The History of Sustainable Housing, a review

Matt’s capstone project will be composed of a website that will focus on Sustainable housing both past and present. Personally I think this will be an excellent website and good resource, especially for new home owners who are looking to make their homes a little greener. There are many positive things to say about this site and very few if any negative and I will highlight them as I proceed.

This site tackles many aspects of the rising sustainable housing industry. As a history student, I do find the aspect at looking at the history of sustainable housing to be quite interesting. I think it could prove also beneficial, and it seems like Matt was leaning in this direction too, to include a general history of housing seeing as sustainable housing seems like a more modern concept. Showing how inefficient houses were during the, say 1800s, compared to what we have now could prove rather interesting, especially in terms of heating. Anyways, I think this timeline aspect of housing evolution will be quite cool, and also be a benefit to the class’ overall scheme.

From Matt’s presentation and paper I also gathered that the project will spend the majority of its time looking at the achievable sustainable housing upgrades. I really like the fact that his emphasis on upgrades will be placed on reasonable ones that your “average joe” will be able to complete, in most cases, on their own. Matt also made mention that most sites looking at this topic are more blog based; so it will be good to have an easy to navigate website. While sites, like the Home Depot’s and other home improvement stores may have sections on sustainable housing it will be beneficial to have a site strictly dedicated to the matter at hand.

Asides from providing general information on improvements and the history of sustainable housing Matt also aims to tackle the current inefficiencies he has seen in modern housing. His goal is to outline the flaws on his site and prompt critical conversation which will in turn lead to better strategies in house renovation and construction. I think this is a bold yet excellent step. It could be hard to get the ball rolling in the conversations and difficult to see this have a quick impact on the home construction and renovation industries, but if it really takes off and given time I think that it could help people bring some major changes to housing, be it on a small or large scale.

This is a good idea for a project and the only thing I place emphasis on at the moment is that you may want to start building the general structure of your site sooner than later. This will give you a good idea on how long it will take to complete various aspects on your site and will also better help you assess which applications and methods you want to use to display information on the site, be it Sketch Up, maps, images, videos and so forth. I look forward to seeing the final product!

To read Matt’s project proposal click here.