Overheating buildings are architects’ responsibility too

Perhaps unusually amongst UK architects, my training is in both engineering and architecture. My Part 1 was a four-year masters degree, jointly accredited by RIBA and the Chartered Institution of Building Services Engineers, with a particular focus on environmental design. I am therefore more ready than most traditionally educated architects to fully embrace the geeky details of M&E reports and discussions around ventilation strategies.

In the current heat wave friends from my Part 1 and I have dredged our memories and the leftover textbooks on our shelves for passive cooling measures to implement at home. We’ve tried ventilating behind closed blinds and placing fans in front of drying washing for evaporative cooling.

One friend went to the lengths of placing white paper on the outside of her window panes as makeshift shutters to reflect light (and heat) away from her home, and reduce the need to mitigate the effects of warming inside.

尽管我对被动冷却和建筑服务的兴趣高于平均水平，但当BD让我阅读一本600多页的《劳特利奇弹性热舒适手册》时，我还是有了不同的想法。这并不是我一开始想要坐下来深入研究的内容;这就是为什么我有时应该忽略我最初的直觉。

As I was sitting down to read the book, with all the windows and doors wide open, the radio was just announcing the Met Office’s first ever red warning for extreme heat. Never has reading on resilient thermal comfort felt so appropriate.

The book has come about through the collaboration of a group of psychologists, physiologists, epidemiologists, physicists and engineers, who have been meeting at a series of conferences in Windsor to discuss thermal comfort and internal building environments. Ninety-one authors from twenty countries have contributed.

Damningly, the preface notes that the only group that was all but missing were architects “who increasingly appeared to consider issues of building performance as belonging to the remit of the engineer, to the detriment of much of the modern built environment today”.

In light of the climate crisis and the sermons that architects preach on the importance of sustainability and promoting inhabitant well-being, it was enough to make me squirm with embarrassment for my profession. The book is right - this isn’t a problem just for the M&E engineers, it is a challenge for the entirety of the construction industry and all its design professionals.

这本书的一些结论读起来就像常识。关于英国未来热浪的一章指出，减少热量进入是控制过热最有效的方法。另一章指出，开窗仍然是减少室内空气污染物(取决于室外污染水平)的最有效和最经济的方式。

What I found particularly fascinating though was the focus of so many of the chapters on the need to consider alternative solutions and understanding why we’re in the situation that we’re in. Detailed at length was the intertwined history of building regulations, HVAC systems, and the companies that build them. Together, they have increasingly promoted a steady state controlled environment – something achievable only by mechanical aid at significant capital and carbon cost.

控制在18 ~ 25摄氏度的环境并不是唯一让人类感到舒适的温度。在可以打开窗户的手动控制环境中，人们可以在高达36摄氏度的温度下感到舒适——这取决于该地方的环境温度。

正如这本书所指出的，西方的建筑技术已经为富人提供了热舒适。通过依赖这种舒适的方法和以这种方式运行的建筑，我们正在为最富有的人开发解决方案。我们正在把世界上的大多数人口——那些往往位于地球上受气候危机影响最严重地区的人口——甩在身后。

The book questions our received wisdom on building efficiency - one chapter examined the thermal adaptability of a Tuvan yurt in comparison with a small modern Danish house. Whilst noting that on paper the modern house performed better, its lower adaptability made it a less appropriate environment for humans.

Although the thermal efficiency of the yurt’s building fabric was worse, its ability to respond to a changing climate throughout the year had significant advantages. The quick response heat source of the stove, along with the ability to make simple adaptations to the yurt’s height and bare floor, meant that it was a more comfortable environment, with an overall significantly lower carbon footprint.

This focus on humanity rather than computer modelled avatars was obvious throughout the book. Another chapter argues that the “extent to which societies experience, avoid or inflict thermal stress on its people and workforce is an under recognised measure of their overall humanity”.

Written down this seems obvious - think of the construction conditions for sports venues in the middle east - but it is a view we seem strangely unwilling or perhaps unable to articulate. The affordability of the comfort our buildings are designed for needs to be taken more seriously.

This is a book that architects may not rush to pick up, but I believe they should. The broader profession’s misunderstanding of these crucial issues is not only bad for the built environment and for the climate, but also bad for business.

One chapter of the book explains how architects HKS and SOM have recently settled out of court in the US, after being sued by the residents of a development that they had designed. The plaintiffs alleged the building was over-glazed, and that it became uninhabitable when the sun came out. Paucity of opening windows was a major feature of the case.

Routledge’s Handbook of Resilient Thermal Comfort is an urgent and timely call to re-calibrate our relationship with internal environments in light of an impending climate crisis. I finished the book inspired to do better and fight harder for building design that faces the reality of the moment we are living in and the climatic environment of our immediate future.

If you aren’t drawn to this subject because you care about people or the environment, learn about it because you care about your insurance premiums. The preponderance of HVAC has made us lazy with building design. We need to move with the times.