In the Lebanese village of Baskinta, one off-grid house is built a bit differently than your average tiny home. Designed by architect Nizar Haddad, “Lifehaus” is a proof-of-concept project for building eco-friendly, self-sufficient and low-cost housing, combining ancient ancestral building techniques with modern science and engineering.
The small 1,722 square-foot residential property consists of a studio with a living room, mezzanine, terrace, and greenhouse. It’s completely off-grid, and made from local sustainable materials or recycled resources. The project seeks to highlight how sustainable historic architecture was, in comparison with modern construction which generates a lot of waste, has a high carbon footprint and needs more energy to maintain.
“I’ve always been passionate about nature and aware about the negative human impact on the environment, and this followed me into my architectural practice,” Haddad tells AD. He is critical about the modern architecture because of how negatively it impacts the environment. Consider the steps of contemporary building: the extraction of materials and the manufacturing are not great for environmental preservation. Plus, the end products themselves consume a lot of energy to heat and cool. Nor do they last very long, with the waste from construction and demolition both ending up in a landfill.
Fascinated by older buildings’ harmony with nature and how, over time, working with materials like stone, earth, and lime was historically perfected as a sustainable process, Haddad decided to explore how he could bring back these methods. “I’m not trying to just replicate what they did in the past,” he says, “but be inspired by and merge it with modern concepts to better serve the modern society. This is the main idea behind Lifehaus.”
The quaint-looking house runs on solar panels and collects rainwater, which is used as part of a larger recycled water system in the house. As a natural lighting feature, some walls have been embedded with upcycled glass bottles, allowing light to filter through into rooms without traditional windowpanes.
The walls are made from stone, clay bricks, sheep’s wool insulation, reeds, and even recycled tires—which are an anti-seismic and durable building material—to regulate temperature naturally. With the addition of vents and tunnels going through and under the house, air warmed in an attached greenhouse will heat the space in the winter, while air passing through in the summer will be cooled in adjacent tunnels before entering the structure.
The house is built around five main principles, which can be applied to any climate and location to make an off-grid house suited to its local environment. Should the project be replicated outside of Lebanon, the first principle is to use locally-sourced sustainable and natural materials (or to reuse materials.) For example, the lime-plastered walls are filled with 1,200 car tires saved from a local landfill.
The second is to design the layout and architecture of the house with bioclimatic principles, meaning harnessing environmental resources to help with climate control. The third principle is water management. In Lifehaus, harvested rain and river water is reused as grey water (meaning used water from all outlets) and black water (a supply for the toilet) that go through reed filtering systems so they can be used again as irrigation water. The fourth principal is renewable energy.
“By reducing the building’s heating and cooling consumption, I am reducing it’s energy dependency too–instead of installing 12 solar panels, I installed nine, the inverter [transformer] is smaller, and I gained more self-sufficiency,” Haddad explains. “The last principle is waste management, so all the organic waste is composted and used for the greenhouse.”
The project was also a community effort, bringing together builders from the region and beyond, keen to experiment with new techniques and exchange knowledge.
“Our stonemason used to build with earth bricks in Egypt…his technique was far more efficient than the one written in books, so with his experience we were able to pour 800 bricks per day,” Haddad says. “This kind of know-how is endangered because it’s all passed orally and people are not using this kind of architecture anymore, so the new generation are losing this knowledge.”
“We need to rethink our architecture and part of this is keeping these old, sustainable techniques alive,” he adds. “This project is not just for a small cottage in the middle of nowhere, but can be scaled up to apply to larger buildings in big cities, it’s all about choosing to build sustainably.”