No More Fried Eggs
by Timothy Lock
Building orientation has always been a critical part of ecological design. Even ancient and pre-civilization structures show evidence of careful siting—responding to sun, wind, slope, or seasonal migration patterns. Orientation could enhance comfort, ensure safety, or even reflect cultural hierarchies.
In contemporary practice, however, orientation is often constrained by pre-existing conditions: zoning ordinances that govern setbacks and encroachments, street grids drawn decades (or centuries) ago, and institutional design guidelines that prioritize form over function. These social, regulatory, and aesthetic frameworks can supersede ecological considerations.
In the last half-century, a renewed interest in passive solar gain, on-site renewable energy, and microclimate responsiveness has reintroduced ecological criteria into the orientation conversation. But we must ask: what about ecosystems?
Orientation is often the first physical decision made by the architect, the most final, and, potentially, the most resilient. It determines everything from access and shadow to wind patterns and drainage. But more than that, it sets in motion a cascade of impacts—on the soil, vegetation, water cycles, and non-human species that share the site. If we are to build in ways that support resilient ecosystems, we must treat orientation not as an aesthetic preference or an energy calculation alone, but as a defining ecological act.
Of course, even invoking “building orientation” presupposes new construction. And I would be remiss not to acknowledge that the lowest-impact intervention on any site is often reuse. Building reuse dramatically reduces the ecological cost of excavation, grading, and disruption—not just to soil and hydrology, but to the broader web of life that may have reclaimed or adapted to the site.
When reuse is not an option, the next best strategy is to locate the building, and, optimally, all associated construction activities on previously disturbed ground. Many sites carry the imprint of earlier human uses: driveways, fill areas, foundations, or compacted zones where little besides human activity has ever thrived. Lawns are great examples of seemingly “unbuilt” human-only areas. These are the scars. And often, they’re the best place to build. If the design doesn’t fill the total disturbance, can we locate all of the construction activities within this space as well and then, after the heavy vehicles are gone, revegetate the site to be ecologically resilient to as many species as possible?
Orientation toward disturbance in siting conversations might reduce theoretical building performance in terms of solar gain or energy modeling, but it offers a richer, more holistic ecological response. It opens the door to revegetation, habitat restoration, and a site strategy that maximizes resilience not just for people, but for the non-human life that surrounds and sustains us. And it doesn’t just benefit habitat and site resilience. It also reduces embodied emissions. Using already disturbed land often means less excavation, shorter utility runs, and fewer new materials for roads, foundations, and site infrastructure. It all adds up. While embodied carbon discussions often focus on structure and enclosure, early siting decisions like these can meaningfully reduce impacts long before construction begins.
This tension is especially critical now, as the rapid adoption of scientifically based design principles for reducing energy demand continues to reshape practice. We know the drill—hell, those of us who were Passive House early adopters often taught the drill:
- Orient the long axis east-west to maximize winter solar gain.
- Keep glazing to the south, minimize it on the east and west to avoid overheating.
- Provide shade in specific areas to combat solar gain when not needed.
- Compact the form, air-seal the envelope, minimize thermal bridging.
These are valuable tools, but limited, focused narrowly on operational efficiency, sometimes at the expense of broader ecological systems. They don’t account for the site disturbance that can result from rigid adherence to orientation metrics. They rarely ask whether the most solar-optimized location is also the most ecologically sensitive. They overlook the fact that advances in building assembly performance now allow for high-performing envelopes—regardless of which direction they face. And perhaps most critically, they never ask whether building at all is necessary.
Prioritizing internal performance in siting can also lead to what we’ve come to call the “fried egg”—a building placed alone in the middle of an open site to maximize solar exposure. This approach not only demands greater human-only disturbance zones around the building, it also, quite frankly, looks funny: a yolk floating in a field of white. The surrounding landscape becomes an afterthought. It is merely filler shaped by a reality where the building’s performance matters more than the site’s ecological resilience. We’ve all cooked fried eggs in the past. No more fried eggs.
A truly ecological architecture must integrate energy logic without becoming a servant to it. Sometimes the right move for an ecosystem is to break the rulebook—to sacrifice a few kilowatt-hours of modeled performance in exchange for long-term soil retention, habitat continuity, or restoration potential. If we’re serious about resilience, then efficiency alone isn’t enough.
