What to do now the 21st century is not even a teenager any more

Here is the third part of the Building Culture presentation, and the final video recording of the course.



Being the last video it should probably include a short summary of the main points, but it probably just ends rather abruptly, with more questions asked than answers, and many things left unsaid. A bit like this post.

Humidity and Traditional Buildings

When I talked about humidity the last time, I realised there was a lot more to say. It's not enough just to understand what humidity is, how temperature affects relative humidity, and how important it is to keep your walls airtight.

Keeping walls airtight is still very important, but we also need to understand how moisture moves through materials, and how important that is if moisture does get into your building materials, which is an undesirable, but unfortunately not unavoidable situation.

In this video I also look at traditional buildings, how they overcome humidity, and how traditional building culture can be influenced by events as well by the local climate and available building materials. 

Building Culture: Differences between Japan and the UK

Different countries have different building cultures, and the differences between Japan and the UK are immediately visible. Just like the buildings themselves, some of these differences are superficial and others are structural, some are easily visible and others are buried and hidden deep underground but have profound influences.

In Japan people like new houses but in the UK people like old houses. I think this comes from the fundamental difference that in the UK houses represent capital wealth, while in Japan the value is in the land, and houses are consumables. Before we decided to build, we spent a few years looking at buying a house, and visited many that were unsatisfactory, in one way or another. A few times we noticed houses for sale moving into the list plots of land for sale, as the building was knocked down. In these cases, the price usually went up, suggesting that an old building on a piece of land is a liability and the land becomes more valuable when it is removed.

In the UK, if people want a different house, they will sell up, buy a new one and move. In Japan they will knock the house down and rebuild. Redecoration and renovation are carried out on a regular basis on UK houses, while in Japan they are more of a recent trend.

Click here to read more of the original post.

Jevons Paradox

People say that more is less and less is more, but in economics, often less is less and more is more, particularly with efficiency.


Read more about this here: https://minuszeroeco.blogspot.com/2016/01/lesson-12-part-iii-economics-dark-side.html

Economics

Here are some terrible predictions by clever men. And some more reliable predictions about how much your running costs are going to be, depending on your capital investment.


Read more about this here: https://minuszeroeco.blogspot.com/2016/01/lesson-12-part-i-economics-story-so-far.html and here: https://minuszeroeco.blogspot.com/2016/01/lesson-12-part-ii-future.html