Living Spaces: Ecological Building and Design

Living Spaces:

by Thomas Schmitz-Günter, Loren Abraham, and Thomas A. Fisher, 1999 (English edition). Könemann Verlagsgesellschaft mbH, Cologne, Germany. Hardcover, 478 pages, $39.95

Living Spaces is a large coffee-table-quality book that touches on nearly every aspect of environmentally sound and natural homes.

Compiled from articles that appeared over a 10-year period in the German

Öko-Haus and

Öko-Test magazines, the resulting material was skillfully adapted to the U.S. context by co-authors Loren Abraham and Thomas Fisher.

Thanks to its magazine-article roots,

Living Spaces is superbly illustrated, with several high-quality color photos on nearly every page. The downside to this approach is that, while much of the text has been adapted for a U.S. and British audience, all the images are from Germany and its neighboring countries. As a result there is, in some places, an odd disconnect between the text and photos.

Other discrepancies that show up in this cross-cultural work are discussions of cost—$125/ft² ($1,345/m²) is cited as “economical” in Germany but would hardly be viewed as such in much of the U.S.—and a lack of attention to cooling, either passive or mechanical. Given the ubiquity with which wood is used to build houses in the U.S., it is interesting to see how much focus is given to touting the ecological benefits of using this material (masonry construction dominates in Europe). While we don’t disagree with this emphasis, we were disappointed not to see more about forest certification programs and guidance on choosing wood from well-managed sources.

A strength of

Living Spaces is the great job it does of explaining in lay terms some of the basic science behind issues such as heat loss, humidity, and acoustics. The authors also go to great lengths to clarify the distinctions between “natural” building, which uses minimally processed materials but may not be energy efficient or otherwise low-impact, and more high-tech approaches to low-impact housing.

On the whole,

Living Spaces is a great resource for anyone who specializes in green home design. American homeowners are likely to be challenged and intrigued by the European images, even if they don’t relate to them directly. Hopefully they will see past the pictures and also read the text, which has a lot to offer.

– NM