Date published: 2007/05/14
The third seminar in the Architecture Department's "Sustainable Design" series was presented by Alexandros Tombazis (from Athens) and Alan Short (Cambridge and London), on the theme of "Bioclimatic Architecture". Whatever that means.
Tombazis gave a presentation based on a recent book he has published, called "Letter to a Young Architect". Per se this does not have a lot to do with the theme of the lecture series. And one of the problems with the Architecture Department in Cambridge is that it is top-heavy with old architects, so he was not addressing a large chunk of the audience (although over half were "young"). The presentation was very slick, with five or six words per slide on top of one or two fairly decent photographs of this, that and the other (many, it seems, taken by Tombazis himself, he evidently gets around the world quite a lot).
This was philosophy, more than anything else. So we got lots of stock phrases, e.g. "All buildings are living organisms" and "Architecture is sculpture with function" and "Architects should love the laws of nature". All very well (and it was fairly well presented, given the theme) but not much to do with "sustainable design".
Then Short gave a presentation on some of the buildings his firm has worked on. He started out quoting the usual statistic that half of energy consumption in the UK is from buildings (and he asked the obvious question, how does anyone know this). So to reduce carbon emissions we need to do something here. He was mainly concerned with non-residential buildings.
Short is evidently keen on using natural ventilation to improve the energy performance of buildings. (He kept saying by an order of magnitude but it was never clear whether this was just for heating and cooling, or also included lighting, etc.) There have been a few examples in Cambridge where these kind of ideas have been put into practise e.g. the Ionica HQ and the university maths buildings (and Ted Cullinan was in the audience, but the CMS never got mentioned). It is not always clear after the fact how well these buildings have actually performed (with energy use and comfort levels) in practise. Short gave several examples of his own buildings which he says have performed well.
But Short has no standard way of implementing natural ventilation, pretty much approaching every building differently (as might be expected). And he never really explained (there was no time) why a given approach was taken in any of the cases. Natural ventilation relies on air flow achieved via temperature gradients. And it seems that when the physicists have examined the actual flow once the buildings were up, they sometimes noticed results fairly different from the theoretical modelling done at the design stage. So it seems there is a long way to go with this approach, although obviously worth pursuing.
Why aren't more architects using this approach? Well, it is fairly complex, especially the modelling. Lots of architects probably don't feel up to this. And it seems that in the UK the fire regulations are a major stumbling block. Short did not explain why, but it seems to be down to the large amount of space without a fire barrier. It seems that in the UK the fire regulations are prescriptive and to use any design that falls outside the prescription you have to have a lengthy argument with the fire services. Indeed Short said that it took a year or two to get the fire certificate for a couple of his buildings. Needless to say, not many architects or developers are going to be very keen to go down that route.
_________________________________________________________
All material not included from other sources is copyright cambridge2000.com.
For further information or questions email: info [at] cambridge2000 [dot] com
(replace "[at]" with "@" and "[dot]" with ".").