Solarchitect | Sunbeam carpenter
@Solarchitects
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Designed & built 100+ affordable, healthy, self-sufficient homes in 10 years. Here to help you do the same. Join my newsletter 👉
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It is the season of gifting 🎅🏻 so I am doing a 30 threads for 30 days challenge about solarchitecture: 🌞
Here they are neatly ordered one by one:
1. Sunlight, Fresh Air, Living spaces
1st/30
We spend 2/3rd of our time in our homes & neglect the effect they have our health.
Lack of sunlight, fresh air and spaces not adapted to your life are grinding you down every day.
Improve your life by improving these key factors in your home & environment.
Read on
⟱
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We should abolish 99% of universities
and return to apprenticeship for craftsmen
starting at age 12.
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211
2K
Bathrooms should be spa sanctuaries,
but modern living is transforming bathrooms into sterile cleaning machines.
Actually every home only needs one big bath that rejuvenates, refreshes and fills your pores with vitality.
I am currently gathering inspiration from Japanese
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138
2K
Mold is the invisible killer of households.
The big mold thread is here!
It's that time of the year when wherever possible, a nasty, unwanted roommate appears in our homes. Lets take a look why and what havoc can it cause?
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When you can't stop building, amazing things happen. Türelbaach Castle in Luxemburg built by it's stonemason owner, Pol Gibson over 40 years.
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We should only build in colours Nature gave us. Do you agree?
Researching rammed earth aesthetics.
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Slavic low time preference beam aesthetics.
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A main bedroom that has morning sunlight almost all year round will make a huge difference in how you start your day, influencing your mood and energy levels in a positive way.
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How to build better with the most conventional & affordable structure?
Timber Frame megathread is here!
I'll present you traditional framing ideas, the popular stick built and some cool evolutions that can be used especially in solar timber frame builds.
Let's dive in
↓
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Alternative to individual children's rooms:
Create sleeping nooks for every youngster + a common learning & playing area.
It offers intimacy while aiding daytime cooperation between siblings.
Thank my childhood for spending it in a huge room together with my little sister!
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Higher ceilings lead to clearer thoughts.
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Life is just better with(in) nooks.
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"Contemporary“ architects are too lazy to design something beautiful and simple.
a.k.a
The most efficient structures start from simplicity and not something complex made efficient.
Something seemingly complex can be reduced to simple, common sense systems.
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Periodic reminder that watermills are still a thing.
Micro-hydro is a decentralized green energy.
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3 essential rooms you need in a home:
1. Farmhouse kitchen where everyone can gather around hearty meals.
2. Cozy alcoves to retreat, relax & get sound sleep in pitch black silence.
3. Spa bathroom to get clean & reinvigorated daily.
I elaborate why below
↓
23rd thread of 30
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@archi_tradition
You just posted about it:
Heidelberg, Germany 🇩🇪
{📸: paulmichael}
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14K
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There is something we call "summer-kitchen" in Transylvania.
An outdoor living-working place used for cooking everyday food and preparing pickles, compotes, jam for the winter.
A fully functional workspace for homesteads for the warm season!
But there's more...
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3 essential rooms you need in a home:
1. Farmhouse kitchen where everyone can congregate around hearty meals.
2. Cozy alcoves to retreat, relax & get sound sleep in pitch black silence.
3. A cavernous spa bathroom to get clean and reinvigorated daily.
All else are secondary
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How does this picture make you feel?
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Incredible brick vaulting done 100 years ago by Rafael Guastavino & co., as pointed out by
@AustinTunnell
He was a Spanish immigrant builder, who crafted these with the technique called the Catalan Tile vaulting, an incredibly materially efficient and lightweight, albeit
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Would living here fill you with vitality?
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Homes built inadequately for hot climates can be unbearable without Air-Con and can bring a lot of adverse health effects.
Here are my tips for houses in hot dry & humid climates.
First here's what an ideal home needs in any hot climate:
{27th of 30th thread}
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5 reasons why higher ceilings are better for rooms:
1. Lets sunlight in deeper
Higher ceilings mean taller windows so sunlight and its warmth gets in much deeper, reducing need for artificial light even more.
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2nd/30 - Mass timber megathread.
Everything I can tell you about the structure I use in most of the new-builds.
It is structural
aesthetic
- insulates 25x more than concrete & 400x more than steel
- highly durable
- grown in nature & by the sun.
Read on for more.
⟱
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Sunlight deprivation is a serious issue, now more than ever.
We cannot maintain late autumn and winter time energy & immunity levels without it.
Maximising the sun's natural light in every indoor space is a major part of my design practice.
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Researching clay plaster aesthetics & techniques.
The reason why lime plaster is not so wide-spread is not the lack of materials but as with many other construction techniques - the lack of expertise in this type of finishing.
It involves a lot more steps than drywalling. Needs
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The well designed passive solar house does not need artificial light fixtures.
It let in abundant sunlight from dawn till dusk.
It regulates your circadian rhythm even in the winter.
Giving you high energy flows while making you more energy-independent.
🌞
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GM.
What do you think about the farmhouse kitchen concept?
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Sheep fear wolves for all their life, only to be eaten by the shepherd at the end.
- Transylvanian proverb.
cc. Sorin Onisor.
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A fascinating example of a city is Priene built in Ancient Greece in 1000 BC.
Built completely on a southern slope, it was organised so every building, courtyard, monument and street maximised sunlight.
They definitely knew how to design for health and vitality in their age.
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This living space I designed for a family is basically a giant sunroom in the forest.
Abundance of sunlight.
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Quality outdoor spaces around a home are vital for a healthy lifestyle.
Some examples to start with:
Outdoor kitchen & living
Detached home office
Workshop/shed
Teenage cottage
Courtyard
Garden room
In this thread I share why they are awesome additions...
{11th thread of 30}
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Nooks cost no extra space in a home, yet they make it 100% extra cozy.
Here's a calendar selection of cozy nooks:
1/4
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Your periodic reminder to not use ceiling lights after dusk.
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Architecture is a perpetual struggle with gravity.
That's why I think the cruck frame structure is a perfect example of how humans put in use a material (wooden beams) in order to work WITH gravity in HARMONY, not against it.
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If you want to move out of the city:
Aim for a large land with a small house
rather than
a large house with a small land.
You can always build more to it later.
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Prioritising resale value when designing and building your home, you will rob yourself of the unique solutions you might want to incorporate,
And of the experience of nurturing it over a long time and just experiencing it as you evolve with it.
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The beginners guide to off-grid buildings
A thread.
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7 tricks I use to make houses feel bigger - thread
Let's see them work in my latest project for a sustainable village, the first & most important:
1. Windows on multiple walls:
This pattern alone helps make spaces at least 20% bigger, it evens out light both in space & time.
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I’m a short term thinker.
Solving the next 700 years is enough challenge for me!
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You are only truly free if you can have exactly as much Sunlight as you want,
every day.
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The ratio of useful indoor/outdoor spaces in a house
should be the function of days one can spend outside
based on local climate.
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A conventional house is good for the market but not good for your family.
The first key principle of affordability is knowing what you need. More importantly, knowing what you need every day, not more, not less.
Just enough is more.
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Fiat economy.
Fast growing spruce, cedar, larch and other species that are harvestable quickly, in 25 years were exchanged for slow, old growth species.
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By shaping a home in an L or U form, you can create outdoor rooms, courtyards which feel safe and be used in lots of ways.
Sprinkle it with a portico - shaded area with columns and you made your home liveable, with a fraction of a cost!
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Do you own a sunroom?
If yes, what do you use it for? Write it in the comments below!
{appreciate any feedback, doing research for a project}
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The Solar Manifesto - 🌞thread🌞
Your most important physical expression outside your body is your house.
Odysseus has a solar palace.
Do you?
↓
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The beginners guide to off-grid buildings
The definitive OG Thread.
{17th of 30}
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A King can never outlive his subjects.
We may never see the Beauty we are working on
in full Blossom.
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Be the 1% who regenerates the Earth, not the 1% who wants to escape off it.
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The debate in architecture is not about traditional vs. modern.
It's about low vs. high time preference.
It's about borrowing from the future vs. building it out gradually.
It's about being trendy vs. being timeless.
It's about expendable vs. highly durable.
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More about that new mass timber stair.
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Thermal insulation vs. thermal mass
People familiar with passive solar could argue that thermal mass is more important than thermal insulation (I even debated this on twitter). My short answer is always the same: It depends on the climate.
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Revolution in 3 steps:
1. Work from home. ⚓️
2. Homeschooling. ♟
3. Homesteading. 🍎
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1st/30
We spend 2/3rd of our time in our homes & neglect the effect they have our health.
Lack of sunlight, fresh air and spaces not adapted to your life are grinding you down every day.
Improve your life by improving these key factors in your home & environment.
Read on
⟱
4
15
147
A compliment I often get is that my designs feel much larger in real life than measured on paper.
99% of the designs I conceived are between 80-200 sqm / 860-2150 sqft.
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The bigger the house you build,
the farther you'll be from the sun.
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In a bid to beautify your posttraumatic timeline,
here's a calendar with a stellar selection of 12 vernacular houses - from my photo collection:
4/12
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In the market to buy a land for a forever home in 2023?
In this thread I detail the most important factors to look at when looking for a good quality, low risk land to build on.
Solar land buying thread
Read on.
{19th of 30}
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Quality of light both depends on direct, indirect sunlight interacting with shadows.
A pleasant place balances them all and shifts them throughout the day
- one key step if every space has windows on multiple walls & one wall has multiple windows spread evenly, not one plane.
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Self-building or managing building your own home with a design of your choice or completely custom has many advantages over buying a home on the market:
- customisation
- cost control/savings
- quality control
- health & energy efficiency
- pride of ownership
- a short thread
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Imagine a house you don't have to heat 80% of the time, and when you do, a couple of candles are enough.
It's not magic, just a
Solar Passive House.
photo from latest construction site - note how deep the sunlights penetrate in winter.
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The greenest form of energy is that you never consume.
Comfort is the most energy-consuming product of the XXIst century.
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Time flies...exactly 8 years since I had the chance to work and learn with this Beauty.
Crow's Castle, Transylvania, unfiltered architecture history.
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Build smaller and more durable houses.
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You live up north and want to build your energy-independent eskimo hut for the 21st century?
Buckle up 'cause here's my thread for better buildings in cold & arctic climates.
28th thread of 30.
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I regret having tended to this garden for decades.
- Said no one ever.
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A 𝑻𝑯𝑬𝑹𝑴𝑨𝑳𝑳𝒀 𝑹𝑬𝑺𝑰𝑳𝑰𝑬𝑵𝑻 home
is the best response to the climate in every culture and every epoch.
We did not conquer nature, we just adapted to it.
Houses are built to temper the effects of weather and seasons in any given location.
⇩⇩⇩
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Windows - a visual evolution thread of the ages.
Did windows evolve because we became a more indoor people
or we became more indoor people because windows evolved?
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"𝐸𝑇𝐸𝑅𝑁𝐼𝑇𝑌 was born in the countryside."
- Lucian Blaga, romanian poet.
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The transition from outdoor life to indoor life was so subtle that after 100+ years we still don't know ww all got depressed by it.
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@CharlestonArchi
But but but why does it look and feel better then most anything we’ve built in the last century?
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Most of modern ubiquitous materials like concrete and steel have a much higher thermal conductivity than naturals like timber, clay, rammed earth, hemp etc.
Meaning they literally suck the energy from your body to the environment.
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Some more high quality pictures of the Aframe we've built in 2018.
You can see the different aging qualities of the untreated wood, as the home is completely clad with wood on all sides with wood shingles too.
Every face tells a different story of material aging, obviously it
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The worst thing you can do is stay inside under an air-con, which is bad for everyone's health, including the planet.
So Why not build an outdoor kitchen?
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If in need of a home office expansion,
I strongly advise building it separately from your main house!
It helps mentally separate your home from your work.
If you have the means, top it with a rentable guestroom!
We finally return to how work has been done for ages.
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Luxury means not being in a meeting on a Monday morning.
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Real estate in the past:
My great-grandpa built a brick house in '38 with the help of family and friends, which still serves us today.
Real estate now:
I give away 40% of my income for 30 years for a "product", which barely survives 50 years, it's only worth is the land below.
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Good morning,
gates are important,
in-
portal.
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"The objects in your house should have an anchoring gravity to them. They should look and feel solid whenever possible. This doesn’t mean they have to be old or look old. They just need to have the weight of real things."
@simonsarris
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Today I took part in a whole day metal roofing workshop to once again confirm that 100 year old techniques are the best way to build.
Best metal roofing materials are zinc, copper and aluminum, worked intricately with hand, adapted to the projects needs.
Also very important to
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Inspired by the post below I started digging for photos of Ch. Alexander's homes and found a bunch of old, pixelated ones that nevertheless express well what his work was about:
The Christopher Alexander & Center for Environmental Structure Archive gives access to 50+ years of work by Alexander/CES, sharing ideas and projects to inspire all who wish to build and repair living environments in which people thrive. Visit at .
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If we can agree that we need both to thrive, we will be halfway there.
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A 500 year old building is 10x more sustainable than one which will stand for 50.
Low time preference vs. high time preference architecture thread
{8th of 30}
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Good morning from the Bureau of Timeless Beauty Consultancy.
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New word just dropped for the sunbeam vocabulary:
front "porchette"
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A harmonious facade.
cc: Jeffrey Dungan.
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99% of long term problems in buildings could be solved with a return to more durable materials and designing for local climate.
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If you are a knowledge worker, chances are you spend 80% of your time indoors, in poorly ventilated places.
In the warm months, You should spend the whole day on shady porch, where you can cook, eat, work all day long.
A good porch can offer you shelter and a cool breeze...
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A first in my practice, a client’s asking for a full clay render interior for the house.
Haven’t actually done a full house but have some good guys who will help.
Will report back with the findings.
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A comfortable and functional 4bed house can be designed in 140-160 sqm / 1500-1700 sq ft.
Why is this such a radical thought?
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Build a home which makes going on vacation obsolete.
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