A Frank Shirley-designed “sustainable” building in Newbury.
Climatologists, car-makers and elected members of congress can debate the issue; but here is what the term “sustainability” means when applied to architecture: it means buildings that can exist without fossil fuels are sustainable, able to sustain their own integrity and the health of their inhabitants.
This is true not only due to the rising price of fossil fuels, or because of the ill health effects that are attributed to burning those fuels. And it goes well beyond our current worries about high levels of carbon in the earth’s atmosphere, another result of burning.
The argument, as it comes from Cambridge architect Frank Shirley, is that buildings – houses especially — constructed prior to the re-cent era of rampant fossil fuel use, were designed and detailed to sustain themselves and us and much of their surroundings as well. Pre-fossil fuel buildings – traditional architecture – did not focus on shiny materials, industrial processes, machine precision. Instead, they were about craft, the trace of the hands of real people as they went about shaping materials and spaces and surfaces that would admit sunlight, shed rain and feel right to the hands and psyches of their inhabitants.
Frank Shirley understands this because his young professional practice has focused exclusively on such buildings: renovating, adding to, creating new examples in their historical image. In over a hundred projects Shirley has confronted the thoughtful ways our ancestors situated their houses, used renewable materials, detailed their building joints to both last and to delight viewers’ perceptions and imaginations. His work is helping a whole new generation of building owners and neighbors in New England take part in this tradition.
Shirley is the author of the book, “New Rooms for Old Houses”, in which he describes the principles that govern traditional design, and shows he understands the use of the hand in making drawings as well as buildings. He recently won Boston’s “Traditional Building and Home Show Design Challenge,” producing a set of remarkable design drawings, completed in a day, all by hand. His office staff designs by hand too, preferring to connect mind to design the old fashioned way. On large sheets of paper, they are able to work on all parts of a design at once, rather than on only the bit of it the small size of a computer screen permits. They do use computers to generate final construction drawings.
Energy-Saving Design
Shirley’s design practice – renovating and recycling historic houses – results in projects like the one pictured here, in Newbury, Massachusetts. This house is a study in traditional performance: how old houses were designed to save energy. A wide south facing façade captures warming sunlight in winter, while narrow east and west walls and a ventilated attic prevent overheating from strong summer sun. The broad porch provides shade and admits cooler air into the house in summer. Shirley added anew the two-story portion on the right. And he attached a garage, not an historical fixture, but necessary today. It is a complex example of how to manage rain, snow, sun, the sense of place, of how pieces of wood come together, overlap, and protect themselves, how their resultant long life and the image they compose makes the house sustainable. The addition does not just harmonize with the original; by using the same materials, proportions, roof lines, window heights, trim details, the addition completes it.
Frank Shirley is a traditional architect, not an easy or normal thing to be in the early 21st century. A traditional architect, especially, courts controversy when treating specific building elements.
Of all the old-house elements that can be upgraded, replacing an historic property’s windows – the first thing most folks think of doing — is the first thing Frank Shirley will not recommend. Not only does he advise clients to avoid this mistake: he himself lives in a Victorian house in Cambridge, well over a hundred years old, complete with all its original windows. Among the many reasons are these:
• Window placement: Older houses were often designed with large south-facing windows to achieve solar gain in winter days; bay windows for extra light.
• Trash burden: What are you going to do with those old windows? Throw them away? 136 million tons of construction debris is generated each year in the United States, a huge and expensive problem. You do not need to add to this.
• Manufacturing standards: Modern replacement windows have a useful life of around 20 to 30 years; they will need replacing themselves while you likely are still living in the house.
• Energy: Historic houses do not really lose so much energy through their windows. Proper storm windows outside, proper curtains inside, help. Energy is mostly lost through un- or under-insulated walls; fix these, instead.
• Beauty: Look again at the windows of a pre-fossil fuel house: they’re beautiful. Their proportions, the carving that has gone into old-growth hard wood those are made from Â… very different than modern windows. It actually feels good to touch them.
The 20th century American architect Louis Kahn believed those traditional windows, especially how their frames relate them to the sur-rounding walls, allowed a relationship that a building’s inhabitants could feel, between inside and outside. Frank Shirley believes this, and he designs renovations so the current generation might have the same keen perception.
In the end, traditional architecture is rather like the iconic “slow food” movement. That cultural undertaking, originating in Europe, al-lows one to taste and savor food and ponder our relationship to it. Slow food (as opposed to fast food) lets us not only take in calories, but delivers the sensory experience of eating. Frank Shirley’s work is like that: one not only gains shelter but gets to enjoy the whole experience of living with and within traditional buildings. The use of fossil fuels has created a sense of easy indoor comfort, but at the expense of innovative solutions that now must be applied to building designs. Frank Shirley points out that we need look no further than prefossil fuel buildings to start that work.
