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Earth Living
| Article
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11909 |
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Section : |
LIFE
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| Issue
Date : |
8 / 1987 |
2,340 Words |
| Author
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John Elvin
John Elvin is a columnist for the Washington Times. He has
written extensively on housing topics for periodicals. |
While civilization's advance has brought us out of the caves, living underground has its attractions. Earth-sheltered housing is certainly a great improvement on cave dwelling. But the present fascination has roots in the same factors that interested our ancestors: safety and energy conservation. Underground, we are much less vulnerable to tornadoes or radiation, plus the temperature remains in the mid-50-degree range.
The interest in earth-sheltered housing dates back to the free-spirited alternative life-style seekers of the 1960s. Yet living so close to Mother Earth is not a serious rival to the conventional approach to housing; it remains the choice of a daring and eccentric few. Architects and builders find it difficult to train the public to use a sophisticated term, "earth architecture," for earth-sheltered housing. By any other name, a hole in the ground is a hole in the ground. Even the Library of Congress stands accused of listing information on earth architecture under "caves."
Some of us recoil at the thought of being cold, damp, perhaps buried alive, or at least cramped up in an enclosed, windowless space. To us, earth-sheltered housing is just a fancy name for cave dwelling. But not so to Ray Scott, of the plush suburban community of Forest Hills in Harford Country, Maryland. Scott has lived in an earth-sheltered home for the past eight years. An engineer, he built the structure himself and has written five books about the experience. A measure of interest in the subject is that his books have sold over five hundred thousand copies in the United States and abroad.
Scott is a restless, adventurous sort. To him, the idea of living differently has great appeal. But he is realistically blunt in not recommending his life-style to daydreamers, idealists, or renegades. Scott says that these sorts of people tend to abandon underground construction plans when it becomes obvious that this "simple" life-style - using the earth as an integral part of home construction - can actually increase building costs by as much as 25 to 30 percent.
Following the sixties dreamers, Scott notes, came the energy savers of the seventies. They were determined to be independent of foreign sources of fuel, and earth-sheltered housing seemed just the answer. But they also had to face higher construction costs. "If your aim is strictly to save money," says Scott, "put that extra money in certificates of deposit in the bank and live conventionally."
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