The sustainable house for the future style generation?
Take a very old idea: the timber-framed house — ecologically and environmentally friendly, warm, satisfyingly quick to put up and long-lasting. Then think what a timber-framed house usually looks like these days: that is, the same as every other kind of house.
Now forget that image. The house that the young architect Jonathan Ellis-Miller has built in Milton Keynes follows a different agenda: folksy, it isn’t; timber, it is. And glass. Is this the low-energy, sustainable house of the future for the style generation?
It is one of the abiding ironies of the 20th century that avant-garde architects have long been fascinated by the idea of kit-building, of houses that arrive on trucks and can be put up like Meccano, but that the people who have really made the running in instant houses have been the stylistically-challenged builders that architects generally tend to despise.
Hence the fact that most timber-framed homes are more or less encrusted with the kind of applied detail (tiles, brick and render) associated with a labour-intensive, masonry-built house. Odd, really. What could have been more high-tech in its day than a truck-framed tithe barn, with its structure proudly on display?
Ellis-Miller’s house is a contemporary attempt to recapture something of that mediaeval honesty. Better still, it is eminently buildable.
Contrasting with the cherished belief that architects design homes they would never live in themselves, Ellis-Miller had previously designed and built an award-winning, low-cost, flat-roofed, single-storey house for himself and his dog (and later, wife and child) in his native Fens. They live there still.
Designing for the open market, however, is a rather different business. It is assumed, even by people with Pentium laptop computers and Citroën Xantias, that a house should look like a child’s drawing; tradition means a pitched roof.
So, when Ellis-Miller found that he had a plot of land in Milton Keynes to work on, a leading engineering consultancy ready to back him, and a manufacturer of off-the-peg timber houses and chalets who, along with in-kind materials sponsors, were prepared to pay for it, he knew he couldn’t design the same kind of wood-and-glass house that he had built for himself.
The resulting pitched-roof form was comparatively orthodox. The trick was to produce something highly original within an acceptably traditional envelope.
The experiment took place at last year’s Future World exhibition where, on the rural fringes of Milton Keynes, around thirty one-off houses were built, each supposedly incorporating some advanced concept or other. Ultimately, few managed to transcend the suburban estate benchmark. One that did, however, and with great success, was Ellis-Miller’s.
“At first, I thought I had come up with an over-conventional solution,” he recalls, “then I saw the houses going up round about and I realised that — by luck as much as judgement — I had pitched it just about right.”
The idea was very simple: to make a rectangular house out of a structural grid of Douglas fir columns set in poured concrete piles in the Buckinghamshire clay. Ellis-Miller wanted the structure to be slender and light. Structural engineers Mott MacDonald — the largest consultancy of its kind in Britain — processed his designs through their powerful computers to guarantee its structural strength before a single fir was felled.
The house is two bays deep and five long, achieved with a series of six columns at either side and an offset row of five along the middle, these branching out into “trees” supporting the roof.
Original article here.
