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THE OWNER BUILDER 166 August/September 2011 61 www.theownerbuilder.com.

au 0402 428 123


The Barefoot Architect:
A Handbook for Green
Building
Johan van Lengen
RRP $37.95. ISBN 9780936070421
Published by Shelter Publications (2008)
Distributed by Woodslane
697 pages, black and white illustrations
REVIEW BY BRUCE GIFFORD
This book is a pictorial handbook of
sustainable building. Johan van Lengen
is a Canadian architect who founded
the Bio-Architecture and Intuitive
Technology School in Brazil where there
are workshops on housing, sanitation,
communication and town planning. The
Spanish language edition sold 200,000
copies and the Mexican government
bought copies for every library in Mexico.
There are no palaces, no cathedrals
or self-conscious architectural fashion
statements in this amazing book. Every
page is directed at the owner builder with
clear drawings to analyse and illustrate
the thought behind a building. The
techniques described are derived from
the favellas and poor rural areas of South
America ltered through the mind
and pen of a brilliant educator. While
many vernacular practices are illustrated
they can be combined with modern
technology where this is available.
Owner builders will appreciate the
chapter on how to design a house. From
how to make a drawing, making models,
choosing dimensions, analysing the solar
pattern, wind, and slope for siting. Then
the relationship between rooms and
the placement of doors and windows.
To quote One way to be sure about the
placement of windows is to build the
walls half a metre high, walk around
inside the house, and then decide on
their most suitable location and size.
There is an understanding of the task of
building without professional help and
trying to get everything right.
There are separate chapters for
humid tropics, dry tropics and temperate
zones with suggestions for house shape,
ventilation, heating and pests. While the
reader may have no immediate need to
make a roof covering using palm leaves,
or sinks and toilets using only soil and
cement, it is nice to know it is possible
if one had to. There are drawings for
composting toilets, a bamboo-cement water
reservoir, lter and irrigation systems,
stoves and kilns, to name just a few.
There is much information on adobe
building, with construction details,
recommended mixes, renders, domes
and vaults.
There are designs for wind turbines,
water mills and intriguingly, a welder
using 18 litres of water and 5kg of
salt. The energy capacity of the welder
depends on the depth of the metal rods
in the water.
This apparently technical book
is immensely readable, with its
encyclopaedic scope, concise explanatory
text and drawings, and obviously
founded on practical experience. I
ROOF VENTILATION OPENINGS
One way to prevent the house interior from heating up is to build
openings in the upper part of the walls or in the roof. Since hot
air always rises, these openings provide exits for the heat.
There are three ways to ventilate:
A Allow interior hot air to exit:
B Prevent hot air from entering the room:
C Draw hot air between the roof and the
top of wall:
to let in cool
outside air, the
interior air must
be evacuated
the hot air ows
into the eaves
and exits through
openings near the
ridge
another type of
opening near the
ridge
with a at roof the
breeze lifts the air
that is stagnant
beneath the eaves
the breeze enters through
holed tiles in the upper
part of the walls
the hot air
exits through
roof openings
Examples of method A:
Example of method B:
Example of method C:
EXTRACT FROM THE BAREFOOT ARCHITECT
the hot air
exits through
openings in
the upper
walls
66 THE OWNER BUILDER 166 August/September 2011 www.theownerbuilder.com.au 0402 428 123
Diary of an Eco-builder
Will Anderson
RRP $44.95. ISBN 9781903998793
Published by Green Books (2006)
Distributed by Brumby Books
256 pages, colour photographs
REVIEW BY ROB HADDEN
In some ways this is a rather
extraordinary little book documenting
the day to day minutiae of building an
eco house in London and yet it seems
pitched at the converted and possibly
missing a bigger audience who probably
need to know what this book is all about.
Will Anderson is rather big in the
UK eco business and when he decided
to build his dream house, he chose to
document the entire process from start to
nish as he turned his vision of a super
efcient and sustainable building into
reality. Many of the problems that come
about when you build like this are dealt
with in a step-by-step fashion and he
doesnt shy away from the difcult issues.
Somehow, in the middle of London
in Clapham, a small plot of land
became available for building on and
Will immediately decided on this as the
place to live his dream. Given the lack
of any land to build on in London, it
was now or never.
Probably the single biggest inuence
was the huge tree that dominated the
block and this became the inspiration
to design the house using the tree as
metaphor for the construction of the
building. The tree also provided much
needed natural shade for the house.
To build so close to the tree
meant driving great piles of concrete
down instead of deep trenches and
then overlaying them with the slab.
Enormous amounts of concrete were
used and Will seems to think this is
OK in the bigger picture. From these
standard beginnings it rapidly alters
pace and direction to concentrate on the
more environmental concerns and of
the sheer cost of building this way in the
city. As he notes at the end there is an
enormous cost both scally and in the
proigate use of energy to make all the
material goods needed to save energy in
the future. This house has all of that in
bucket loads. This is a serious high tech
house with enough technology to put
man/woman on the moon!
Some of the subjects covered (and
there are so many) are: costs of living
green, future proong, air tightness,
ultra low heat homes, heat pumps,
climate sensitive design, indirect energy
consumption, high tech vs. low tech,
paints, lime, steel and scrap, electronic
goods, windows and so on. All the usual
suspects are covered as well.
But this is more than just a day to
day diary and Will also includes lists
of resources, design details, proles
of builders and artisans and other
craftspeople involved that give a much
See opposite for an extract from

this book
more human side to all that intense
building activity. In true Grand Designs
form, this project went over time
and over budget and certainly had its
stresses and strains and why did I ever
start moments. But through it all, Will
stuck to his vision and in the end he
triumphed as the three story leviathan
stood proud next to its original
inspiration that survived all the frantic
activity that went on around it.
At the end of this project Will muses
on the thoughts of a small cob house in
Scotland where no technology is used to
achieve the same visions he had for his
inner city house and thinks that in the
future this may be the way to go. For
now he believes that in the city it will
require the costly high tech solutions to
work and perhaps he is right...
This is an intelligently written book
and one that can turn the day to day
drudgery of building into an amusing
and informative narrative. For anyone
wanting to build more sensitively in an
urban environment, this book is well
worth handing over some folding stuff
for. If nothing else it is inspirational... I
Homes for a changing climate:
Adapting our homes and communities to cope with
the climate of the 21
st
C
Will Anderson
RRP $75.00. ISBN 9781900322478
Published by Green Books (2009). Distributed by Brumby Books
192 pages, colour photographs
REVIEW BY ROB HADDEN
This handy little tome by Will
Anderson is looking at how humanity
has always built for the climate and
habitat and how this pattern of building
has to be rediscovered in the 21
st
C.
Climate change is upon us now and as
it changes so must we adapt to it.
The basic message this book conveys
is this: the human race has been there
before and we have known what to do.
Now we do not and we have to confront
these environmental threats. Across the
globe are countless examples of how
humanity has adapted and thrived by
utilising our own resources, adaptability
and with a large dollop of imagination.
Each chapter deals with one of the
earths natural climactic events such as
heat waves, oods, storms, drought,
threatened coastal regions and the
related matters like food security, future-
proong and energy security.
In some ways I found this book to
be even better than Diary of an Eco-
builder as it goes beyond just stufng
insulation in the walls and roof and
making your house air-tight it goes to
the nub of the problem and asks how
are we going to survive if it all goes pear
shaped? For most of the western world
that relies on fast food and gas heating,
that means you! I

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