Beyond Environmental Comfort highlights some of the key ideas that form the foundation of the field of environmental comfort and, at the same time, gives voice to some of the concerns and considerations on the limitations of the field as it stands today. Bringing together a range of foremost thinkers in their respective fields - Michel Cabanac, Derek Clements-Croome, Nick Baker, Harold Marshall, Juhani Pallasmaa, Dean Hawkes, and Constance Classen - this book argues for a deeper appreciation of how environmental comfort may be understood in terms of our relationship with the environment rather than as independent qualities. For the first time these diverse views are brought together by Editor Boon Lay Ong to present insights into a world beyond what is normally covered in academic research. In the process, an attempt is made to define the field for the future. This book shows that it is by understanding just how environmental design needs to go beyond mere comfort and deal with well-being that we can meaningfully design our future.

The built environment affects our physical, mental and social well-being. Here renowned professionals from practice and academia explore the evidence from basic research as well as case studies to test this belief. They show that many elements in the built environment contribute to establishing a milieu which helps people to be healthier and have the energy to concentrate while being free to be creative. The health and well-being agenda pervades society in many different ways but we spend much of our lives in buildings, so they have an important role to play within this total picture. This demands us to embrace change and think beyond the conventional wisdom while retaining our respect for it. Creating the Productive Workplace shows how we need to balance the needs of people and the ever-increasing enabling technologies but also to take advantage of the healing powers of Nature and let them be part of environmental design. This book aims to lead to more human-centred ways of designing the built environment with deeper meaning and achieve healthier and more creative, as well as more productive places to work.

This book gathers 14 original contributions published in an IJERPH Special Issue that deal with the perception of environmental sounds and how such sounds are likely to affect human quality of life and well-being and the experience of a place. The research focus over the years has been gradually shifting from treating sound simply as “noise” and something that cities should get rid of to a potential “resource” to promote and support community life in public spaces. Three main topics or “needs” to be addressed by researchers and practitioners emerged from this Special Issue: (1) the need to re-think “quietness” in cities as something that goes beyond the mere “pursuit of silence”, (2) the need to integrate additional contextual factors in the characterization and management of urban acoustic environments for public health, and (3) the need to consider the acoustic quality of indoor spaces as opposed to an outdoor-only perspective. The contributions collected in this book will hopefully trigger new questions and inform the agenda of future researchers and practitioners in the environmental acoustics domain.

This “ambitious [and] delightful” (The New York Times) work of literary nonfiction interweaves the science and history of the powerful refrigerant (and dangerous greenhouse gas) Freon with a haunting meditation on how to live meaningfully and morally in a rapidly heating world. In After Cooling, Eric Dean Wilson braids together air-conditioning history, climate science, road trips, and philosophy to tell the story of the birth, life, and afterlife of Freon, the refrigerant that ripped a hole larger than the continental United States in the ozone layer. As he traces the refrigerant’s life span from its invention in the 1920s—when it was hailed as a miracle of scientific progress—to efforts in the 1980s to ban the chemical (and the resulting political backlash), Wilson finds himself on a journey through the American heartland, trailing a man who buys up old tanks of Freon stockpiled in attics and basements to destroy what remains of the chemical before it can do further harm. Wilson is at heart an essayist, looking far and wide to tease out what particular forces in American culture—in capitalism, in systemic racism, in our values—combined to lead us into the Freon crisis and then out. “Meticulously researched and engagingly written” (Amitav Ghosh), this “knockout debut” (New York Journal of Books) offers a rare glimpse of environmental hope, suggesting that maybe the vast and terrifying problem of global warming is not beyond our grasp to face.

Beyond Sustainable discusses the relationship between human-beings and the constructed environments of habitation we create living in the Anthropocene, an increasingly volatile and unpredictable landscape of certain change. This volume accepts that human-beings have reached a moment beyond climatological and ecological crisis. It asks not how we resolve the crisis but, rather, how we can cope with, or adapt to, the irreversible changes in the earth-system by rethinking how we choose to inhabit the world-ecology. Through an examination of numerous historical and contemporary projects of architecture and art, as well as observations in philosophy, ecology, evolutionary biology, genetics, neurobiology and psychology, this book reimagines architecture capable of influencing and impacting who we are, how we live, what we feel and even how we evolve. Beyond Sustainable provides students and academics with a single comprehensive overview of this architectural reconceptualization, which is grounded in an ecologically inclusive and co-productive understanding of architecture.

The Recovery of Natural Environments in Architecture challenges the modern practice of sealing up and mechanically cooling public scaled buildings in whichever climate and environment they are located. This book unravels the extremely complex history of understanding and perception of air, bad air, miasmas, airborne pathogens, beneficial thermal conditions, ideal climates and climate determinism. It uncovers inventive and entirely viable attempts to design large buildings, hospitals, theatres and academic buildings through the 19th and early 20th centuries, which use the configuration of the building itself and a shrewd understanding of the natural physics of airflow and fluid dynamics to make good, comfortable interior spaces. In exhuming these ideas and reinforcing them with contemporary scientific insight, the book proposes a recovery of the lost art and science of making naturally conditioned buildings.

Winner of the 2021 In The Margins Award "When reading this book, all I feel is kindness."-- Sam Smith, Grammy and Oscar award-winning singer and songwriter "Thank God we have Alok. And I'm learning a thing or two myself."--Billy Porter, Emmy award-winning actor, singer, and Broadway theater performer "Beyond the Gender Binary will give readers everywhere the feeling that anything is possible within themselves"--Princess Nokia, musician and co-founder of the Smart Girl Club "A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change."-- Kirkus Reviews, starred review "An affirming, thoughtful read for all ages." -- School Library Journal, starred review In Beyond the Gender Binary, poet, artist, and LGBTQIA+ rights advocate Alok Vaid-Menon deconstructs, demystifies, and reimagines the gender binary. Pocket Change Collective is a series of small books with big ideas from today's leading activists and artists. In this installment, Beyond the Gender Binary, Alok Vaid-Menon challenges the world to see gender not in black and white, but in full color. Taking from their own experiences as a gender-nonconforming artist, they show us that gender is a malleable and creative form of expression. The only limit is your imagination.