Designing Buildings for People E-Book

Derek Clements-Croome

• Herausgeber: Crowood
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 379

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

Our built environments can affect us in many subtle ways. Simply sensing fresh air and natural light or seeing greenery and open space can uplift our mood and improve our wellbeing. But these healthy environments are increasingly difficult to achieve in practice. The vital collaboration between the many people involved in designing and producing buildings is often not achieved. Then there is the pressing need to reduce waste and pollution. Managing these demands is a challenge, especially in a traditional climate of short-term thinking. Designing Buildings for People explores how we can learn from buildings of the past, vernacular architecture and the natural world around us, while still harnessing the opportunities presented by technology, to think creatively, work collaboratively and exercise a transdisciplinary approach. The book features over 200 images, exhibiting the acclaimed work of internationally recognized and research-led designers from the fields of architecture, engineering and management. It is a prime reference work for professionals and students who want to build the sustainable buildings of the future.

Leseprobe

First published in 2020 by

The Crowood Press Ltd

Ramsbury, Marlborough

Wiltshire SN8 2HR

[email protected]

www.crowood.com

This e-book first published in 2020

© Derek Clements-Croome 2020

All rights reserved. This e-book is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 1 78500 710 1

Contents

Acknowledgements

Preface

Chapter One Sustainable intelligent buildings for people

Chapter Two Vernacular architecture

Chapter Three Lessons from nature – biomimetic and biophilic architecture

Chapter Four Buildings for health and wellbeing

Chapter Five Technology as an enabler

Chapter Six Sustainable architecture

Chapter Seven Decision-making

Chapter Eight Gallery of case studies

Appendix

References

Index

Acknowledgements

IHAVE SO MANY PEOPLE among my friends and colleagues to thank for their help, advice and input. Firstly my gratitude to my photo manager Tong Yang for her deft processing of all the photos and arranging drawings with Desislava Veleva; and to Gulay Ozkan and Norma Diaz for checking and formatting the references.

I am indebted to Mina Hasman at Skidmore Owings and Merrill (SOM); Clare Bowman at RCZM Architects; Professor Alberto Estevez at University International Catalunya; Petra Gruber at University of Akron in Ohio; Barbara Imhof at Liquifer Systems Group; Michael Beaven and his colleagues at Arup; Patrick Bellew at Atelier Ten; Stefan Jakobek at HOK; Joyce Chan Schoof at Parliament and Loughborough University; Ann Marie Aguilar at Well Certified; Sandra Gritti at Edge; Renzo Piano Building Workshop (RPBW); Amanda Levete at AL_A; Alexander Bond at Biophilic Designs; Alexandra Morris at Mitie; David Benjamin at The Living Architects New York; James Law Architects, Hong Kong; Neveen Hamza at Newcastle University, UK; Howard Morgan at Real Service; Debra Corey, Global Head of Engagement at Reward Gateway; Marylis Ramos at PRP; Midori Ainoura and her colleagues at PLP; Vyt Garnys and Paul Abijoye at CETEC; Nicola Gillen at Cushman Wakefield; Charlotte Hermans at AECOM; Briony Turner at Institute for Environmental Analytics; Neil Pennell at Land Securities; Toby Benzecry at Workplace Futures Group and Modus; Britni Stone at NBBJ; Farrah Hassan – Hardwick (HOK); among many others for discussions that opened my mind to new ideas. Photos are credited, as are companies where appropriate, on the pages where their work appears. Case studies have been generously offered by those above and many others.

A special thank you to my colleagues at the British Council for Offices for their help and encouragement, and also to members of the CIBSE Intelligent Buildings Group. Last but not least, I would like to pay tribute to all the students past and present with whom I have exchanged ideas over many years in the UK, China and other countries. It has been a rich knowledge exchange.

Derek Clements-Croome

Professor Emeritus at Reading University

Visiting Professor at Queen Mary University

London

August 2019

Preface

EVERY GENERATION seeks change and this is reflected by the shifting outlooks in society and advancements in technology. There is a growing sense that we are moving towards an open society in which personalization is strongly evident. Today many people want to work in adaptable environments denoted by such terms as flexi-time and flexi-space.

Many people are involved in the processes that underlie architecture – and hence the buildings being newly created or older ones being refurbished. It is important that connectivity between everyone is seamless so that the communication between them all is effective; all too often it is not. There has to be an openness to consider fresh ideas besides an awareness of long-term implications. It is the value of our endeavours that is important, expressed by, for example, the benefits to costs ratio or the social return on investment that should be a vital part of decision-making. Too often perceptions based on costs alone are misplaced.

We spend much of our time throughout our life in buildings. How do they affect us and how does our behaviour affect their performance? Today sustainable development and climate change, together with health and well-being, are two issues that permeate our thinking worldwide. Is it any longer enough to carry on thinking in the same way about how we design, plan and manage buildings? Buildings are viewed here more as organisms rather that static lifeless blocks of materials.

Chapters 1 to 7 of this book discuss and illustrate some principal areas of development that influence our thinking. We see here how lessons from Nature and history provide powerful insights into how we approach planning, designing and managing sustainability, whilst at the same time achieving flourishing environments in which people live and work. A gallery of examples which demonstrate these objectives is illustrated in Chapter 8.

I welcome readers to write to me care of the publishers with their ideas and experiences, which I can then reference in any possible future edition.

Derek Clements-Croome

September 2019

Chapter One

Sustainable intelligent buildings for people

We never just look at one thing: we are always looking at the relation between things and ourselves. Our vision is continually active, continually moving….

John Berger, Ways of Seeing (1972)

BERGER IS REFERRING to viewing art but what he says is true of how we sense the environment around us and the places we inhabit too. What do we mean by an ‘intelligent building’? It is one that serves the needs of people in functional ways but is also beautiful – not just visually but in its simplicity and in the sensory ways it meets these human needs. Intelligent buildings have existed for thousands of years but different centuries and cultures express them in different ways; examples might be an igloo, a Japanese tea house, the traditional Malaysian house or a courtyard design. There are many other vernacular types throughout history, each offering ingredients that make up the recipe for what is the essence of an intelligent building.

Sir Henry Wotton’s work, The Elements of Architecture (published in 1624), a loose translation of de Architectura by the Roman author and architect Vitruvius, includes the quotation, ‘Well building hath three conditions: firmness, commodity, and delight,’ which might today be paraphrased, ‘durability, resilience, function and beauty.’

Of course these are basic, primary needs but they can be interpreted in various ways. Each building will be nuanced according to the way the client and design team interact. A building is a composition, but unlike a music score composed by one mind, buildings are a composite of thoughts and ideas from many minds that make up the design, construction and operation team. The variety of personnel constituting the team are educated in different ways too, and therein lies the source of many problems: the basic language of building and architecture is interpreted with different priorities by the various players. Attaining seamless connectivity of thoughts to achieve a vision is not easy but when successful it is very powerful.

Architecture can stir our emotions; how and why this happens is a complex but beautiful story and has been a topic of philosophical debate for many centuries. A cathedral evokes a special feeling within us as soon as we step over its threshold. Perhaps the sight of it has prepared us, but stepping inside, our sensory perception reaches deeper into our minds. The atmosphere is tangible, and even more so if music plays within the cathedral walls because it evokes another emotion in our sensory response beyond the visual impact. For those who have experienced music in King’s College Chapel in Cambridge, St Paul’s Cathedral in London, or Coventry Cathedral, for example, know how the visual and aural senses in those places evoke our emotions and wellbeing in a heightened way.

Terminology

In the twenty-first century, ‘intelligent’ buildings tend to be those that are technologically driven, but already we can see the impact of a shift in society’s values: there is an increasing desire for buildings to be designed for the health and wellbeing of their occupants, a more caring and humane approach that offsets the hard face of construction and technology. Too often an intelligent building is reduced down to the choice of a building management system but there is much more to it than that; this is why I prefer the term ‘intelligent’ to ‘smart’.

Fig. 1.1 Key domains of focus for intelligent buildings. (Clements-Croome 2013, p. 289)

The words ‘intelligent’ and ‘smart’ are often used interchangeably but there is a distinction. Intelligence is the faculty of reasoning with a capacity to quickly comprehend. It is characterized by sound thought and good judgement. When a person is inherently intelligent they can also be smart but a smart person may not be very intelligent by nature. Smartness comes from responding to the situation or circumstances being experienced.

There are three types of intelligence, which recognize cognitive, emotional and practical reasoning and abilities. Smartness concentrates mainly on cognitive intelligence whereas most decisions in life depend on a mixture of all three types of intelligence. We can conclude that an intelligent building has a higher level of demands than a smart one. It has to enhance health and wellbeing by providing a wholesome sensory experience; it has to be sustainable in its use of resources but it also needs to be ‘smart’ in order to deal with quick changes of demand in temperature, ventilation or lighting, for example.

Digital technology can enable a building to be smart. The EDGE Olympic building in Amsterdam with its 15,000 sensors might be an example of a smart building but it also embraces other features that show it to be an intelligent one too as it aims to reduce energy costs and environmental impact whilst providing an optimal indoor environment for the occupants.

On the other hand, a low-tech building can be effective using passive control: measures like building form, orientation, mass and materials respond to changes in a more natural way. An igloo is an example of an intelligent building in the Arctic context. We can see that intelligence is a more embracing term than smartness; hence the use of these terms needs to be differentiated.

Can intelligent buildings provide alternative and more sustainable approaches to heating, ventilating and air-conditioning of buildings? Lessons from history as well as the natural world show us that they can. Some of these approaches feature in Chapters 2 and 3. Throughout history clean air, sunlight, sound and water have been fundamental to the needs of people. Today, sensitive control of these needs may use either traditional or new solutions, or a blend of both, but we have to remember that the built environment is fundamental to mankind’s sense of wellbeing and it is the totality of this idea that we need to understand and value, even in a zero-carbon economy.

Intelligent buildings respect the needs of the individual, the business organization and the wider society, and we can learn a lot about intelligent buildings by looking at the history of world architecture and seeing how people have adapted buildings to deal with the rigours of climate and the changing face of civilization. There are also lessons to be learned from nature: animals and plants have evolved to use materials and expend energy optimally in the various changing and dynamic environments across the world, whether in deserts, arctic regions, hot-humid, hot-dry or temperate climates. Similarly, buildings are now having to absorb the impact of the technological age; the implications of climate change and the need for healthy working conditions are now dominating our thinking as people become more knowledgeable about the impact of the environment on individuals and within the context of local and global communities.

Intelligent buildings should be sustainable, healthy, and technologically aware, meet the needs of occupants and business, and should be flexible and adaptable to deal with change. The processes of planning, design, construction, commissioning and facilities management – including evaluating the building, referred to as post-occupancy evaluation (POE) – are all vitally important when defining an intelligent building. Buildings comprise many systems devised by many people, yet the relationship between buildings and people can only work satisfactorily if there is an integrated design, construction and operational team possessing a common holistic vision by working together right from the commencement of a project. This means that planners, consultants, contractors, facilities managers, manufacturers and clients must share a common vision with a set of intrinsic values, and must also develop a mutual understanding of how the culture of an organization with its patterns of work are best suited to a particular building form and layout and served by the most appropriate environmental systems. A host of technologies are emerging that help these processes, but in the end, it is how we think about achieving responsive buildings that matters. Intelligent buildings can cope with social and technological change and should be adaptable to short-term and long-term human needs. The design brief must reflect this vision and understanding.

We need to consider how buildings affect people in various ways. They need to be aesthetically expressive in sensory terms as well as satisfying our primeval needs of warmth, safety and security. The environments they create can help us work more effectively because they can present a wide range of stimuli for our senses to react to. Intelligent buildings enable their occupants to experience delight, freshness, a feeling of space; they should invite daylight into their interiors, and should provide a social ambience which contributes to a general sense of pleasure and improvement in mood. In Chapter 4, I introduce the idea of ‘flourishing’ environments in which people can thrive. Of course, the culture, the management and job satisfaction are key but this does not diminish the importance of the built environment.

Buildings consume a great amount of energy and water in their construction and during their total life-cycle. They use large quantities of materials and aggregates and they generate waste and pollution at every stage of their production. It is no longer acceptable to consider a building and its systems in isolation from its wider social impact. This has become critical with the growth of megacities, which is part of a rising trend towards urban living. Modern liveable cities comprise intelligent and sustainable buildings and infrastructures; however, they should also be designed to show respect for the natural environment and the health of the inhabitants. In other words, sustainable and intelligent cities are composed of buildings supported by intelligent infrastructures created for the wellbeing of residential, commercial and industrial communities.

The key criteria for good quality intelligent buildings are that they should:

• satisfy client and users in a sustainable manner (the main objective for supply stakeholders);

• meet social and community needs;

• respect the health and wellbeing of occupants; and

• recognize available resources.

An intelligent building starts with a comprehensive brief, which should include:

• a clearly articulated project with a holistic vision and mission;

• a recognition of the planning, design and procurement realities;

• a whole-life value approach;

• an embedded monitoring system; and

• a comprehensive operating system for the building.

The creation of shared visions, effective teams, clear structures and robust processes ensures that the intelligent building being constructed will demonstrate the purpose for which it was conceived. As we move towards sustainable futures there needs to be a long-term outlook by the project team; it is no longer valid to think short-term. This book is about change brought about by societal pressures as well as the technology we create.

We need intelligent buildings for humanity as well as for functionality and efficiency. They are our twenty-first-century signature to a better, kinder world in which health, wellbeing and happiness can be integral in our planning, design and management thinking. Many of the ideas discussed apply to the refurbishment of older buildings as well as new ones.

Too often there are barriers which make these ideals difficult to achieve. Short-termism; a lack of design thinking time; silo thinking where there is a lack of communication between all the stakeholders involved in the design, construction and management processes; besides an over-conservative outlook are some of the issues. Chapter 7 advocates a more open, transdisciplinary approach to our decision-making.

PHILOSOPHY OF OVE ARUP

Arup wrote about the theory and practice of design throughout his life. Central to his thinking was the notion of total design which advocated closer collaboration not only between architects and engineers but across the whole building supply chain. His firm, founded in 1938, became a test bed for this design philosophy. He believed that a design should be developed by individuals with diverse skills coming together from the beginning of the project. Traditionally engineers were not involved in the early stages of design. He believed that the architect should be part an engineer and the engineer should be part an architect in order to achieve a fruitful collaboration. We see this creed being continued not only in practice but in the growing trend towards university degree courses in architectural engineering today.

Deconstructing intelligent buildings

We can often deepen our understanding of architecture by deconstructing ideas first and then reconstructing them. Francis Duffy (formerly of DEGW and President of the UK Royal Institute of British Architects 1993–95) described the nature of buildings as being composed of four layers of components: Shell, Services, Scenery and Set. The Shell is the structure, which has a lifetime of about fifty years or more; the Services are all the systems covering power, digital, air, water and transportation, having a lifetime ranging from three to twenty years; Scenery is the layout of partitions, including false ceilings, which can change about every five to seven years; Set is the furniture and contents, which can be changed every few weeks or months. Stewart Brand in his book How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They’re Built interprets these factors and recasts them in terms of six ‘S’s; to these I have added Senses, Spirit and Soul:

The nine S’s

Site: the geographical setting

Structure: the foundation and load-bearing elements

Skin: exterior surfaces

Services: operational systems of a building, including information technology and communications systems

Space plan: the interior layout

Stuff: the contents, including furniture

Senses: the human being

Spirit: the joy and mood induced by a place

Soul: the atmosphere or aura of a place

Brand considers one design imperative to be that ‘an adapted building has to allow slippage between the differently paced systems of Site, Structure, Skin, Services, Space Plan, and Stuff.’

The concept of layering also defines how a building relates to people: the building interacts with the occupants at the levels of the Senses, Spirit, Soul and Stuff; with the tenant organization at the Space plan level; with the landlord via the Services that have to be maintained; with the public via the Skin and entry to the building; and with the whole community concerning the plan and size of the Structure and the Site. Occupants use the building and its systems in different ways depending on their use patterns of behaviour, lifestyle and expectations. Occupancy behaviour gives rise to the largest differences between patterns of consumption of energy or water, for example.

Buildings and their interiors should evoke a sensory experience and the quality of that experience will depend on the interaction between the individual and the building together with the environment that the building creates. Juhani Pallasmaa, in The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses (1996), gives an elegant exposition about how architecture touches our perception of the world around us:

Architecture is essentially an extension of nature into the man-made realm, providing the ground for perception and the horizon of experiencing and understanding the world. It is not an isolated and self-sufficient artifact; it directs our attention and existential experience to wider horizons. Architecture also gives a conceptual and material structure to societal institutions, as well as to the conditions of daily life. It concretises the cycle of the year, the course of the sun and the passing of the hours of the day.

Juhani Pallasmaa

Buildings are subject to technological and sociological change. Christopher Alexander has posed the question, ‘What does it take to build something so that it is really easy to make comfortable little modifications in a way that once you have made them, they feel integral with the nature and structure of what is already there?’ (Refer to his books The Timeless Way of Building (1979) and A Pattern Language (1977).) Age plus adaptability make a building come to be loved. The building learns from its occupants and they learn from it. People like to have some control over their environment and also over the way that the building can be rearranged to deal with changing needs.

Old, cheap buildings offer high adaptability and opportunities for high-risk, creative ventures to be housed with little capital (Thorburn, 2002). Brand describes how the electronics firm Hewlett-Packard was founded in a garage in 1939 in California, with a $538 loan from their electronics teacher. Low rent space leaves tenants free to improve the space to suit their needs. Constant revision is the fate of the institutional and expensive buildings, but even they can be designed in an adaptable, loose-fit way to suit whole life expectancies.

Kincaid (2002) offers a note of caution about intelligent buildings and their tendency to be judged by the levels of system integration that they demonstrate. He argues that this approach can limit the adaptability potential of sustainable intelligent buildings. He goes on to suggest that the capability for re-differentiation or flexibility allows systems to be reconfigured and this will enhance the adaptability of the building and ease the problems of managing the information and communication technology systems.

Over fifty years there can be three generations of services and ten or more generations of space plan changes, and together with continual updating of information and communication systems the resulting costs are much higher than that of the original building.

Cathedrals appear to be monumental and impervious to change. The exterior of Salisbury Cathedral looks much as it did in 1266 yet, as Brand describes, the tower and spire were added in the fourteenth century; in 1754 the original choir screen was removed; in 1865 the screen and old organ were replaced with a new screen and a new organ; in 1929 the organ was removed and the screen demolished, to be replaced by an open metalwork one; in 1965 the screen was removed entirely to give an uninterrupted vista from end to end. What will be the next change?

Sir Richard Rogers, in an essay entitled ‘The artist and the scientist’, wrote:

One of the things that we are searching for is a form of architecture which, unlike classical architecture, is not perfect and finite upon completion … we are looking for an architecture rather like some music and poetry which can actually be changed by the users, a kind of architecture of improvisation.

Richard Rogers (quoted in Gans (ed.), 1991)

Architecture, like music, needs a technical resource to function in a myriad of ways, but at a higher level it requires interpretation which will ignite the spirit of the users.

The nature of aesthetics is broader than generally supposed. There is the direct visual aesthetic but there is also a sensory aesthetic which relates to the invisible. So the sounds, the feel, and the smell of the atmosphere in the building are part of the aesthetic. Freshness is one attribute of aesthetic, for example, and is a word which can apply to colour (visual sense), air quality (including air movement), one’s sense of space, or the degree of tidiness (it is widely recognized that people often feel better when they declutter a space).

The title of Sybil Kapoor’s book – Sight, Smell, Touch, Taste, Sound: A New Way to Cook – again reflects the power of our senses in all we do. Professor Charles Spence in the Experimental Psychology Department at the University of Oxford is an expert in ‘gastrophysics’, which he refers to as multisensory dining. This cross-sensory modal approach is evident when we experience the environment the building creates and is the root of the ‘flourish’ approach to assessing our state of health and wellbeing (seeChapter 4).

Aesthetics are also about how a building adapts and matures over time. How were the aesthetics of a Georgian building viewed in the eighteenth century in contrast to how they are seen today? There is an aesthetic linked to words such as mature, durable and mellow, and this aesthetic develops with time; buildings cannot learn if they do not last. Old buildings embody history and give a glimpse of it. There is also a social and environmental aesthetic, reflecting how well the building communicates with people inside and outside.

People often ask me to name my favourite intelligent building. Not an easy question to answer; both the Notre Dame du Haut chapel by Le Corbusier (shown in Chapter 4) and the Fallingwater House1 by Frank Lloyd Wright inspire me in various ways, but I often refer to the Jean-Marie Tjibaou Cultural Centre on the Tinu Peninsula in the Pacific near Noumea, built by the Renzo Piano Building Workshop Studios (RPBW). It is a low-tech and low-maintenance building in which the culture of the Kanak people of former times served as a starting point to the design because they knew and understood how to deal with the regional climate and the moods of the Pacific Ocean nearby.

Fig. 1.2 The Fallingwater Home by Frank Lloyd Wright. (Photo: Thibaut Houette)

Fig. 1.3 Model of a pavilion for the Jean-Marie Tjibaou Cultural Centre shown at the Royal Academy Exhibition in London, September 2018.

Fig. 1.4 The Jean-Marie Tjibaou Cultural Centre in Nouméa, New Caledonia. © RPBW – Renzo Piano Building Workshop Architects © ADCK – Agence de Développement de la Culture Kanak (Jean Pipite) © Fondazione Renzo Piano. (a) Aerial view of the ‘huts’ (photo: Pierre Alain Pantz); (b) aerial view (photo: John Gollings); (c) exterior view (photo: John Gollings); (d) interior (photo: Michel Denancé); (e) detail of the textural quality (photo: William Vassal); (f) people visiting the Cultural Centre (photo: William Vassal).

The Centre is located on a spit of land surrounded by water on three sides. The site’s lush vegetation is cut through with trails and paths, amongst which there are ‘villages’ with clusters of huts or small pavilions with strong ties to their context, Kanak culture arranged with a semicircular layout so defining open communal areas.

There are ten huts, in three different sizes, from 20m to 28m in height, all interconnected by a footpath. Within the Cultural Centre these huts serve various functions. The first group comprises exhibition spaces whilst a second series of huts houses research areas, a conference room and a library. The last series of huts contains studios for music, dance, painting and sculpture. The tall curved iroko wood shields that form the pavilions have adaptable louvres that protect the Centre from the Pacific ocean weather but also let the local breezes naturally ventilate the spaces. Iroko wood was chosen because it is termite proof. The concept shows beauty in simplicity but it also displays practicality and functionality.

The façades of the pavilions are part of a passive ventilation system; they control environmental conditions in what is a humid, semi-tropical climate. The double outer walls allow air to circulate between the two layers of slatted wood. The apertures in the external shell have adjustable louvres to take advantage of winds to circulate the air around the building using the natural buoyancy of the air.

In contrast, EDGE Olympic2 in Amsterdam is a high-tech building, but is also focused on user well-being and being environmentally sustainable. The building minimizes its environmental impact but also creates inspiring spaces for people to work. It uses a digital infrastructure to connect everything and everyone to a single cloud platform. Energy consumption is 72kWh/m2, largely supplied from solar panels. It has a green accessible rooftop and uses a lot of glass for its façade. 15,000 sensors measure the quality of the inside environment in the building. The carefully planned spaces are rich with greenery, filled with natural daylight and offer circadian artificial lighting, which closely mimics the daylight spectrum throughout the day that affects the human circadian rhythms.

Fig. 1.5 (a) Exterior of Edge Olympic (photo: Ossip van Duivenbode); (b–d) interior (photos: Ronald Tilleman); (e) health and wellbeing at EDGE Headquarters. (Credit: EDGE Technologies; photos: Horizon Photoworks)

Some practical realities

Building maintenance has had little status except where safety is compromised and yet preventive maintenance not only costs less than repairing building failures, it also reduces human wear and tear. Occupants become frustrated by systems that continually break down; buildings become non-sustainable and wasteful.

Commissioning is another stage of the design process that is often neglected. Post-occupancy evaluation and continual commissioning are spoken of but too often not done, although this is now improving with the more recent emphasis on the health and wellbeing of occupants. Darryl K. Boyce, President of the American Society for Heating, Refrigeration and Air Conditioning Engineering (ASHRAE) in 2019– 20, writes about achieving operational excellence in a paper emphasizing the need to recognize the close performance relationship between the building and people (ASHRAE Journal, 2019, 61, 14–18). He calls on us to think and act differently (an opinion I share in Chapter 7 in reference to creating sustainable, liveable buildings).

Buildings take a long time to plan, design and construct, and in some ways it is easy to understand how things can go wrong, bearing in mind all the stakeholders involved in all of these processes. As an example of the difficulties that often arise in planning buildings, Brand (1995) quotes the Sydney Opera House, finished in 1973 and universally recognized as a symbol of Australia. It cost $120 million with a cost overrun of about 1,700 per cent. The magnificent roof shells were designed to last 300 years and yet the waterproof joints between them were sealed with mastics that have a projected life of twelve years with no sensible provision made for inspection, maintenance or repair. In 1989, it was estimated that the Opera House would need $100 million to replace them. Why did that happen? Probably for several reasons. Was there a lack of systems and long-term thinking, or was it that the innumerable changes that inevitably take place during a building project could not be accounted for by the existing quantitative and qualitative processes? The design of the curved shell structures was complex and took time, so perhaps minds were concentrated on that (the result was brilliant) and maybe some practicalities were overlooked.

The three things that change a building most are economic and fashion markets, money and weather (temperature, moisture, water, frosts). To protect a building over a long period one needs to protect it from markets and weather by maintaining it. Money should be sufficient to maintain the building so that it can run efficiently and effectively for its intended purposes and to provide for renovation; sadly, all too often the maintenance budgets are viewed as an opportunity to reduce costs in the short term.

The facilities manager has an essential role: covering the planning and design related to construction and renovation; coordinating changes of facilities and relocation; developing facilities policies; long-term planning; building operations, maintenance and engineering; furnishings, equipment and inventory management; real estate procurement, disposal, reuse or recycling; and post-occupancy evaluation and continual commissioning.

Offices are a good building type to exemplify how buildings learn to take change continually. Open-plan and landscaped offices were developed in the 1960s, followed soon afterwards by a second wave of innovation in office furniture. Purpose-built partitions were easily linked; purpose-made work surfaces and storage devices became common and were suited to the open office environment. The nature of the open office environment was emphasized by the arrival of information technology which needs replacement practically every three years. This and sociological changes have altered the concept of the workplace, as discussed in Chapter 4.

The fuel crisis in the early 1970s started off an ever-increasing interest in energy and its consumption in buildings as well as in other sectors. New office buildings were sealed tightly with tinted windows or were double- and triple-glazed; tighter control was enforced by building management over lighting, ventilation and air temperature. Money was saved, public credit was taken for energy conservation but people became feeling unwell owing to being sealed in spaces with insufficient ventilation and exposed to chemicals – so called volatile organic compounds (VOCs) – outgassing from the carpets and building materials, a problem which can still occur today in tightly sealed buildings. Considerations such as water, waste management, pollution, and health and wellbeing are just as important as energy (as highlighted in Chapter 6). According to varying attitudes to climate change amongst all the cultures across the world, different priorities have been given to sustainability but a united global effort is needed to fulfil the challenges it gives nations and us as individuals.

The ‘intelligent’ building became dominant in the 1980s. Integration of climate control, fire services, security, lighting, heating, ventilation, air-conditioning and communications were all managed by a computerized integrated network. But vernacular architecture (as featured in Chapter 2) makes us pause and think. In all the increasing complexities of technology and changing social expectations we have to remember that simplicity is reliable, durable, gracious, elegant and natural.

Human values are always overwhelmingly important, however sophisticated the technology. It is the people who use the space who understand best how it can be altered to be conducive to the work being undertaken. Materials and structural systems can be used which invite change and allow changes to accumulate. According to Becker in The Total Workplace (1990), adaptability can be over-specified and cites the City of London Lloyds building (1985) as a case of this. The cost was £157 million and it was reckoned in a 1988 survey that 75 per cent of its occupants wanted to move back to their old 1958 building. The building was high-tech on a very large scale but took no account of the individual worker and work group needs, according to Becker, even though workplaces had a high degree of control. The building’s services were installed on the outside of the building, as they had been in 1976 for the Centre Pompidou in Paris, in order to open up interiors for flexible space planning, but this led to an attractive but expensive exterior with high maintenance costs. In contrast, the Chrysler building (1930) and the Empire State Building (1931) in New York have proved adaptable, although it is not clear that this was originally intended. Their high ceilings, shallow floor depth and openable windows allowed flexibility in subsequent replanning of the interiors. More recent upgrading of the Empire State Building has led to a more energy-efficient building.

Fig. 1.6 Lloyd’s of London.

Brand (1995) gives many examples where buildings at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Boston have proved flexible. Here there is a recognition that an abundance of natural daylight, controlled ventilation, good fire control and low energy consumption gave added value, an issue which is only more recently coming to be appreciated. Providing healthy environments should be seen as an investment, not as an expenditure. Good design and management of buildings with low energy demands tend to produce healthier buildings, for example. Capital cost outlooks do not respect these approaches and yet we know the flow of natural light through a building has a fundamental effect on health and a sense of wellbeing, so windows are very important for this and a range of other reasons. More fundamentally, sustainability means planning for future generations, which can only be achieved with a long-term outlook.

Brand believes scenario planning leads to a more versatile building because it takes advantage of the information developed by programming (detailed querying of building users) and offsets the common tendency to over-specify without properly understanding user needs. Buildings are treated in a strategic way and scenario planning and programming stimulate the design process so that a strategy can be formulated. This intent is conducted through the design and construction phases and ultimately through to the occupancy of the building.

I have emphasized that there has to be a common vision. Priority issues have to be understood. Integrated logistic support systems are common in naval architecture, aerospace, nuclear and defence industries; a lot can be learnt by studying them and applying some of the principles to buildings in order to reduce waste streams in the design and construction processes. The value of virtual reality is that designers and users can enter and walk round and view arrangements generated by computer modelling so that alternatives can be quickly reformed and different arrangements put into place. These processes can be helped considerably by feedback from post-occupancy evaluations.

Coda

James Gleick in his book Chaos states that simple shapes are inhuman. Mandelbrot was the inventor of fractal geometry (Fractals: Form, Chance, and Dimension (1977), and The Fractal Geometry of Nature (1982)) and wrote an explanation about this. Simple shapes fail to resonate with the way in which nature organizes itself or with the way that human perception sees the world. Physical architecture has immense detail; different scales draw one’s attention and stir the imagination. The architectural composition changes as one approaches the building and sees details in which new elements of the structure come into play. People appear to be happiest in a building where change occurs at every scale in space and time. There is a resonance with human reactions if these layers of scale can be felt. The analogy with the onion is appropriate: peel back the layers and reveal simplicity and depth simultaneously. The layers in the built environment created by the building designed and operated by people for people affect our outer and inner selves in more subtle ways than perhaps we have realized previously.

Recommendations: a summary

• Plan and design with an integrated team so that there is a commitment to the project from all stakeholders.

• Set a clear vision and mission which increases the motivation of the team.

• Apply a holistic approach with systems thinking.

• Consider the impact of the built environment on occupants and communities.

• The occupants’ behaviour has a significant effect on the consumption of energy and water besides the generation of waste, so it is important to increase the awareness of occupants to their impact on resources.

• Aim to increase the build asset value by designing for sustainable operation, flexible and agile spaces; health and wellbeing.

• Monitor using smart metering and wireless sensor technology.

• Develop data management systems to give feedback on the performance of spaces in the building. Measure the interaction between the building, the systems and the occupants using the latest wireless sensor systems (including wearables).

• Design for a degree of personal control of the environment.

• Use a whole life value approach to economic evaluations.

• Use technology as an enabler but aim for simplicity rather than over-complicated systems, and ensure interoperability is in place as connectivity is vital to effect smooth continuous operation.

• Remember efficiency does not guarantee effectiveness: you need to consider both when designing systems.

• Design beyond the expectations defined in codes and regulations.

• Keep abreast of relevant fields of knowledge and innovation which may be occurring in other sectors. Learn from other disciplines across sectors.

• Think of an intelligent building as an organism responding to human and environmental needs. Bio-façades are emerging where living and nonliving elements coexist.

Futures

Now and in the future we must consider the influence that buildings have on society, the local community and future generations. For this we will need to consider the environmental, social and economic impacts of buildings throughout the total process of design, construction and operation – whether the buildings are new or old. Whole life value, in which quality and whole life costs are assessed, is paramount if we are to think long-term and meet growing sustainability demands. Emerging technologies (discussed in Chapter 5) can help in the process. However, this does not mean a project has to be starved of human considerations; after all, improving the quality of life is a primary basis for sustainable development. Chapter 7 seeks to encourage a change in the way we think and make decisions about designing and managing buildings.

END NOTES

1 The Fallingwater House was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright for the Kaufmann family around 1936 and is a fine example of organic architecture.

It has served well as a house, yet has always been more than that, a work of art beyond any ordinary measure of excellence. Itself an ever-flowing source of exhilaration, it is set on the waterfall of Bear Run, spouting nature’s endless energy and grace. House and site together form the very image of man’s desire to be at one with nature, equal and wedded to nature.

Edgar Kaufmann, Junior

See also Percy Wong’s 2011 essay: ‘Fallingwater House: A design icon?’.

2 EDGE Olympic and Deloitte Buildings: a smart phone app lets users personalize their workplace with the possibility to customize the lighting and temperature, continuously measuring noise levels and air quality to inform choices. The same technology allows users access to the building and enables them to locate their colleagues or find meeting rooms or workplaces. This sophisticated digital infrastructure is flexible, making it future-proof. Extra services can be added to meet changing needs. This enables the buildings to continuously update their systems and contribute to user comfort, productivity and creativity.

Chapter Two

Vernacular architecture

If we look at all the major concerns of humanists and environmentalists today: balanced ecosystems, recycling of waste products, people’s participation, appropriate life-styles, indigenous technology, etc. we find the people of Asia already have it all… The old architecture – especially the vernacular – has much to teach us as it always develops a typology of fundamental common sense.

Charles Correa

MANY LESSONS CAN BE LEARNED by studying vernacular architecture (Oliver, 2003)1. The term ‘vernacular’ has been used since the 1850s by architectural historians to refer to the native architectural language of a region. Vernacular architecture has evolved from early humans living in caves or trees, to nomadic peoples using wood, wool and plant materials to make portable tents or yurts. And there are animals who make their homes in a myriad of ways to suit their needs, however hostile the environment. Vernacular architecture blends buildings into their specific settings, so that there is a natural harmony between the climate, architecture, and people. It features natural ventilation and controls air quality with the careful design and placement of indoor pollutant sources like stoves and commodes. Three examples of effective vernacular architecture are described in this chapter: wind towers, courtyards and igloos – each integrating the conditioning power of natural ventilation to give unique responses to local climate.

Some new buildings imitate the best of mature buildings; they increase in sophistication while retaining the simplicity that is a hallmark of vernacular architecture. Lim Jee Yuan describes in his book The Malay House (1987) how it creates a nearly perfect solution for the control of climate, with a multi-functional use of space, flexibility in design and a sophisticated prefabricated system which can extend the house with the growing needs of the family. There are many examples worldwide of how humans have ingeniously designed buildings to respond to climate; the principles upon which they were conceived are still relevant today.

Fig. 2.1 A traditional Malay house. (a) Natural ventilation and stack effect diagram of Selangor traditional Malay house (Ramli, 2012, available via licence: CC BY-NCSA 4.0); (b) Malaysian traditional architecture. (Photo: http://davidvso.blogspot.com/2012/09/east-coast-trip_20.html); (c) Fenestration design of the Selangor traditional Malay house. (Ramli, 2012, Available via licence: CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)

People in countries throughout the world have shown that there are many ways of creating buildings that not only provide an enduring practical utility but also an aesthetic; Islamic architecture is one example that is renowned. Currently there is a danger that as the economy of nations becomes more reliant on the rapidly advancing technologies, lessons enshrined in the heritage of world architecture will be neglected and a solely modern technological approach adopted. The basis of this chapter is to argue that human and sustainable development are the main priorities. Buildings should enrich the lives of people and for this they need to be in harmony with the climate, the purposes for which they are built, and the culture that has evolved in their region.