Aryana Libris

Author : Holmgren David
Title : The flywire house A case study in design against bushfire
Year : 1993

Link download : Holmgren_David_-_The_flywire_house.zip

Foreword. Catastrophic bushfires have been an integral part of the history of European settlement in south eastern Australia. This provided a context for the inclusion bushfire resistant house and landscape design as one of the elements that Bill Mollison and I brought together in Permaculture One in 1978. That pioneering work was directly influenced by Bill Mollison’s then recent personal experience of surviving the great Tasmanian bushfires of 1967, in which he saved his own (not at all fire resistant) house and then saved several more nearby houses, while many more unattended ones burnt down. Another key theme in that early work was the recognition that the nutrient rich, forests of food producing tree species and appropriate livestock that were one outcome of permaculture design, were inherently less fire hazardous and even fire retardant compared to fuel rich sclerophyll forests dominated by eucalypts or pines. The experiences of many during the 1983 Ash Wednesday fires as well as extensive research by CSIRO and others confirmed much of this integrated bushfire resistant design as reflecting the consensus of expert opinion. Flywire House embodies this bridge between permaculture as radical fringe innovation on the one hand and mainstream science and public policy on the other. The influence of the permaculture vision of the fire retardant food forest is moderated in the Flywire House design. Like the building design itself, the landscape design reflects the more conventional sensibilities of a mainstream audience that the original design project addressed. Secondly the low fertility clay soils prone to waterlogging in winter and hardsetting in summer were not likely to support a healthy high density of diverse food producing trees that form a close canopy forest with deep enough root systems to remain healthy and fire retardant in a severe drought such as the 82-83 Victorian drought that was regarded as a one in one hundred year event. ...