The House That £100k Built - S02E06 - Howe Farm Section

Just the bit from S02E06 about Howe Farm

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Agree with dlwatib. While I like the open concept and sectioned off spaces of the house; I don't think that it matches my concept of country living with the overly dark exterior, drab boxy shapes, and lack of using the glass in the house to allow ample sunlight while having privacy. I don't enjoy being on display. I like modern building techniques, construction methods, and more functional floor plans while hating its' I live in glass box concept. In the upper Midwest of the USA where I am responding from we lack sunlight as in England but the climate and winds would make this structure unbearable to heat and cool. (up to 19 to 20 degrees Fahrenheit below zero in the winter with 35 to 40 mph winds and summers that reach 95 degrees Fahrenheit with up to 80 to 90 mph winds) ( -29 Celsius with 56.3 km/hr winds in winter to 35 Celsius with 152.9 km/hr winds) I like Frank Loyd Wright's floor plans but can't accept his totally dysfunctional and impractical architecture and buildings. The older farm houses embraced open spaces with sliding large doors to create separate rooms if needed, height, light, and line of sight to reduce the feelings of enclosure while providing a warm comfortable home by stuffing old newspapers in the walls and ceiling. While one wouldn't want to build like the old farmhouse; taking some design wisdom from these old homes is very beneficial. It is hard to support 1 1/2 foot of snow on a flat roof. (0.46 meters o snow) While my weather conditions are the worst possible; I have lived through these conditions during my life time and the house should stand up to such.

[@dlwatib]

It's almost unfair to judge this building before it's completed, so much depends on the final finish of modern architecture. But I can say at the outset that I don't think highly of box-on-box architecture. It's all just too easy and simplistic a solution to the problem of creating livable space. I also read "clean and crisp" as devoid of human-scale details that transform a box into a building. To me, buildings must be conceived from the outset as more than just boxes to sleep in and store our stuff. Even beautiful boxes aren't buildings. There is something far more primeval about shelter and hearth that needs to be expressed in a house than a mere box can do, even if you slap windows and a door on it. There's also a lack of a sense of a particular place to modern architecture that is instinctively disturbing to me. This house could be built anywhere. Nothing about it says "farmhouse" or "Somerset" or even "England". It relates more to the clouds than the ground. There is also a lack of awareness and response to climate and weather in modern architecture. No porches, flat roofs, no eaves, no gables, not even any downspouts, large energy-wasting floor-to-ceiling windows, all these things betray a lack of response to the fact that this is a building that must respond efficiently to all weather conditions it may encounter. They are particularly disturbed that their cantilever was failing and they had to install support columns. But support columns are to be celebrated. That's how real architecture naturally responds to gravity. Modern architecture wants to celebrate the unnatural, the unusual, the quirky, the impractical, the perverse. Is it any wonder why it so frequently fails? There never was any need whatsoever for this building to require a cantilever in the first place, except it was pretending to be as light as a shoebox.