Lifestyle and Embodied Energy: A Proposed Hybrid Analysis Method for Housing
Authors:   , Leah Adele Louise 
Published: November 2021

<p>This thesis set out to form a bridge between the disciplines of architectural history, social and women’s history, building technology and environmental assessment, by investigating changes to existing houses over time and linking these with changes in lifestyle and technology. The primary aim of this research is to establish a Hybrid Analysis Method for Housing (HAMH) as a vehicle for the investigation of the relationship between the environmental impact of the building materials in a house and the lifestyle of its inhabitants, both immediately after construction and in the present day. The method is developed using existing research techniques through the study of typical, working class, family houses in New Zealand (Tarikaka Settlement, Wellington) before being applied to a comparable sample of houses in England (Silver End, Witham). Although different in terms of layout, style, building materials and methods of construction, the two groups of case study houses have commonality in the people for whom they were originally designed, the period in which they were constructed and in their conception and planning. The HAMH incorporates both qualitative and quantitative analysis. The former relates to oral interviews with people who lived around the time the case study houses were first constructed, complemented by oral interviews covering the same questions with the present inhabitants of the case study houses. The quantitative part of the research is an investigation of the embodied energy of building materials invested in the case study houses since their construction. The research findings highlight a change in the purpose and function of housing which has taken place since the case study houses were constructed, when the house was very much a place of production and the adjacent public spaces were places for social interaction. Present day houses appear to be for eating and sleeping, relaxing, and engaging with technology, with the adjacent public spaces being dominated by the car. The results of the comparative study show that although the Tarikaka Settlement case study houses as constructed had much lower levels of embodied energy than the Silver End houses, the alterations and improvements made to them, combined with the necessary maintenance means that the cumulative embodied energy of these houses in 2012 is higher than the Silver End houses. The analysis of embodied energy highlights the importance of occupancy levels in the environmental impact of houses. This thesis suggests that the real value of the HAMH is its use as a vehicle for comparison and as such, it needs to be applied to other groups of houses, constructed in different time periods and in other locations. This should enable meaningful comparison between houses designed differently, using varied methods of construction and materials that are inhabited by different people with differing lifestyles, with the overall aim being to see how lifestyle and the environmental impact of building materials relate to each other. This thesis argues that unless the impact of household behaviour is understood, many efforts to produce more sustainable housing may be less effective than envisaged.</p>