Segal was born in 1907 in Switzerland and spent his youth years in an experimental alternative community Monte Verita (the Mountain of Truth). It was there that he found the inspiration to explore the traditional building methods and develop his own based on a mix of medieval English buildings, traditional American frame-house, and the super-simple Japanese house. Having studied architecture in the Netherlands and Germany, he brought science and maths to the traditional building movement by introducing timber frame calculation. He was employing modular dimensions in order to avoid waste of material.
He developed a method that is using standard, easily available materials without a real need to master wet trades. When it comes to building your house on your own, which are the most dreaded trades? Plastering and bricklaying? Right – unless you have experience, any attempt at plastering a wall will end up in a disaster. Why bother if you can do without plastering?
Green Roofs, Flat Roofs
For me, the main reason why Walter Segal’s method makes sense is that it is simple, readily available, eco-friendly and! it makes for an easy way to have a flat roof. If you know me for a while, you’ll have noticed that I love flat roofs.
Pitched roofs, especially those that cannot be converted in an attic room, are waste of space, waste of money and they don’t look very good. Well, at least from a modernist’s perspective they don’t.
Walter Segal was an advocate of green roofs – a layer of soil and vegetation provides unsurpassed insulation and helps the building mix within the environment. His followers usually choose strandboard as the base layer for a flat roof. It is made of oriented wood strands pressed and glued with natural wax and resin.
If strandboard is made to a certain standard, it will have around 10% of the usual formaldehyde emissions, which is relatively harmless. Of course, you can use wooden planks if you can justify it – many believe that using timber for roofing is a waste of resources, as strandboard is made from waste products – strands of bark, wooden chips and whatever is left after working the timber.
In 1936 Walter Segal moved to the UK and started spreading his method here during the 60s and 70s. One of his most famous buildings is The Centre for Alternative Technology in Powys, Wales.
Today, Segal’s ideas are still kept alive by Walter Segal Self-build Trust. They are staging self-build courses and if timber frame building is your thing, a course like this would be a great place to start.
Pic by Chester Tourist via Creative Commons.
