How to be green and stay sane - why we must build to better standards.
By Sarah Lonsdale 'The Telegraph'
My husband's Norwegian cousin, Hans Thomas Meinich, lives in a 100-year-old wooden house in Lillehammer, where winter temperatures can drop to -25C (-13F). Despite the cold, he and his wife, Sidsel, get by with one wood-burning stove which heats the whole house beautifully, his little silver birch copse providing all the wood he needs.
When he comes to stay he remarks that English houses are always so cold.
I've been thinking about Hans Thomas and his cosy home this winter, while here the green debate gets mired in a mixture of eco-fatigue and economic uncertainty.
Back in 1915, when Hans Thomas's house was built, nobody had even imagined a world where people measured and traded in carbon emissions and put slivers of silicon on their roofs to convert sunlight into electricity. They just built houses like that because they wanted to keep warm, at a minimum cost.
We've had the know-how to build homes with little or no heating requirements for centuries ....Continued via 'The Telegraph'
Extraordinary: Suffolk’s Balancing Barn, above, achieves energy-efficiency levels 20 per cent higher than current regulations; while Low2No in Helsinki, above right, is aiming to be carbon negative within six years of its scheduled completion in 2014
