Modern Building Design

Evidencing changes in engineering and design practice

Ricardo Codinhoto

• Publisher: Crowood
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781785006647
• Topic: Architektur
• Subtopic: Architektur Allgemein

Climate change, technology, and regulation are just some of the challenges faced by the architecture, engineering and construction industry in the design and build of modern buildings. This book explores these trends, highlighting how higher education and the construction sector can address these challenges through modern design practices and integrated approaches. It explores the following topics: conflicting design tensions in projects; the concept of Defornocere ('ugly through harm'); the emerging role of the design manager; buildings and their impact on health and wellbeing, and the importance of information modelling for enhanced design. Energy modelling and life-cycle analysis along with multidisciplinary building design and design trade-offs are covered too. With case studies and supporting illustrations this book will guide you to a better understanding of modern building design.

Chapter 1

ARE BUILDINGS EVIL?

Professor David Coley and Martin Gledhill

The dictionary definition of evil is generally configured as the opposite of good. Moreover, it is conceived as both a disposition and an act that in both cases is conscious and deliberate in its intent to do harm, wrongdoing and to destroy. Our purpose here is to ask, are buildings evil? In this chapter, we encourage you to view buildings differently – to consider them from a moral rather than purely aesthetic or apparently functional perspective. In particular we ask you to consider examples from three categories in which buildings are responsible for doing harm by using energy unnecessarily, and thereby accelerating climate change. All of these are set within and have an impact upon the wider context of the world and humanity as a whole. In the first instance this harm might be strategic in that it results from an ill-considered orientation and overall form. In the second it may result from the building’s materiality such as the use of overly glazed facades and poorly insulated walls. And finally it may be systemic, where heating systems with incomprehensible controls run when the rooms are not occupied. If you start to recognize these elements of poor design and engineering we will have been partly successful. However, if you connect those things with the impact they are having on the planet and many of the poorest people in the world, then we will have truly succeeded. We believe for this to happen it requires you to see these poorly performing elements as morally unacceptable and by definition, ugly. In short, we want to foster a link between aesthetic, ecological and moral values.

Depending upon your philosophical view of matter, an inanimate object, such as a building, might not be understood as conscious or capable of deliberate action. So, maybe an alternative title for the chapter would be: are we who commission, purchase, design, build or operate buildings evil? Being that, in our professional lives as designers, we all carry out at least one of these functions (or educate others to), this is clearly an unsettling question, particularly as we as individuals tend to believe ourselves not all that bad, and that our actions are logical, even if those of others are not. Most of us would prefer not to take responsibility for actions that might harm others, but rather, we find reasons why we should be excused from being judged as having done wrong. We normally do this by suggesting others are to blame; for example, the budget being too small to deliver a low-energy building, rather than thinking about how the design might be altered to deliver a low-energy building at the same cost – or simply excuse ourselves by claiming that if we didn’t agree to work on the project we might get the sack. However, is ignorance or the displacement of responsibility a credible defence? We think not. We also think that much of the problem arises from us choosing to not really see the damage energy use is causing to the world, and particularly to others. We react with a ‘that’s not ideal’, rather than, ‘that’s unacceptable’. As we will try and show, the solution to conceiving a ‘good’ building that is less damaging, often means altering some aesthetic of the design. And this is why we argue that alternating people’s aesthetic frame of reference is critical if we are to make modern low-energy building design the only morally acceptable option.

Note, in the above we said: altering, not compromising an aspect of the design. The high-performance end of the car market does not see the limitations of physics (for example the need for a low profile and large tyres) as unfortunate compromises cramping their style, but as positive selling points. Yet in buildings a common refrain is that by seeking to reduce the environmental harm a building will contribute over its lifetime (which is long) the aesthetics will be compromised. To us this point of view arises only because the aesthetic framework under which the initial design took place did not include environmental accountability and conscience. In essence, what is happening is that buildings are being designed, then others are asked to engineer a solution in order to mitigate the damage to the world the building will do. We have much evidence that this does not work.

The words in the definition of evil at the start of the chapter that we would like you to pay particular attention to are conscious and harm. It is against these that we suggest we test ourselves. In medicine the idea of non-maleficence, or Primum non nocere (first, do no harm), is a central concept and one that students learn at the beginning of their studies. It is most famously presented within the Hippocratic Oath as the promise to abstain from doing harm (ἐπὶ δηλήσει δὲ καὶ ἀδικίῃ εἴρξειν). In the built environment similar oaths, for example ‘to protect the health, safety, and welfare of the general public’ have been promoted, but it would be fair to say none have the bite of the Hippocratic Oath, and are often applied late in the day, in a kind of here’s-the-design-now-make-it-safe way. It is also clear that the main (often the only) focus is the health and safety of those in or near the building, not those that will be most impacted by a changing climate, and which represent a hidden population. The world has a history of hiding populations – women, ethnic minorities and so on – and it looks like we are now doing the same with respect to climate change. In order to make sure this population is included (along with the rest of humanity), right from the start of a project or when we analyse existing buildings, we introduce the notion of defornocere (as an aberration of the Latin deformis per nocere meaning ugly through harm) to describe buildings, or elements of buildings, that are harming others and that we believe we should see as ugly thereby coupling energy consumption with building aesthetics.

In this chapter we only plan to talk about one aspect of buildings; their energy consumption and the implications this has for the planet’s climate. There are other environmental and societal issues for the built environment, including water use, the production of harmful chemicals, indoor air quality, damp, mould growth, hypothermia and fuel poverty to name but a few. The concept of defornocere can be applied in all such cases. However, we believe climate change is primary amongst all these. In part this is because there is something deeply asymmetric about who climate change will most impact, and who has caused the problem. It is unquestionably true that we who live in wealthy energy-profligate societies will be safe from the worst impacts of climate change for a while, and those that emit the least will suffer the most, and suffer first. History is replete with such examples of one set of countries or one ethic group exploiting, or ignoring the plight of, another for financial or other advantage. But to do so over a question of aesthetics, for example by resisting a change to the glazing on a building, is surely a step change for racism.

CLIMATE CHANGE – THE MORAL IMPERATIVE

Contemporary narratives around sustainability often employ the rhetoric of catastrophe, justified by data (often expressed as tonnes of CO₂ and kWh), both of which can be alienating and difficult to assimilate. For the moment however let us consider some of that data in order to set it within a wider moral context.

Let us remind ourselves of why the world’s climate is changing. They key observation is that the moon is on average 33°C colder than the earth. Why? After all it is at the same distance from the sun as the earth, and must therefore receive the same amount of warmth from the sun per square metre of surface. Clearly, something is trapping the heat on earth and not on the moon. That something is the bundle of gases we call greenhouse gases. The most important being carbon dioxide and water vapour. Table 1 shows the relative importance of these gases in keeping us warm.

Gas	Warming provided, °C
Water vapour	20.6
CO2	7.2
Tropospheric O3	2.4
N2O	0.8
CH4	0.8
Others	0.6
Total	33.0

Table 1 Temperature elevation caused by common greenhouse gases in our atmosphere.

A lot of work using some very large computers has gone into modelling the possible impact that changing the concentrations of these gases will have on the earth’s temperature. However to get a reasonable idea there is no real need to dig that deep; 33°C is a big difference, without it the earth would be at -19°C, water would not be liquid and life either would not exist, or at least would be very different, and presumably not include us. So, one of the key reasons that we are here today is because of the presence of, and exact concentrations of, greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. They, along with the sun and the compounds we need for our metabolism to function and to build cells, are central components of the life support system that maintains us on a lump of rock sitting in a vacuum and spinning around its axis at 1,000 miles per hour, rotating around the sun at 67,000 miles per hour, and around the galaxy at half a million miles per hour. Surely it would take a very brave individual to risk playing around with such a key component of our inflight survival system and alter the concentration of these gases’ concentrations in any substantial way.

Around 1894 the Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius, concerned by the growing use of coal, was the first to make estimates of what might happen to the temperature of the planet if we managed to double the concentration of carbon dioxide (the main by-product of burning any carbon-based fuel) in the atmosphere. The calculations were onerous and took him several years by hand. He made two conclusions: firstly that doubling the concentration of carbon dioxide would increase the planet’s mean temperature by about 2°C. Secondly, there was little to worry about, as fossil fuel use was so small, it would take 3,000 years to complete this doubling. His first conclusion was surprisingly accurate and is not far off what our much more sophisticated computer-based models give us today. His second was way off. He didn’t foresee the exponential rise in fossil fuel use that has happened in the intervening hundred years. It is now expected that we will have doubled the concentration of carbon dioxide in a few decades from now, and will continue to increase the concentration beyond even that.

We now need to ask, how much will the climate change? Almost all the modern estimates point to it being at least a 2°C rise in mean global air temperature (just as Arrhenius said), and at least 4°C if we do not stop emitting carbon dioxide almost completely. Being that we are doing very little, it might be best to make 4°C the working assumption. How much difference will 4°C make? Well, the mean annual temperature difference between Nice in the south of France and London is only 5°C. And as the warming will be greater over land than the oceans, we might like to plan for just such a rise. This is going to be a massive challenge in Europe and North America, but what about for those living in less benign climates and in society already on the edge?

Fig. 1 A 4°C warmer world. (Data from New Scientist, 25 Feb. 2009)

Fig. 1 shows in red, brown and orange those parts of the planet that will not be able to support their populations because conditions will mean they will not be able to grow enough food due to high temperatures and lack of rain, or they will simply be under water (from an increase in sea level) if we allow a 4°C rise in temperature. There is little controversy in the image. The science is sound, and the assumptions that went into producing it are extremely conservative. So, what is the plan for those living in these areas? Except for those with enough wealth and industry to allow them to import much of their food (for example the USA), we can see only three possibilities:

1.Encourage mass migration into the green areas, like the UK, Canada, and Siberia. We might be talking about 2 billion people. Is this likely to be politically acceptable?

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