Building the Urban Frontier House

by Janna Hafer

Introduction
By Randy Hafer, FAIA

This quest to build a sustainable urban house, our little house on the high plains, the Urban Frontier House, began a long time ago in the early 1970’s. In the fall of that year, I packed a trunk and flew off to the Bay Area to study architecture at a university that I had never seen before. For a kid from Montana, that was a pretty big shock. I went from a place that I felt I knew well, a place with friends and family, big skies, long views, and few cars to a place where I didn’t know anyone, a place with a very different climate, and lots of cars.

Then, as it happened, in the fall of 1973, my second year in California, the first Arab oil embargo – the first Energy Crisis – occurred. I was very impressed with the disruption, anxiety, and uncertainty that quickly developed in the car centered world of the Bay Area around me. While that first energy crisis was a political crisis and not a real shortage crisis, the swift and negative impacts of the shortage and price increases got me thinking. What if oil really was in short supply? What if gasoline was expensive? Could that even happen? Those questions had never occurred to me before that time.

I began exploring those questions. Clearly, as a society, we were then and are now dependent on readily available, inexpensive fossil fuels to power our transportation systems, heat, cool and light our buildings, manufacture the stuff of everyday life, and produce food. And if we are still dependent on those fossil fuels, are we not then also vulnerable to real shortages and price increases? And since the fossil fuels that produce the energy we depend upon come out of the ground, can they run out, and, if so, when? Is there another way?