«Natural House» Upgrenna: How to Lead Eco-Friendly Lifestyle

Environmental protection, energy technology, sustainable development – perhaps are one of the most important nowadays issues. Obviously this number of questions make direct influence on contemporary architecture and architects, engineers who dedicate many years of their work on finding better ways for sustainable construction.

Swedish architect Bengt Warne died in December 2006, but his ideas are alive until now and moreover are so inspiring for many architects that they on their turn develop new excellent projects based on his great concepts and making them even more perfect.

He was an experienced architect with soul of scientist and researcher who dedicated his life working on houses which would allow people to live in harmony with nature. The architect said: “Even if ecology has been misunderstood as moralistic, boring, uncomfortable and expensive, it is now proved to be radically the opposite”. Warne was constantly struggling to reduce the distance between natural environment and man and this fight led him to create Naturhus model – a “natural house”. So what was his idea about?

The first “natural house” was built in 1974 in Saltsjöbaden, Stockholm, and its particularity was the glass shell-greenhouse, surrounding the entire building. From the architect’s point of view, water, earth, air, natural cycle and flows cont only can be, but must be used to sustain life of the house.

He was often mentioning that “living in a greenhouse gives architecture a fourth dimension, where time is represented by movements of naturally recycled endless flows of growth, sun, rain, wind and soil in plants, energy, air, water and earth. I call this naturehousing”.

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Text: Elizaveta Klepanova
Illustrative materials provided by Tailor Made arkitekter