Horses do it, dogs do it, even summer kitchen sinks do it
...bits falling off, hair floating in the midday wind. The first one to go was Kangee, who's the fittest of them. Healthy as a horse.
My Dearest Galosh,
The horses are molting. They look a tad strange, bits falling off, hair floating in the midday wind. The first one to go was Kangee, who's the fittest of them. Healthy as a horse. He knows when spring is here better than any of us. Then came the girls, and now, even the dogs and the cat have gotten into the groove.
There is hair just about anywhere you look here these days.
Changing from winter waltz to spring samba is what we've been doing as well.
The mulch in the garden has been removed and the soil has been prepared for the planting of veggies. Bulbs of all kinds have been planted all around. Old branches and debris have been burned and the firewood storage has been cleaned. We're not making a fire anymore, which makes the house colder than outside sometimes. So we sit in the sunshine in the day, taking in the joy and peace of nature coming back for a new cycle.
We have also made changes in the home. The bench we sat on in front of the fire has been replaced with a coffee table that is easier to move around. The heavy curtains have been changed to lighter summer ones and the big carpets have been removed. The mosquito net will have to be placed back above the bed soon enough.
All of these are bioclimatic adaptations. Kangee predicts the changes in weather patterns just as we do and acts accordingly.
There are two types of bioclimatic adaptations: fixed and flexible.
The fixed adaptations are architecture in the proper sense, right? An eave carefully placed is a bioclimatic adaptation. Large South-facing windows instead of North-facing ones, bedrooms to the East, using thermal mass where needed, all of these are fixed elements that have been created as a response to natural patterns and our understanding of them. Our predictions about what’s to come.
Flexible ones are these more ephemeral features, from curtains to… well, molting. The things that need us to press the button at the right time. Our conscious or instinctual changes.
I know, you'll tell me that we now have all the tech we need to not mind about weather patterns and nature and anything. Thermostat and triple glazing will solve it all. The modern passive box is oblivious of what is happening around it. It doesn't care. The world could very well be on fire, smog all around, the HVAC will filter it out and notify you about it through an app.
But let's imagine we're not talking about a house. We're building a summer kitchen. Or an outside dining area, a garden. Or just a house outside the hyper-industrialized Western world. The comfort of that space is dependent on our ability to predict weather changes and adapt to them.
The most important fixed adaptation ever is the simple placement choice. Where something sits in relation to everything else and the Sun is going to give the biggest leverage. That's why I wrote "Listen to your Land".
Then there is the placement of the stuff inside your... thing. Say, where the sink is placed in relation to the garden and the table in your summer kitchen. Whether and where you have enough airflow to dry onions from the veggie patch or whatever. How the afternoon sun hits your face in August when you grill aubergines (it shouldn’t:) ).
Next come all the fixed features, like raised ground where wet, or using large eaves for August use and planting trees towards the West to keep shade in the afternoons.
Though I'm not sure that plants are a fixed feature.
They might be a flexible one, like my kiwi vine, that looses it's leaves at about the same time Kangee is putting on his winter coat again. Plants can help us mitigate nature, weirdly enough. Well placed trees can give shade in the summer and still let the sun through in the autumn after the leaves have fallen. Wind-breaks can be made from evergreens and pergolas from annual crops like runner beans and peas.
Trees regulate the temperature around them by acting as a wind and rain buffer, providing shade, reducing evaporation, changing micro-turbulences at the soil level.
Before adding more air-conditioning, we could think about planting more trees. So if you know someone who's preparing for summer heat, think about recommending them to plant some trees in the right spots.
Yours,
Jo
PS There is a beautiful book about the way buildings adapt to the cyclical changes in the environment. It is called Ritual House: Drawing on Nature's Rhythms for Architecture and Urban Design. It's a great read about the way people in different cultures change their houses and their behavior according to seasonal and diurnal change, form the tents of the Berbers to the courtyards of the Indians.
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