[Peakoil] Public talk by Derek Wrigley: The integrated solar house and the future of suburbia

[Nature and Society Forum]

Talk by DFW to NSF in MayDerek Wrigley is very alive to the problems of peak oil and climate change. This talk will be of interest to those who are looking at domestic comfort after the end of cheap oil.

Public talk: The integrated solar house and the future of suburbia
By: Derek Wrigley, architect and author of "Making Your Home Sustainable"
Date: Wednesday 17 May 2006
Time: 7:30 pm to 9:00pm
Venue: The Emeritus Faculty rooms, Building 3T ANU campus
Map showing venue: http://campusmap.anu.edu.au/displaymap.asp?grid=cd32

Derek has provided the following synopsis of his talk:

We have been willingly seduced into becoming an effluent society and the physical state of the world now requires a lot of urgent rethinking of what we have all taken for granted - particularly in the design of housing. 

Global warming and the resultant climate changes will soon give us no choice but to explore the use of our only free source of energy - the sun - and to use its several manifestations in more beneficial ways. 200 years of Australian architecture has tended to think of the sun as its enemy rather than its friend and this will almost certainly have to be reversed.

The housing industry has so far ignored many of the findings of building science research and we are going along an illogical road of smaller block sizes with anti-solar orientations (which prevent the building of solar effective houses), larger houses (despite the decreasing size of families), increasing use of energy (and pollution), enormous mortgages (which have reached the limits of affordability) and technology being tentatively stuck on to houses in a disintegrated way. Something has to give.

The bureaucratic rhetoric of 'sustainable growth' is somewhat oxymoronic in a finite world and impossible to achieve, but housing development on the ground and the wants of society are going in the opposite direction, yet continue to be approved. 

The looming oil crisis + climate change will almost certainly force a rethink toward self-reliance in house design as well as re-orientation of our personal mindsets and lifestyles.

Schumacher's small and beautiful 'appropriate technology' of the 1960s, needs to be resurrected toward self-reliant house design, requiring us to think more simply and to choose more wisely.

Better house design need not cost the Earth.
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Keith Thomas
Nature and Society Forum
(02) 6288 0760 (Weekday mornings only);  0412 487 625 (Mobile)
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