Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
“Hey, it didn't say it had to be a skinny line!” Right, that was not part of
the rules. I think the lesson MacCready tells us that we learn from this is
that the original design assignment was misstated as “Find one solution
with only four lines.” If we had been asked instead to find as many solu-
tions as possible with as few lines as possible by eight tomorrow morning,
we would have been more creative.This tyranny of the word “the,” the just-
one-solution idea, put us back in a box.
I think we need to approach energy efficiency and resource efficiency
generally in that spirit. Another thing we need to get over is the common
notion that design is the art of compromise and tradeoff. Our friend J. Bald-
win was being taught this one day in design school. He looked out the
window and saw a pelican flying around catching fish and said: “Wait a
minute. Out there is a 3.8 billion-year-old design lab that has a great deal
of experience embodied in it.Whatever we see living today is what worked,
whatever did not work got recalled by the manufacturer.” As any naturalist
can see just by looking at what is going on out there, nature does not com-
promise. Nature optimizes.“A pelican,” Baldwin said,“is not a compromise
between a duck and a crow. It is the best possible pelican.” But, of course,
it has to be designed in context. You could not design a pelican without
knowing about fish, oceans, air, and so on, any more than you could design
a good comfort or lighting system without a building, or a building with-
out its landscape, climate, and culture. So the context is important, and
where we draw the boundary determines the whole system.
That brings me then to a first example of tunneling through the cost
barrier. My wife and partner Hunter and I live 7,100 feet up in the Rocky
Mountains, where it gets as cold as
47˚F on occasion. The growing sea-
son between hard frosts is from about June 26 to August 16, but you can
get a frost any day of the year, and we have had as long as 39 days of con-
tinuous mid-winter clouds. Nonetheless, you can come into the atrium of
the house out of a snowstorm, and you will find yourself in a semitropical
jungle. We have harvested more than 26 banana crops in that atrium and
you can get your advanced lizarding lesson there, too. If you qualify (the
prerequisites are elementary hedonism and intermediate decadence), you
can watch the little pygmy African hedgehog running around eating bugs
and so on.
Then you realize that, other than the 50-watt portable supplementary
unit (our dog), there isn't a heating system. Why not? It is cheaper not to
have one. There are a couple of wood stoves, which provide about 1 per-
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