Casa Pixie

At a party of friends of ours, we met R, a friend of friends. You know, one of these people you meet once in a while. A small detail about this person, R is an architect.

Of course we’re not the kind of people that will start talking about our own building project. Our friends did that for us. ‘These are the people that will be building that ecological strawbale building’, they said enthusiastically. The reaction of our friend the architect was a real bummer: ‘I wouldn’t want to do that,’ he said. When we asked him if he knew about the principles of strawbale building he referred to Bokrijk, a famous historical site in Belgium. What can we say?

This guy took care of the retrofitting of our friends home. He did a fine job, that’s true.  But when our friends asked about some ecological solutions like a solar hot water system, he simply didn’t plan it, presuming people are not willing to pay for such things. They had to tell him twice the really wanted it. I think that’s weird. Isn’t the architect supposed to work for his client?

One of his (and other architects) ideas is that modern materials and solutions were not invented just like that. They must for sure be better that old materials and technical solutions. So why use a method from a hundred years ago?

Maybe because that evolution in building materials hasn’t always been inspired by improving the quality, but improving the economical feasability. Mass products are easier to produce and sell. Take ordinary bricks. Ages ago they were simply dried in the sun. But that takes time and a dry climate. So why not bake them? It’s faster and you can do that all the time.

The end result is a brick that loses some of the good qualities of sundried bricks. Baked bricks cannot keep as much warmth as sundried ones. And they don’t regulate humidity nowhere near as efficiently.

Well, architects, they’re a curious breed. As another friend of ours, an architectural photographer, once said: all these modern houses look exactly the same because most often the architect arrives with a truckload of design furniture to make the house look good. They simply toss the existing furniture aside for the photoshoot. No wonder that all these buildings look alike.

But we’ll do things differently. That’s a promise.