Well's Rating for Evaluating Buildings

Malcolm Wells (March 11, 1926 – November 27, 2009) was an American architect who is regarded as "the father of modern earth-sheltered architecture." ... Wells was also a writer, illustrator, draftsman, lecturer, cartoonist, columnist, and solar energy consultant.

Malcolm Wells (wikipedia), the father of underground building, wrote an article that appeared in the "Next Whole Earth Catalog" about, among other things, this simple and ingenious device for rating the desirability of a building.  It's a scorecard that you fill out by rating a building or site according to a bunch of common-sense criteria about what makes it good, healthy, and sustainable.  You give the building a score from -100 to 100 on each dimension and then add up the scores to get the total rating for the building or project.





            Destroys pure air <—> Creates pure air
          Destroys pure water <—> Creates pure water
             Wastes rainwater <—> Stores rainwater
             Produces no food <—> Produces surplus food
           Destroys rich soil <—> Creates rich soil
          Wastes solar energy <—> Uses solar energy
       Stores no solar energy <—> Stores solar energy
             Destoys serenity <—> Creates serenity
                  Dumps waste <—> Consumes waste
           Needs maintainence <—> Self-maintaining
   Disregards Nature's cycles <—> Matches Nature's cycles
    Destroys wildlife habitat <—> Provides wildlife habitat
       Destroys human habitat <—> Provides human habitat
   Instensifies local weather <—> Moderates local weather
                              Is ugly <—> Is beautiful


There are lots of ways to improve existing buildings. Rainwater catchments are an easy win, even if you only use the water to irrigate. If you add an attached greenhouse to a building you can gain several advantages at once: create pure air; produces own food; creates rich soil; uses and stores solar energy; consumes its own wastes (composting); matches nature's cycles; provides human habitat; and, if done well, is beautiful.

This is a really interesting design tool! Thanks for sharing. I downloaded the image and will use it to be more intentional in future designs! I bet we could even add to it.

I did something similar when I was tasked with evaluating a Children’s Camp. They had 72 buildings in varying need of repair.

I drew up a Excel Spread sheet and plugged
In various formulas so that a priority rating could be assigned to each building. It was based on year around use, level of human occupancy, safety concerns, etc.

It basically said, “ by computer analytics this building and task needs to be done first”.

But anyone can do that for anything, like making a Permie property have priorities. Some people struggle with what to do first.

@Clay  Yeah, I like it a lot.  I really like how trees score very high, eh?

@Steve That's awesome.  As a Bucky Fuller fan it reminds me of his "World Game" on a small scale.  He basically proposed that we could fill out a big spreadsheet listing our resources and technological capabilities and then the computer could just calculate efficient ways to meet our needs.

I really should do that at the place I am now.

I am retiring from homesteading and bought an old Victorian Home that needs a lot of work. By plugging in certain perimeters, it would help me better focus my home improvements where I could get the best return on investment, aesthetics, usage, etc.

The best thing about this sort of worksheet is, you can change how the spread sheet makes it calculations so you can easily change its outcomes, than use the sort function to create lists based on priority. By sorting that stuff out, you get to look at the same task in different ways.

Just as an example, while I need a whole new kitchen, I am working on the library as I am a writer and spend a lot of time in the library creating my novels. The lack of light, less than inviting space, etc is the reason for that. As much as I want a new kitchen, the fact is it is functional, and we do not spend much time there anyway. But if I was to rate tasks based on return-on-investment, the kitchen would be top of the list of course.

A few years ago I really got into geology, and on my farm (not the house I live in now), it have a lot of mineralization. Using the same sort of spread sheet, as I found locations with gold, silver, palladium and lithium; I would plug in a host of parameters just to plot out where the best sites were.

It varied greatly and had surprising conclusions because ease of access might nudge out grams-per-overburden ton for instance. And sometimes trace elements like copper, zinc and palladium might nudge out larger deposits of silver.

Obviously, I would never mine them, but it was interesting to develop a map of the found locations and then chart them out of a feasibility scale. Not really the thing to do during daylight hours when better things can be done on a farm or homestead, but during the winter and during late-nights, creating custom spreadsheets can really be fascinating, and more so if people struggle with priorities.

I found a little paper by the Society of Building Science Educators that expands on Wells' Rating: https://www.sbse.org/sites/sbse/files/resources/wells_checklist_explanation.pdf

During the summer of 1999 the Society of Building Science Educators (SBSE) studied Wells' checklist and revised it to reflect the changes in thinking that have affected sustainable design in the past thirty years. The most notable changes were to organize the checklist into site and building issues and to acknowledge John Tillman Lyle's idea that sustainable design is merely breaking even, while regenerative design renews earth resources.