Our goals

The first priority in our treatment of the building envelope is to preserve the long-term structural integrity of the building. The second is to improve its function as an environmental separator -- to more effectively "keep the outside out and the inside in."¹ These are inter-related.

The most undesirable outsider is water, because (1) it destroys buildings by blowing up bricks (when it freezes), (2) it causes mold and rot, harming wood structures and lungs, and (3) getting wet is uncomfortable.

The second enemy is air, because it (1) carries water vapor, (2) carries heat in or out, and (3) carries irritants and pollutants, reducing comfort and health. (Air is also a friend, because we like to breath it. So here we need to bring the outside in and send the inside out, but not just willy-nilly.)

The third unwanted intruder/escapee is heat, because controlling the thermal environment is important for health and comfort, and because not wasting energy generating and removing heat is vital for the reasons outlined below.

Keeping the outside and inside separated in these respects is important for comfort, health, and rationality, including environmental rationality (avoiding energy waste and greenhouse gas emissions), financial rationality (vastly reducing energy bills for decades), and sustainability (resistance to an energy shortage, pandemic, etc.)

These areas of rationality are important because they help secure important ends (e.g. wealth, hospitable environmental conditions, safety), but also because human beings tend by nature to want coherent and meaningful lives, which is to say, we want to be guided by reason, the mental faculty which is ultimately our desire for coherence. Living in coherently designed structures is one factor which could help facilitate such a life.

This later end, because it is an "end in itself" is the most important. While securing of the above pragmatic ends is always accompanied by the knowledge that they will eventually disintegrate, a coherent life, a good life, is what we can desire for its own sake, and not as a means to any end. It is thus not met with this entropic challenge, and is a higher end.

This is where architecture enters the analysis. Architecture is the aesthetic expression of this designed coherence, and thus is a reflection for us of our own rational habitation of the environments we find for ourselves. This framework departs from the usual entrance of architectural concerns into engineering discussions. These treat the aesthetic dimension as exogenous to fundamental engineering concerns, even sometimes as hostile.

In our analysis, aesthetics must be fully at home with the engineering process. Architecture is central to our humanistic framework for designed habitation, and indispensable to the project of sheltering ourselves under roofs and reason. Building science engineering divorced from architecture is like thought divorced from language: it fails not only to find expression but even to be itself.¹

This also goes for the detached garage.

---

1 Joseph Lstiburek: BSI-001-The Perfect Wall ^↩
2 Likewise, architecture that is imposed on a habitat without understanding itself as an expression of the inner nature and function of the shelter is like the thoughtless ravings of a loquacious idiot^↩