Designing Buildings for People

Sustainable liveable architecture

Derek Clements-Croome

• Publisher: Crowood
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781785007101
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Sustainability in Architecture

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.

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 c...