Looking for a better future and trying to achieve current economical crisis, humanity is searching for a new way of life to develop more sustainable living places and reduce their energy costs. The most blocking habit we have against such a sustainable life style is the energy consuming, active service systems we use in our current buildings. We are forgetting that we had many examples of passive service solutions developed by highly initiated master architects in our history. Such passive solutions created no cost for energy.

In search for creating sustainable living spaces for humanity, the German architect and theorist Gottfried Semper’s way of evaluating architectrual culture, in his book “The Four Elements of Architecture,” published in 1851, is still a very good guiding source for current architectural practice.

Semper divides primordial dwellings into four basic elements:

(1) “the earhwork” (the section that raises the structure from the ground to a clean level and carries it),

(2) “the hearth” (although it is considered as hearth, it represents all the service requirements like acoustics, ventilation, heating, cooling, plumbing, drainage and electricity, needed in a building today),

(3) “the framework /roof” (for carrying the building and its mound),

(4) “the light enclosing membrane / mound” (interpreted as a covering that protects the structure from external influences).

Materials used for these four elements and their forms are supposed to be direct results and passive solutions for such functional needs and design problems in a living place.

 In current practice, hearth or services are seperated from architectural design by many architects as an element to be solved in a mechanical and electrical project. However, the service needs are one of the inseperable elements of the buildings that should be considered and technically solved by the architects. If current architects focus on designing passive service solutions by using the correct materials and forms as solutions for the needs of humanity we will achieve a more sustainable life style.

To understand this theory more deeply, let us look at just one example from the Museum of Mansion of Ismet Inonu in Heybeliada, one of the Prince Islands in Sea of Marmara, Istanbul. Here you can see the system for water supply from a water well below the kitchen, thus, residents of the house needed to pay neither for the water nor for any electricity for a mechanical pumping & plumbing system. The only cost they had was for the maintenance.

There are many examples of such passive solutions to develop a more sustainable lifestyle, and I hope to share them with you in my upcoming new studies to raise awareness on this issue.