The selective environment — an approach to environmentally responsive architecture - Sustainable Framework

Architectural Review, The, Dec, 2002 by Adam Voelcker

By Dean Hawkes, Jane McDonald and Koen Steemers. London: Spon Press. 2002. [pounds sterling]29.50

This contribution to the sustainable design of buildings follows in the path of Victor Olgyay's Design with Climate (1963) and Reyner Banham's The Architecture of the Well-tempered Environment (1969). Its central thesis is that a building's form and construction can and should provide the primary means of controlling the internal environment, with energy-consuming mechanical control taking secondary place, as a sort of fine-tuning. In its own words, the book 'sets out to define a set of principles that may guide the design of environmentally responsible buildings appropriate to all cultures and climates'. Its chapters cover the subjective complexities of comfort, and related to this the control of a building's environment by its users (if too complicated to understand, the mechanisms of control will be misused, thereby defeating the energy-saving objectives of control). There is a discussion about the importance of adopting accepted 'types' if the wheel is not to be reinvented for each new building design. Th is leads on to a series of case studies of different building types from around the world, and concludes with a check-list for sustainable design, ranging from regional issues, through site and building form, to building fabric and finally services.

As a primer for students, the book is a success. It puts the subject into a historical context and an intellectual framework, it illustrates its thesis with case studies which form a good starting-point for further research, and in its checklist it offers a tool which can be implemented in the design of projects. I cannot say it goes further or deeper than this. But primers are important if younger generations of architectural students are to take sustainable design seriously. Once this is achieved, the task must be to educate developers and volume house builders.