I love this house of steel and glass! There are just a few problems....

There is the upfront carbon, the lack of comfort, the flat roof, the giant fireplace, the energy consumption, but everything else is fabulous.

When I was recently in Innsbruck for the International Passive House conference, I talked with an architect about how my thinking about house design had changed. I used to love modern design with its flat roofs and big windows. I grew up reading my mom’s architectural and design magazines from the 50s and 60s and dreamed of Case Study Houses. Monsanto’s House of the Future at Disney World inspired me to become an architect. But I look at them differently now.

Still, I loved this old ad from Bethlehem Steel that recently popped up on my Pinterest feed. It asked: " Would your client like living in a steel-framed house?” I answered: Who wouldn’t?

“Steel permits freedom of design. Curtain walls offer dramatic possibilities.. for instance, huge glass panels and sliding glass doors can be placed between the steel columns to bring the outdoors in. Problem sites. With steel, you can build over the terrain, elevating the house on steel stilts. How about time? A fabricating shop can prepare the steel in a few days; most likely, the entire frame can be put up in a matter of hours.

What’s not to love?

The plan is a wonder, too: a bathroom for each bedroom AND a powder room! More toilets than people! I am not crazy about putting the kitchen four steps up from the sunken dining room and then back up to the living room, but I love the separate dining.

And what a living room it is, with a giant hanging fireplace and circular sofa around it.

I can imagine everyone sitting around, cigarettes and drinks in hand, barbecuing thick, juicy steaks over charcoal inside the house. And unlike architect A. Quincy Jones, the Bethlehem steel house has a hood and a chimney!

So why don’t I love this anymore? Quincy Jones is in Los Angeles, so he probably doesn’t have to worry about his heating bill, although air quality might be an issue.

It’s an energy hog

Photo Maxime Brouillet

Architects are still designing modern glass houses, and this one by Atelier Pierre Thibault is in frigid Quebec. It was described on V2com:

"Situated on the majestic lake in the Southern Eastern Townships, Lake Brome Residence was first inspired by a large, outdoor, covered terrace where the family could live immersed in nature. The single-level dwelling, designed with floor-to-ceiling windows, takes full advantage of the sweeping lakeside views and surrounding mountainous landscape."  

Photo Maxime Brouillet

It’s hard to heat or cool a house made of glass, but hey, that’s why we have what Rayner Banham called "a neat box with control knobs and a mains [electrical] connection." He wrote in 1969:

"By providing almost total control of the atmospheric variables of temperature, humidity and purity, it has demolished almost all of the environmental constraints on design that have survived that other great breakthrough, electric lighting. For anyone who is prepared to foot the consequent bill for power consumed, it is now possible to live in almost any type or form of house one likes to name in any region of the world that takes the fancy. Given this convenient climactic package one may live under low ceilings in the humid tropics, behind thin walls in the arctic and under uninsulated roofs in the desert." 

This gorgeous house fits right into that category, but in my look at it earlier, I noted that it is in Quebec, blessed with vast resources of carbon-free hydroelectric power. I wondered, does that give the architect and owner carte blanche to use as much energy as they want or can afford?

Evelyne Bouchard of Tandem Architecture Ecologique is also working in Quebec, and designs a very different house, also running on green electrons but with very low energy consumption. For Green Building Advisor, I asked her why she went to the trouble, and she told me:

“It’s true that the operational carbon of an all-electric building in Quebec is quite low, even if the building isn’t particularly efficient, thanks to our relatively ‘clean’ grid. This is where context matters: freeing up some of the electrical grid’s capacity by making buildings more efficient makes it possible for other sectors, such as transportation or industry, to switch from fossil fuels to electricity. In places that are still working to decarbonize their electricity system, energy-efficient buildings can help to make the challenge of scaling up renewables and grid capacity more manageable. Even Hydro-Québec has recently been considering building new hydro dams or reactivating an old nuclear plant to meet growing demand. That puts the cost of more efficient buildings into a whole other context.”

So, even with green electrons, energy consumption still matters, and glass boxes are still problematic.

There are tonnes of Upfront Carbon

There are advantages to building with steel (and I have always liked houses built on stilts), but steel production is responsible for 8% of global carbon emissions and 25% of all industrial emissions. Saying it’s recycled (as much structural steel is) doesn’t get you out of jail free because there will be more primary demand. We really want to build like Evelyne Bouchard did, out of wood and cellulose insulation, because, even though some say adding more insulation could enlarge the upfront carbon footprint, Bouchard says:

“It is possible to design a building that achieves exemplary energy efficiency with lower embodied carbon than an ordinary building designed to the code minimum, but we need to be careful about our material choices. We can have our cake and eat it too (yay!), but we need to choose the ingredients carefully.”

It needs a Good Hat

In the Treehugger post with my favourite title of all time, I questioned why so many modern buildings no longer have roof overhangs. There is an old English expression from an 1857 cob house builder: “A cob wall will last forever if it has a good hat and a good pair of boots.” This is true for any building; a good hat will have a deep overhang to keep water off the walls. And the roof shouldn’t be flat; the architect I was speaking with in Innsbruck thought flat roofs should be banned, noting that “it’s not if a flat roof will leak, it’s when.” A good hat will be steep to shed water and snow more easily.

In Quebec, where there is a lot of snow, and you want to shed it with steep roofs, they developed the bell-cast profile. The roof is steep at the top and then bells out at the bottom to get enough overhang to keep the rain and snow further away from the house. The metal is nice, too.

And if you are going to pretend your house is Net Zero Ready, how about designing it without the stupid hip roof design that complicates the solar panel installation, having the house face the sun so you aren’t having the panels face two directions, and making it the right slope for the latitude. This is in Guelph, Ontario, so it should be about 45 degrees.

Walls of Glass are Transparently Wrong

Nick Grant

Windows are much more expensive than walls and are lovely things, but truly a case of where you can have too much of a good thing. In Green Building Advisor I wrote: “Windows are complex, multifunctional, carbon-intensive, expensive, difficult to get right, and too often they are designed primarily for aesthetics.” Windows are hard.

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.”

So I am afraid I have to forget about the glass walls.

It isn’t going to be comfortable

Robert Bean

I learned from Robert Bean that contrary to what Rayner Banham said, you cannot get comfort from a box with knobs. You get it from the quality of the building envelope and its Mean Radiant Temperature.

"Thermal comfort does not come in a furnace or air conditioner nor is it a thermostat reading of 72°F (22°C)…as much as consumers have been led to believe that you can buy thermal comfort - you can't…you can only buy combinations of buildings and HVAC systems, which if selected and coordinated properly can create the necessary conditions for your body to perceive thermal comfort."

I learned from Allison Bailes III that you shouldn’t jump on the bed naked in front of a big window.

“Every object radiates heat. The amount of radiant heat it gives off depends on its temperature (to the 4th power!), surface area, and emissivity. So our naked man jumping on the bed in front of the single pane window is giving off not only more views than he’s getting back but also more heat. The surface of the window is much colder and gives off far less heat, so the net flow of radiant heat is away from the man in his birthday suit. He’s cold!”

That’s the Mean Radiant Temperature.

I learned from Lisa Heschong that what you feel when you are warm or cold is not the temperature but the heat loss or heat gain on your skin.

"There is a basic difference between our thermal sense and our other senses. When our thermal sensors tell us that an object is cold, that object is already making us colder. If, on the other hand, I look at a red object it won't make me grow redder, nor with touching a bumpy object make me bumpy. Thermal information is never neutral; it always reflects what is happening directly to the body. This is because the thermal nerve endings are heat-flow sensors, not temperature sensors. They can't tell directly what the temperature of something is; rather, they monitor how quickly our bodies are losing or gaining heat."

Nobody gets this. Many architects don’t get it, mechanical contractors and designers don’t get it (they will just sell you more equipment), and the clients don’t get it or believe it. And since there is always someone who will talk up the comfort potential of a smart thermostat or a radiant floor, it is hard to convince people that it is really all about the quality of their wall or window.

And the main point is that you do not want a wall made of glass. You will be hot or cold but definitely uncomfortable. Even in Los Angeles these days.

I could go on, talking about air quality (no fireplaces! No barbecuing in the house!), the building form (make it square!), the size and number of bathrooms (Sufficiency! How much do you need?), Or even the location (you have to drive for everything!).

But this is enough to make the point: These houses were lovely to look at (download this wonderful book from the Internet Archives, there are some great houses in it, and a good putting carpet), but there are many good reasons why we don’t do this anymore.