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Team Profile 2 - The Apprentice This is Luke, the youngest member of our team. We are often asked why we decided to attempt a project of this extremity. The easy, and admittedly naff answer, is that we are doing it for our son, little Luke, and the new bun in the oven. It’s obviously the case in any build that having a toddler in the equation when planning the house makes you think ahead in terms of durability of materials and flexibility of design to cater for the forseeable changes in use of the house over the short to medium term. But what about the long long term? We find ourselves thinking ahead to when our children are older than we are now. Will they look at this kind of build and think we are mad, like many people do now, or will it be completely normal within the context of that future?  We would like to believe that this house will have real longevity. We think this not just because we hope to create a beautiful place to live, but more importantly because the fundamental design is based on exact thermodynamic modelling, the essence of passivhaus. Whilst society may develop new technologies to increase energy efficiency and tap into sources of renewable energy, the rules of physics aren’t going to change. Subject to us successfully building it to plan, the house should continue to perform in exactly the same way from the day it is finished until the inevitable fire, earthquake, godzilla attack or local planning decision razes it to the ground. And this project is not just about our house, but also about the houses that flow from it. We are learning such a huge amount about the challenges involved in putting theory into practice, knowledge that we hope to deploy across many building projects in the future.   So back to the original question - why are we doing this? Because of the size of the project and the resources involved in completing it, we realise that the end product needs to last a long time. Our ambition is to futureproof the house so that it can exist in its basic form for as many generations as possible. We want it to outlast us, and our children, and be lived in by, and useful for, the lycra-clad, hover-bike youth of the future. This is a scary thought in many ways, but perhaps it’s nothing more than the clicheed realisation most people have when they invest their life savings into a house - that you never really own it but are just a passing visitor in a stream of many over the years.

Team Profile 2 - The Apprentice

This is Luke, the youngest member of our team.

We are often asked why we decided to attempt a project of this extremity. The easy, and admittedly naff answer, is that we are doing it for our son, little Luke, and the new bun in the oven. It’s obviously the case in any build that having a toddler in the equation when planning the house makes you think ahead in terms of durability of materials and flexibility of design to cater for the forseeable changes in use of the house over the short to medium term.

But what about the long long term? We find ourselves thinking ahead to when our children are older than we are now. Will they look at this kind of build and think we are mad, like many people do now, or will it be completely normal within the context of that future? 

We would like to believe that this house will have real longevity. We think this not just because we hope to create a beautiful place to live, but more importantly because the fundamental design is based on exact thermodynamic modelling, the essence of passivhaus. Whilst society may develop new technologies to increase energy efficiency and tap into sources of renewable energy, the rules of physics aren’t going to change. Subject to us successfully building it to plan, the house should continue to perform in exactly the same way from the day it is finished until the inevitable fire, earthquake, godzilla attack or local planning decision razes it to the ground.

And this project is not just about our house, but also about the houses that flow from it. We are learning such a huge amount about the challenges involved in putting theory into practice, knowledge that we hope to deploy across many building projects in the future.  

So back to the original question - why are we doing this? Because of the size of the project and the resources involved in completing it, we realise that the end product needs to last a long time. Our ambition is to futureproof the house so that it can exist in its basic form for as many generations as possible. We want it to outlast us, and our children, and be lived in by, and useful for, the lycra-clad, hover-bike youth of the future. This is a scary thought in many ways, but perhaps it’s nothing more than the clicheed realisation most people have when they invest their life savings into a house - that you never really own it but are just a passing visitor in a stream of many over the years.

Posted 2 years ago