The Environments of Architecture

Environmental Design in Context

Randall Thomas, Trevor Garnham

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781134236077
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

This well-illustrated 'think piece' provides a much needed and topical philosophical introduction to the place of environmental design in architecture.

The Environments of Architecture sets out a range of considerations necessary to produce appropriate internal environments in the context of a wider discussion on the effect of building decisions on the broader environment.

The authors, from architecture and engineering, academia and practice, provide a rounded and well-balanced introduction to this important topic. Starting from a belief that the built environment can contribute more positively to the planet and the pleasure of places as well as answering the practical demands of comfort, they cover site planning, form, materials, construction and operation as well as looking at design on a city level.

Presenting a thoughtful and stimulating approach to the built environment, this book forms an excellent guide for practitioners, students and academics concerned with our built environment.

1

Introduction

Architecture needs to be located in an environmental, historical and cultural context. Our environmental context is one of rampant energy consumption, dwindling fossil fuels and global warming. Buildings are a major consumer of energy in both their construction and operation. For example, 40–50 per cent of all energy consumed in Europe is used in buildings and 40–60 per cent of this is for heating and ventilating. As such they are a significant cause of our environmental problems. However, it is possible through design (and management) to create an architecture (and here it is understood that we include urban design) which contributes more positively to the planet and our lives. The environmental impact of a building and, in particular, its CO₂ emissions, depends on its overall design – site planning, form, materials, construction and operation all affect performance.

To succeed in developing a new architecture a deeper understanding of science, history and culture than is evident at present will be required. The built environment of the past was at times the creation of geniuses like Brunelleschi and Wren who combined the humanities and sciences. More recently Le Corbusier (along with Ozenfant) expressed an interest in both fields. But very broadly there are significant differences – science is often a more collective effort and much of it depends on a quantitive understanding of the physical world and art is usually more individualistic and qualitative. A scientific theory can normally be objectively verified – an aesthetic theory is more subjective. Science can be seen as a self-correcting thought system which advances but literature, say, has a more active historical sense of the past which shapes the present.¹ Architecture needs to combine the understanding of the relationship between past and present that literature, for example, has with the knowledge that comes from science (and engineering).

Design is about the future, but to be human is to be poised between the past and the future. This very moment and any human activity are made possible by memory and anticipation. Hence we agreed that we needed to cover a sense of time, of history and of the future. Our two-sided Janus approach combines end-of-millennium malaise with a desperate desire to be optimistic. So this book looks both backwards and forwards, embracing both tradition and science. Architecture should learn from how vernacular buildings – the work of anonymous builders – responded to the environment as well as up-to-date methods of design prediction.

It must take a broad approach, almost an anthropological one. Anthropology is ‘the science of … mankind in the widest sense’,² and can be drawn upon, for example, in viewing the role of buildings – as all material culture – to be as much symbolic as practical. Cultures express how they have adapted to the environmental conditions of a particular place as well as the universal, if extremely varied, belief in the spiritual or poetic. Environmental factors have, of course, been major determinants of form and the range of traditional, vernacular buildings records mankind’s adaptability, invention and capacity to produce many kinds of beauty. The sarawak house and the igloo are as different from one another as the parrot and the penguin.

Our view is that it is useful to juxtapose science with well-adapted vernacular buildings. Architecture is all too often seen primarily either as a technical matter or one of personal visual expression and novel form making rather than a cultural concern, as it should be. Sustainable design should aim to make a cultural contribution, which entails combining a scientific understanding of environmental principles with a sense of how vernacular buildings made comfortable living conditions before mechanical services. Kenneth Frampton’s concept of ‘Critical Regionalism’ has been important in establishing an intellectual basis for the approach outlined in the following chapters, dealing with the issues of the age whilst locating building design in a cultural and environmental context. It helps to overcome the dangers of nostalgia and simply reviving the ‘forms of a lost vernacular’.³ Critical Regionalism is a strategy that Frampton proposes for a modern architecture that resists a bland, homogeneous global culture by responding carefully to particular qualities of a region – climate, materials, light and cultural traditions.

One of the most crucial questions for architecture and environmental design is ‘What is the relationship among things, organisms and their context?’ This complex question requires an equally rich response. The answer is not merely a quantitative one, which, for example, analyses energy flows in a community, but a qualitative one which gives full consideration to poetry, beauty and delight (and in this there will also be decay, sadness and death). Perhaps it is not possible to teach these things and perhaps, strictly speaking, there can be no textbooks on design, for each problem presents itself anew and each generation has new ideas to express. But one can set up some signposts, and that is what we have tried to do below.

A related question to the one above is to what extent biology can be of service to architecture. Our view is that simple biological analogies are of limited value but an analysis of the scientific bases – the physics, the chemistry, the ecology and so forth – can be very rewarding.

Views of science and technology are complex and varied (including ours). Although science clearly has the capability of making our lives better, whether in fact it will is less so. Science is often confused with technology. Science can help us understand the environment and develop solutions to its problems. Technology, which can be seen as the application of science, can have both positive and negative effects on the environment as we know from dams, nuclear power plants, genetically modified crops, plastics and on and on. We need to use the right (sometimes known as ‘appropriate’) technologies and, as might be suspected, there is not unanimity on what these are. However, we are of the opinion that the age of mechanisation, as described intelligently and eloquently by Giedion in Mechanisation Takes Command and Reyner Banham in The Architecture of the Well-tempered Environment, is giving way to a more biological approach which values life more and views the built and natural (including the physical) environments as one. This is one basis for a sustainable architecture which can be an element of a new broad understanding of mankind’s relationship to the planet.⁴

Much of this discussion is intertwined, of course, with functionalism, which was taken up in a somewhat simplistic way in modern architecture. Evolution produces organisms that function well (or as well as they have to) and so must buildings in relation to their environment. The built environment needs to be designed in the full knowledge of the impact human actions have in a broader context. Building in this way will be well-adapted to its local environment, its ‘habitat’, and will have internal arrangements that efficiently deliver essential ‘nutrients’, fresh air, warmth, light, etc. But meaning, per se, is absent in evolution. We humans inherit a world where things have significance for us – we find or add meaning and cannot live without it. Meanings may be as many and varied as there are individuals. But we share a common humanity and all live on planet Earth alongside the animals and plants. Considered in this way a ‘deep structure’ might be glimpsed that suggests how the built environment might be more meaningful for us and at the same time less detrimental to the rest of life on the planet. An important role of architecture and environmental design is to ensure that we adapt at least most of our human habitat as symbiotically to the broader environment as naturally many plants and animals do. One key to this will be the use of renewable energy sources. If the nineteenth century was the age of coal and the twentieth of oil, the twenty-first will be the age of the sun.

The built environment in which we live has been shaped by two dominant traditions – a vernacular one which tends to be protective of its inhabitants and that of the Modern Movement which aimed at an ‘open’ architecture of light and space. There is a need to combine the best elements of both these influences and this will be done in part through a careful study of form. Morphology is one of the principal themes in design and will be a key aspect of sustainable architecture.

For us, good architecture embodies our thinking about the world and our place in it. This, we believe, needs to be a place of respect for humans and the environment (both physical and biological). How to achieve this in a rapidly urbanising world is an exceptional and urgent challenge. The worldwide urban population grows by one million each week. Cities now form the environment for most of humanity for most of the time and by mid-century we may be nine billion people with 70 per cent living in cities. The impact of cities on the landscape due to their consumption of energy and materials and their production of wastes is untold. It is impossible to consider the future of architecture without a concept of what urban life may be.

Taking up the themes above, the next three chapters deal with site and setting and building design to develop ways of viewing the site as a specific place on the Earth and at one moment of its history. The first discusses how comfort can be provided (or more broadly how organisms adapt to and alter their environments). The two chapters which follow start to examine how mankind has created buildings for sites in both the past and present and how it may do so in the very different environmental context of global warming and dwindling fossil fuel resources. The three after these go into more detail on specialised areas of environmental design – heating, cooling, ventilation and lighting. Although these are given separate chapter headings, it is worthwhile noting that they are all part of a unity which runs from site to detail and that successful architecture can not divorce form, structure and services. In this again the biological unity of organisms with their integrated form, structure and physiology has inspired us. The penultimate chapter is on cities and reflects upon key points from the preceding ones in relation to groups of buildings in an urban context.

2

Site and setting

Introduction

Architecture is inextricably bound up with place. A building is constructed in a particular place, whatever other factors shape a design. Hence the siting of a building – its relationship to its immediate environment – is of enormous importance. In addition, a sustainable architecture must consider the impact on the broader environment. The word site is derived from the Latin situs, which translates as ‘local position’. But situs is connected to sinere, which means ‘to leave, or allow to remain’. In this we detect a resonance between site and sustainability, that a building should adapt itself to the inherent features of a place as much as it responds to internal dictates of function to develop form. Interestingly, the word sustainability comes from the Latin tenere, which means ‘to hold firm’, a root which gives us tender, to attend upon, and to be attentive to, all words usefully kept in mind as we consider our intentions in siting a building and developing a sustainable architecture.

Biology and biodiversity are the keys to our sustainable future. This starts at the site level in its broadest sense. Before building, a site is what its geology and history have made it, and it is the habitat of plants, insects, birds and animals.¹ The earth teems with life. There is one basic connection between all of its myriad forms; they use material and energy from their surrounding environment to grow. What is of particular interest to us is that in organisms, form, materials, physiology and, in the case of animals, behaviour constitute a whole that is adapted to the environment.

Plants absorb sunlight and use its energy to photosynthesise the food they need, a process that involves taking up carbon dioxide from the air and drawing up water with dissolved chemicals from the earth. Animals get their energy by eating plants, and so taking over their carbohydrates and other nutrients, or by eating other animals. An animal is a bit like a tube that takes in food and air at one end and expels waste at the other. Buildings are not unlike animals in this respect, taking in energy, light and air and producing waste. But buildings are also like plants in being rooted in the ground and rising to the light and air. Sustainable architecture for the twenty-first century will benefit by drawing analogies with biological systems rather than mechanical ones, which featured large in the twentieth.

Life depends on the energy that the Earth receives from the sun. The Earth’s atmosphere allows visible light, infrared and a small amount of ultraviolet to reach the surface. The sun’s radiation warms both the world of the living and the mineral. When life began on Earth about 3.5 billion years ago, the atmosphere was very different from today – the likely mixture of methane, hydrogen sulphide and carbon monoxide is toxic to life as we know it now. As early as 2,500 million years ago cyanobacteria were harvesting light to make sugars from carbon dioxide and water, and in this process of photosynthesis producing oxygen, which consequently transformed the atmosphere. Eventually our current atmosphere developed which is broadly suitable for life on Earth (the number of people who die from respiratory diseases is one reason for the qualification). Although carbon dioxide constitutes less than 0.05 per cent of atmospheric gases, almost all of the carbon in living things is derived from this. The atmosphere also makes life possible and sustainable for, along with the Earth’s rate of rotation, it prevents our planet becoming impossibly hot or cold.

Just as animals need food for energy – partly to maintain their body temperature – so buildings require energy to keep them warm (or cool in a hot environment), as well as light and air. The basic energy source for buildings, as for animals, is plants – fossil fuels, coal, oil and gas being the product of long dead vegetation. As is well known, the proportion of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is rising steadily and this is a principal cause of global warming. This is largely a result of burning fossil fuels, burning in just a few decades the remains of plants that absorbed the gas over millions of years. The energy used in heating and cooling buildings is a major factor in this. The reserves of fossil fuel are running down but new technologies are emerging that will allow buildings to become more like plants and produce energy from solar radiation. Also older forms of energy production are being re-deployed: windmills becoming wind turbines, water mills adapted to produce hydropower, etc. Recent advances in technology that allow buildings to generate energy add a new dimension to the more traditional demand whereby the siting and form of a building, its orientation and design make optimum use of the microclimate of a site.

Until quite recently people tended to remain in the locality where they were born.² Like plants, a culture and its buildings became rooted in a particular place. Any place is made up of the interaction of many factors: topography, geology, soil chemistry, climate, vegetation, human history, culture, time and chance. Locally available natural material – stone, earth, clay, trees and plants – were traditionally used to make congenial habitats for humans wherever they settled. These traditional or vernacular buildings often strike us as having an organic relationship with the environment in which they sit and often contribute greatly to a sense of place.

In contrast, mobility has become such a feature of modern life that with our inexpensive – if environmentally costly – travel, people experience at first hand a range of cultures and climates (mostly people from cold northern climates seeking the sun and warm seas of the south). Our ability to travel freely was re...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Illustration credits
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Note to readers
• Physics units, conversion factors and abbreviations
• Glossary
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Site and setting
• 3. Building design 1: Smaller buildings and the creation of environments
• 4. Building design 2: The environments of larger buildings
• 5. Heating, cooling and power
• 6. Ventilation
• 7. Light and shade
• 8. Cities
• 9. Conclusion
• Appendix A: Earth, sky and physics
• Appendix B: A time line
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index