Kevin McCloud’s Principles of Home: Making a Place to Live

Kevin McCloud’s Principles of Home: Making a Place to Live
Kevin McCloud

A practical paperback edition of the landmark design manifesto from the UK’s favourite design guru.In this inspirational yet also practical paperback Kevin explores all areas of domestic living, from materialism to sustainability, craftsmanship to comfort. Kevin’s beautifully written text brings insight and understanding to enjoying life in the 21st century, but crucially he offers detailed, helpful and incisive advice on design, construction and style.Kevin addresses very real and solvable domestic issues: What is the perfect kitchen layout? How to create a feeling of space in traditionally sized rooms? How to create an extension that works? How best to choose colour for function? What to use for insulation? How to shop for second hand? And how best to manage home waste and recycling?An inspiring but always usable book from the foremost voice in modern architectural design.

(Red Cover/Photoshot/Photolibrary)

(photographer, Martin Morrell/interior design & styling, Jacqueline Morabito – www.jacquelinemorabito.com)

Written in memory of my father

Donald McCloud, Engineer

CONTENTS

COVER (#ubac21fe9-6917-5e91-a3a8-07a2c58e5d55)

TITLE PAGE (#u7fc691bc-cb5f-58b2-9008-b8d8ad62088e)

DEDICATION (#u24c2ec53-672b-561a-94ee-94f952f28a58)

INTRODUCTION (#ucc778ee9-39fd-411c-9e0d-811349c66a4b)

PART ONE ENERGY (#ued39b2cd-d092-553d-ae54-89b152713c92)

01 SETTING FIRE TO THINGS (#ulink_837dc3c9-203d-5337-af11-165059a2fe36)

02 ENERGY IN YOUR WALLS (#ulink_96dcfad0-a023-50f4-b2c0-5c8f4d3259a5)

03 HOW TO RECYCLE ENERGY (#ulink_b88d91af-9966-518c-8198-bfb77cb9a8c5)

04 HOME-MADE ENERGY (#litres_trial_promo)

05 HOW TO NOT BURN ENERGY (#litres_trial_promo)

06 STORING ENERGY AT HOME (#litres_trial_promo)

PART TWO BUILDINGS (#litres_trial_promo)

07 MAKING A PLACE TO LIVE (#litres_trial_promo)

08 LOOKING AFTER THE ELDERLY (#litres_trial_promo)

09 COMFORT AND JOY (#litres_trial_promo)

10 ARCHITECTURE AFTER DARK (#litres_trial_promo)

PART THREE THINGS (#litres_trial_promo)

11 HOW TO SHOP (#litres_trial_promo)

12 HOW NOT TO SHOP (#litres_trial_promo)

13 THINGS AT HOME WORTH INVESTING IN (#litres_trial_promo)

14 THINGS AT HOME NOT WORTH INVESTING IN (#litres_trial_promo)

15 PATINA (#litres_trial_promo)

PART FOUR SHARING (#litres_trial_promo)

16 SHARING OUT THE GARBAGE (#litres_trial_promo)

17 RECYCLING AND REUSING (#litres_trial_promo)

18 SHARING (#litres_trial_promo)

APPENDIX (#litres_trial_promo)

SEARCHABLE TERMS (#litres_trial_promo)

COPYRIGHT (#litres_trial_promo)

ABOUT THE PUBLISHER (#litres_trial_promo)

INTRODUCTION (#u3a8917ba-0d23-5e02-9bfe-9ffef69d98c5)

This book is something of a manifesto for how we can live. It’s a manifesto for a way of living that, in comparison with life of the last 60 years, could be slower, more enjoyable, gentler and altogether less taxing on the resources of this planet. It calls for a new appreciation of the human effort and energy that go into designing and making everything around us, from a spoon to a car, from a house to a city, from a dam to a cathedral. It calls for a re-evaluation of materials and fuel energy, and it calls for a culture in which we share much more of what we have in order that we don’t squander it.

I think we have lost touch with the made world. We have forgotten how difficult and time consuming it is to make something; how hard it is to make an elegant table out of a tree or a spoon out of metals dug out of the ground and refined. Our sensibilities to craftsmanship have been eroded by high-quality machine manufacturing; our tactile sense has been debased by artificial materials pretending to be something that they are not. Our attention, meanwhile, has been diverted by the virtual built worlds that exist inside screens. The landscapes of gaming and avatar worlds, for instance, are not complicated by the inconvenient messiness of the real world. In them, stuff, narratives, buildings and people are both perfect and disposable.

The real world is not perfect and it’s not disposable. In the real world, things and people age and decompose. The real, tangible world is much harder to make, more difficult to maintain and unpleasant to recycle. Which may explain why so many people seek solace in virtual worlds, even if it’s just by watching a soap opera on TV.

My Big Point is that I find the real world, which man has shaped, layered and renewed over thousands of years, more exciting and energizing – despite its grime – than any 3-D movie effect. Watching the Brooklyn Bridge explode in a computer-animated sequence may be awesome, but it is never as awe-inspiring as standing underneath the real thing and wondering how men managed to make it. Awesome is loud but awe is quiet.

I’m aware that my manifesto is motivated by a passionate love for places, buildings and things, not as objects that I want for myself to keep but as examples of human brilliance and creativity, the experience of which I want to share. I’m also frustrated, having worked as a designer and maker, by how little craftsmanship and the sweat of labour are appreciated nowadays. How we all assume that everything around us is made by machines and computers, whereas the truth is that your dinner plate was probably made by just three people in Portugal who spent four months of their lives producing a range for a high-street retailer; and your mobile phone was assembled by one person over a morning of their life.

So I’m writing out of a passionate love for the built environment and a quiet anger over how it is passed over in pursuit of temporary diversions and virtual pleasures when it can offer some of the greatest pleasures of all. The result goes something along the lines of: What do we want? A much better appreciation of the things around us so that we can cherish them, live a more sustainable life and enjoy a richer relationship with our world. When do we want it? Quite soon, please, and quickly. But not too quickly, because it’s all meant to be about lingering to enjoy the moment, isn’t it?

After the Slow Food movement, maybe it’s time for the Slow Living movement. That sounds dull, doesn’t it? In fact, ‘slow’ is the wrong word. It should be the Take Your Time movement (which is really what the Slow Food movement should be called). Take your time to appreciate what’s around you, to explore your environment, to savour experiences and to develop relationships with the objects around you – be they a car, a vase or a town – as examples of human brilliance and human energy. In fact I do have a name for this softer, richer, more fulfilling experience. I call it New Materialism.

You’ll have noticed that I slipped in that slippery word ‘sustainable’ earlier. It doesn’t occur too often in this book because it’s a term already over-used, so tried on by so many people, institutions and companies that it’s stretched and gone all loose and floppy. Sustainability is now a big baggy sack into which people throw all kinds of old ideas, hot air and dodgy activities in order to be able to greenwash their products and feel good. Politicians speak of sustainable economic growth (this is not necessarily ecologically or socially beneficial), which is not the same thing as growing an economy sustainably.

This book doesn’t deal with the fiscal or legal measures that will get us to a new ‘sustainable’ world, wherever that is. It suggests ways we can change ourselves that can make large differences. It won’t beleaguer you with carbon calculators; it doesn’t list fishing quotas or promote campaigns to save polar bears. You can join WWF or Friends of the Earth or Greenpeace, or subscribe to treehugger.com, if you want up-to-the-minute accounts of campaigns and government initiatives. My job here is to persuade you of something you might have overlooked: that your relationships with your possessions, your home and your street are the starting point for a new, more interesting way of experiencing the world and that the end result of that can be a significant reduction in your individual environmental impact.

It can mean more choice and more interesting choice as well. Let me give you an example, a real hot potato of an example. My company, Hab, builds homes in partnership with housing associations – the organizations who provide social housing – and we try to make our developments as ecological, enjoyable and socially progressive as possible. Hab stands for Happiness, Architecture, Beauty. It does not stand for Hummers, Audis and BMWs; which means, in pursuit of a way of life that is resource meagre and low carbon, we encourage residents to reduce their car use. We only provide one and a half parking spaces for each dwelling, which doesn’t go down well with a lot of people. But in exchange for the one privation of one liberty – the right to park an unlimited number of vehicles wherever they want – residents get appealing alternatives including a car club and an intranet advising them of offers to share car journeys. The choice is limited in one way and enlarged in another. The emphasis is shifted from the personal and acquisitive to the communal and shared. That’s what I mean by New Materialism: offering more choice, set in a different framework of choice.

That framework is composed of the ecological, environmental and social goals that many organizations and people are now working towards, from the social workers of Dharavi in India to the government of California.

It comprises ten goals, which reach far beyond governments’ focus on carbon dioxide emissions, extend into every part of our lives and are based on an analysis of how we consume the world’s resources. They’re also very easy to understand: put simply, we have only one planet to support us, yet if everyone on the globe consumed as much and as fast as we do in the West, we’d need three planets to support us. Three planets of aluminium, forests, fish and fuel. But we have only one. There is no Planet B.