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Your e-House is a unique mix of high performance and alternative technologies. What was your inspiration?
I was prompted by an article I did with Bruce Sterling for Wired called “Newer New York,” which became a focal point for learning about and consolidating information on all the building products in existence. Much to my surprise, every single thing I could think of - if I Googled around enough - I found. And more often than not, I discovered that I could buy it with a credit card and have it shipped overnight to a building site. I quite literally found the future of building on the Internet, waiting to be purchased and implemented. This notion became the basis for a science fiction story, but then I started thinking about building it for real. My wife and I were looking at property in upstate New York at the time, so we decided to go for it.

How is e-House a metaphor for the community?
Buildings should not be considered as isolated objects. It’s profoundly important to understand how they’re connected to the ground and the sky, and how they’re connected to the culture of an area. In terms of technological connections, or connections to the culture of technology, this means making a building that thinks for itself, analogous to the way a human body functions. I’d like the building to adjust itself according to temperature and send email alerts when it needs attention.

What’s the importance of holistic thinking in architecture? Every building has connections to the sky, ground, and community, but these could be appreciated and utilized much better. In e-House, we collect rainwater to irrigate our garden. We also use it to store energy from the sun and the earth, and that energy is used to heat or cool a hyper-energy-efficient house. If you extend this thinking to other building systems, you can engineer a geothermal field for maximum efficiency by back-filling it with clean, well-drained, fertile, soil, and get both a heating and cooling source for your home and a productive organic garden. The more people start doing this community-wide, the more open space and forest can be conserved. This, of course, is an alternative to suburban sprawl. If government encourages this tendency through tax policy, you get large organic districts with hyper-energy-efficient homes.
Such districts can have economic and social value. We planned e-House to have an organic micro-farm, greenhouse, and agro-forestry (this is located in New York City’s watershed - a 1900-square-mile district that feeds the city’s reservoirs, delivering a billion gallons of potable water daily). Imagine that new home building in this vast area were encouraged to have organic micro-agricultural uses. New York City and its surrounding areas would be tethered to each other - clean, pure water from organic watersheds and urban markets for local organic produce. So the land and buildings can multi-task and form mutually beneficial relationships at any scale. This is the sort of productive, holistic thinking I want to encourage in architecture and, in turn, in public policy and regional planning. (more…)

The e-House 2000 was the first high-tech, web-based, environmentally appropriate house of the 21st century. Built in 2000 in upstate New York it was developed by award-winning architect Michael McDonough. McDonough worked with a team of engineers, building scientists, computer scientists, manufacturers, and environmentalists, to develop this sustainable home which leverages sustainable design, new building techniques like SIPS (pre-fabricated structural integrated panels) and traditional materials.

Images courtesy of Michael McDonough and Corinne Trang.

“With 300-400 million rural residents joining the urban population in the coming two decades in China, it is of critical importance that we rethink our approach to urban design…applying principles of sustainable development so that commerce, communities and nature can thrive and grow in harmony.”
Nie Meisheng - President, China Housing Industry Association

Groups like the China-US Center for Sustainable Development are working to create more sustainable growth - from energy use to urban development the need for sustainable development is critical. They are working with award-winning architect and author William McDonough (Author of Cradle to Cradle) in developing sustainable city models called sustainable villages.
The China-U.S. Center for Sustainable Development is a new type of international organization, focused on achieving results to accelerate sustainable development in China, the United States and the world.

“We create sustaining enterprises using nature as a model - cradle to cradle design - that enable commerce, communities and nature to thrive and grow in harmony. We also provide training to build capacity for sustainable development and target strategic opportunities that are both timely and important.”

Photo courtesy of the China-US Center for Sustainable Development.

Everywhere is city: We still conceive of cities as discrete objects, separate from their surroundings. This is no longer true. There is no exterior to the global city that connects and sustains us all.

“One thing is sure. The earth is now more cultivated and developed than ever before. There is more farming with pure force, swamps are drying up, and cities are springing up on unprecedented scale. We’ve become a burden to our planet. Resources are becoming scarce, and soon nature will no longer be able to satisfy our needs.” - Quintus Septimus Tertullianus, 200 B.C.

Since the dawn of agriculture over 10,000 years ago, the human tendency has been to manage land. Cities evolved in a defensive posture, an inside protected against an outside. More and more, we’re embracing the stewardship role and increasing and extending the level of management. We must extend design and stewardship to encompass all terrain. The new global city is now defined with zones of urban, suburban, rural, leisure, and even “natural” precincts, all managed, all part of a designed system. Instead of isolated parcels of land or singular architectural projects, it is a matter now of considering an entire city infrastructure and its connected environs, whose reach is hundreds of miles beyond what has been conventionally considered urban domain. The city now represents all territory and all territory needs to be regarded and managed as one urban system. The contradiction embodied in the practice of architecture is that it has traditionally chosen to focus on big buildings rather than to see the big picture as the most compelling design project. Architects have tended to build pieces of city without regarding their relationship to the whole. But holistic thinking is exactly what we need here if we’re ever to develop the capacity we need to provide shelter on a global scale.