The Flat House review – a home made from hemp that will blow your mind

Practice Architecture's house is built from the plant growing in the fields around it. The project addresses a vital issue - the energy consumed and carbon emitted during construction

Here's today's fun fact: the word "canvas" is derived from "cannabis". (And imagine if the two words had still been identical this past century or so: literature would speak of cannabis-covered deck shoes, of boy scouts enjoying their life under cannabis, of going cannabissing for your parliamentary candidate.) There is a simple reason for this etymology. Among the many uses of hemp, the plant from which the drug comes - uses that include ropes, clothes, food and medicine - was the fabric for the sails of ships.

Once commonplace and useful, and hailed in the 1930s as a "billion-dollar crop", hemp's modern promise was cut short by its association with narcotics, which led its production to be taxed and outlawed across the western world. Call it paranoia, call it realism, but there's a theory that billionaires with interests in plastics and paper pulp successfully lobbied the US government to have their rival product suppressed. A war on drugs, in this account, was whipped up in order to deepen the public's dependency on petrochemicals.