There is an urgent need to build human capacity to make the often vulnerable and exposed buildings and communities we live and work in more resilient to the changing social, economic and physical environments around us. Extensive research has been done over the last decades on both mitigation and adaptation to climate change in the built environment, but the outputs of much of this research have failed to result in the wider uptake of effective greenhouse gas emission reduction solutions. This volume introduces credible 'fresh thinking' on how this may be done. For the first time an emerging generation of research is brought together that is directly concerned with understanding, influencing and leading the transformation of markets and thinking in the built environment. Chapters cover: defining values setting targets consumer motivation selling existing ideas better developing new design principles, paradigms and programmes optimizing solutions to ensure that when change does happen, it does so in the right direction. Papers are contributed by leading experts in fields ranging from philosophy, the social, political and physical sciences, engineering, architecture, mathematics and complexity science. The resulting volume will be essential reading for all those involved with changing the mindsets of a generation on the need to, and ways to, build resilience to rapid change and transforming markets in the built environment.

A clear and thorough guide to the building blocks of sustainable design.

Now in its third edition, this book provides the ideal and only reference to the physical basis of architectural design. Fully updated and expanded throughout, the book provides the data required for architects to design buildings that will maintain the users comfort in a variety of conditions, with minimal reliance on energy intensive methods like air conditioning. This is not a ‘how to’ book but answers the question why. It equips the reader with the tools to realize the full potential of the good intentions of sustainable, bioclimatic design. All sections have been revised and updated for this third edition including all the most relevant developments affecting heat, light and sound controls. The book responds to the need of understanding beyond ‘rules of thumb’.

Research Methods for the Architectural Profession introduces research as a systematic process, describes how to formulate research questions, provides an in-depth explanation of different research methods (qualitative, quantitative, and experimental), and explains how to select appropriate research methods and execute research studies. It describes the process of documentation, knowledge dissemination, and application of research results in architectural design and practice. Most importantly, it provides guidelines for integrating research into profession and uses extensive case-studies and practice-relevant examples to illustrate main concepts, procedures, and applications. Integrating research into practice is essential for developing new knowledge, solving design and technical problems, overcoming different types of challenges present in the contemporary profession, and improving the design outcomes. Innovation requires a much stronger correlation between research and design, and it is pertinent for the future of architectural practice that research becomes an integral part of architectural profession. This book provides a roadmap for successfully integrating research into architectural design and for establishing innovative practices, regardless of a firm’s size. Written by an architecture professor with an extensive research and professional background—specifically focusing on integrating research into practice—and richly illustrated with over 150 color images, this reference will be useful for both students and practitioners.

Conditional design is the sequel to Operative Design. This book will further explore the operative in a more detailed, intentional, and perhaps functional manner. Spatially, the conditional is the result of the operative. It is not a blind result however. Both terms work together to satisfy a formal manipulation through a set of opportunities for elements such as connections and apertures.

How architecture can move beyond the contemporary enthusiasms for the technically sustainable and the formally dazzling to enhance our human values and capacities. Architecture remains in crisis, its social relevance lost between the two poles of formal innovation and technical sustainability. In Attunement, Alberto Pérez-Gómez calls for an architecture that can enhance our human values and capacities, an architecture that is connected—attuned—to its location and its inhabitants. Architecture, Pérez-Gómez explains, operates as a communicative setting for societies; its beauty and its meaning lie in its connection to human health and self-understanding. Our physical places are of utmost importance for our well-being. Drawing on recent work in embodied cognition, Pérez-Gómez argues that the environment, including the built environment, matters not only as a material ecology but because it is nothing less than a constituent part of our consciousness. To be fully self-aware, we need an external environment replete with meanings and emotions. Pérez-Gómez views architecture through the lens of mood and atmosphere, linking these ideas to the key German concept of Stimmung—attunement—and its roots in Pythagorean harmony and Vitruvian temperance or proportion. He considers the primacy of place over space; the linguistic aspect of architecture—the voices of architecture and the voice of the architect; architecture as a multisensory (not pictorial) experience, with Piranesi, Ledoux, and Hejduk as examples of metaphorical modeling; and how Stimmung might be put to work today to realize the contemporary possibilities of attunement.