "natural ground" as "dispenser of rheumatism and tuberculosis" and declares it to be "the enemy of man." He insists on detaching buildings, with the help of pilotis, from the "wet, humid, ground where disease breeds" and using the roof as a garden for sunbathing and exercise.”

In Light, Air and Openness, written in 2008, the late architectural historian Paul Overy demonstrated that many of the features of modernist classics, and much of the furniture and the trends in interior design, are a direct response to disease, and a belief in the healing power of light, air and openness.

It started with the sanatorium movement, where buildings like Zonnestraal in Hilversum, the Netherlands, by Jan Duiker and Bernard Bijvoet, were designed to provide what was about the only thing that cured tuberculosis: rest, fresh air, and sunlight. Overy writes about how the design elements used in these hospital settings were transferred to homes:

Sanatoriums exerted a powerful hold on the imagination of modern architects and designers as building types and institutional models. Among the first to be designed in in “modern” or “modernist” style, purpose built sanatoriums for tuberculosis and other chronic diseases were some of the most technologically advanced buildings of the first decades of the 20th century. Combining associations of health, hygiene cleanliness (and easy-to-cleanness) modernity and machine like precision of operation, they were to have a major influence on modernist architecture and furniture design between the wars.

It was definitely a style: “The austere white rooms for the patients of sanatoriums were designed not only to be easy to clean but to appear to be spotlessly clean- potent visual symbols of hygiene and health.”

The basic rules of the hospital soon came to the home:

Dirt and dust harboured germs that must be destroyed by fresh air and sunlight. Homes should be cleaned thoroughly every day and windows and doors opened each morning to let in the sun and air, to destroy the germs. Heavy drapes and curtains, thick carpets and old furniture with decorative features that harboured dust and microbes should be thrown out and replaced with simple, easily cleaned modern furniture and light, easily washed curtains.

As noted last week, Le Corbusier preached this in his book, Towards A New Architecture:

Readers were urged to buy only practical furniture, never decorative pieces. “If you want to see bad taste, go into the houses of the rich.” Clutter was prohibited: “Keep your odds and ends in drawers or cabinets… a house is only habitable with it is full of light and air, and when the floors and walls are clear. Heavy furniture and thick carpets must be eliminated. “bear in mind economy in your actions, your household management and in your thoughts.”

Today, we worry about dust being full of flame retardants, and overstuffed furniture being full of bedbugs; it’s not just bacteria that one can fight with minimalism. That’s why furniture changed, moving away from carved wood and upholstered chairs; “Dust containing tubules and other bacilli lodged in upholstery, in crevices, and especially in decorative features, add as regarded as a particular enemy of hygiene to be eradicated at all costs.”

So Thonet made chairs out of bentwood and cane; Aalto used bent plywood; Marcel Breuer out of tubular steel. It was all designed to be washable, light and easy to move to get at those dust bunnies lurking underneath. Mies van der Rohe wrote of one of his tubular-steel chair designs that it could be “easily moved by anyone and because of its sled-like base it can simply be pushed across the floor.”

“It therefore promotes comfortable, practical living. It facilitates the cleaning of rooms and avoids inaccessible dusty corners. It offers no hiding place for dust and insects and therefore there is no furniture that meets modern sanitary demands better than tubular-steel furniture.”

The architects and planners of the twenties and thirties were worried about tuberculosis and prescribed modernism, light, air, cleanliness and openness. They were right; architecture, planning and public policy were surprisingly effective at dealing with disease, once it was figured out what caused it; in her book The Drugs Don’t work, Professor Dame Sally Davies writes:

Almost without exception, the decline in deaths from the biggest killers at the beginning of the twentieth century predates the introduction of antimicrobial drugs for civilian use at the end of the Second World War. Just over half the decline in infections diseases had occurred before 1931. The main influences on the decline of mortality were better nutrition, improved hygiene and sanitation, and less dense housing with all helped to prevent and to reduce transmission of infectious diseases.

The pandemic has taught us that our homes and our cities are no longer protecting us; we are no longer fighting disease with design. Colomina, writing about Alvar Aalto’s Paimio sanitarium, notes that “tuberculosis helped make modern architecture modern. It is not that modern architects made modern sanatoriums. Rather, Sanatoriums modernized architects.”

Today we have COVID-19 and climate change. We have learned about PM2.5 and PFAS and other pollutants. It’s time to modernize architects again in the face of our current threats and challenges.

Next: a look at some of the early attempts at healthy houses. Previously: