Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Introduction
The recent interest in ecologically sustainable design (ESD) can be seen as the
latest instance of the use of a variety of scientific metaphors to generate
architecture. Yet while ecologists investigate biogeochemical cycles, trophic
layers, and population dynamics, architects address such issues as passive
lighting, ventilation, and thermal performance, and energy and water
embodiment, collection, and reuse. Are these principles compatible with an
ecological view of a building and its inhabitants? Alternatively, can ecology
offer new ways of thinking about architecture and its environmental systems?
Exchanges between the two ought to be fruitful, especially since the term
ecology originates in the Greek oikos (house), suggesting that nature be
regarded as a house in which organisms dwell.
Ecology is a relatively recent science, but the idea of healthy buildings can
be found in architecture from the writings of Vitruvius through to the hygienic
v
obsessions of Modernism. Biological analogies are also commonplace in
architectural theory. Concepts of morphology and function were brought to
architecture by Gottfried Semper, whose writings on style were influenced by
the work of biologist Georges Cuvier. Cuviers ideas were further developed
by DArcy Wentworth Thompson, whose work is frequently cited by Le
Corbusier. Thompsons theories, combined with other studies of dynamic
systems, have also formed the basis of a new biology, interpreted through the
writings of Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari, by architects such as Greg Lynn
and Lars Spuybroek. Meanwhile, organic analogies used in the nineteenth
century by Eugne Emmanuel Viollet le Duc were influential for Louis
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Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright in America, and for Hugo Hring and Hans
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Scharoun in Germany. For these architects, organic concepts are
predominantly formal, to do with structure, composition, or detail. Systemic
metaphors are less prevalent, but certainly do occur. The idea of circulation,
for example, borrowed from William Harveys description of the movement of
the blood, was to prove highly influential in the planning and design of
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cities.
Office Ecology
One of the greatest advances in ecological architecture has come not from the
biomorphic tradition, but from office design. As new forms of technology
have affected modes of work and workplace inhabitation, architects have
responded by developing dynamic models of space provision. By
acknowledging different levels of worker autonomy and interaction, office
design can accommodate temporal change as workers move between
workstations, meeting areas, and other formal and informal spaces. Pioneering
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in this area is British firm DEGW, and founding partner Francis Duffy.
Duffy has explored workplace design in terms of both different activity types
and different rates of change of building elements. Based upon a hierarchical
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model of ecosystems developed by R.V. O'Neill et al, Duffy describes various
layers of longevity of a building that are renewed at different rates,
consisting of site, structure, skin, services, space plan, and stuff. This
hierarchic model has also been used by Stewart Brand to develop ideas of
The landscape idea was generally interpreted as a horizontal array, but the
emergence of the atrium as a feature of office design opened up the vertical
dimension. With daylight from above and planting below, atria provide a
protected version of nature for office workers to look onto or walk through.
Protected from above, such spaces allowed a greater degree of interconnection
between offices and common space. This allowed innovative office
arrangements, such as the tower and pod arrangement used by Herman
Herzberger in the Central Beheer Insurance Company offices in Apeldorn,
Holland (1972). Along with planting at the edge of pods that open into the
atrium space, this gives a forest-like feel to the building as a whole, a series of
separate spaces with a sense of visual and physical connection. More recently,
buildings such as Norman Fosters Commerzbank in Frankfurt, Germany
(1997) and Swiss Re headquarters in London (2004) have employed building
edge atria and double skin technology to achieve similar connections both
between inhabitants and out to the external environment.
Such offices may well be pleasant places to work, but can they fruitfully be
considered as ecological systems? What kind of ecology coastal, forest,
grassland, etc. would a building, or even a city, most closely approximate?
And would that ecology provide for the physiological needs of its inhabitants?
Niche Construction
The idea of an office as an ecological system has been used by Zimbabwean
architect Mick Pearce in his design for Eastgate Harare (1991-96) and in his
design for Council House 2, the new offices for the City of Melbourne
currently under construction. Pearce describes both of these buildings through
the analogy of the termitarium. Termites have adapted to survive severe
desert conditions by constructing large mounds or nests that modify the
external environment, making it cool and humid enough for the colony to
survive. But rather than literally adapting to the desert environment, the
termites in fact change the environment into one to which they are already
adapted.
In traditional Darwinian theory, the idea of adaptive evolution is a one way
process. Through genetic variation across generations, organisms are seen to
adapt to environmental conditions in a way that improves their chances for
reproduction. The environment to which these organisms adapt, in contrast, is
seen as a passive or inert setting within which evolution takes place. This
view has recently been countered by biological models that acknowledge the
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mutual adaptation between organisms and environment.
F. John Odlingxviii
Smee et al describe this process as niche construction.
This process
describes the ability of organisms to extend the niche to which they are
adapted out into the surrounding environment. Animal built structures are a
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well known phenomenon, and are often used as inspiration for design. But
in linking the evolutionary function of these structures, and their role in
adaptation, Pearce provides new possibilities for ecological architecture.
Of course, it is easy to interpret human culture as niche construction in its most
advanced form. Language and technology extend both our reach and our
impact, with the use of fossil fuels enabling us to reproduce the climate to
which we are adapted almost anywhere on earth. However, it also possible to
reduce our reliance on these fuels by designing buildings that more effectively
reproduce the kind of niche to which we are adapted. Architectural myths of
origin often invoke the importance of the forest clearing, and the use of the
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felled timber for both the construction of shelter and the making of fire.
Because of the tendency to make clearings in a forest or to plant trees in open
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space, ecologist Tim Low describes humans as forest edge dwellers. This
position connects us to our simian ancestors, providing a view over the plane
to watch for predators or prey, allowing shelter from the rain and sun, and
moderating the wind. This may explain the willingness to sit high above the
ground in multi-storey buildings, as well as the general preference for operable
windows. The activities within the office, however, are far removed that of a
hunter/gatherer existence, requiring sedentary activity and greater levels of
cleanliness. With a predominance of symbolic work in both paper and digital
forms, office work is largely devoid of physical activity that characterise other
types of employment, thereby requiring precise levels of temperature control.
This type of work thus constitutes a refinement of a much broader range of
conditions; think, for example, of a chef, who might move from a freezer at
below 0C to a cooktop with radiant temperatures of several hundred degrees.
Physiologically, we are able to tolerate a wide range of variation in
temperature and humidity, depending upon activity and duration.
An understanding of physiology is central to the concept of niche construction.
According to Turner, niches are an outward extension of the physiology of an
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organism.
Thus buildings conceived of as a niche need not necessarily
connect to external conditions, but should moderate those conditions to create
an environment to which we are adapted. This requires a better understanding
of that environment in terms of fluctuations in temperature, wind speed, an so
on, as well as a better understanding of the activities undertaken within it. The
environmental variation experienced by our ancestors, resulting from both
natural fluctuations and changing activity types, is poorly replicated in most
offices. Innovative designs, such as those by DEGW, have provided for
various activities, such as recreation, relaxation, and food preparation, as
alternatives for staff interaction. Variety can also emerge from movement
between spaces, or from a degree of user control over environmental
xxiii
systems.
Our body temperature of around 37C is at the upper level of the range
normally encountered in temperate climates. With most temperatures just
below this, excess heat generated by metabolism can be readily expelled. The
rate of heat loss can be varied, depending upon the ambient temperature, by
conductance adjustment, changing blood flow rates to the skin, for example,
or by changing clothing levels. At lower temperatures, metabolism can
increase, or at higher temperatures, heat loss achieved through evaporative
cooling (sweating), both of which require greater levels of energy use.
Comfort in this sense consists of a state of minimal energy expenditure,
which occurs when operating at the base metabolic rate. Using energy for
environmental control allows us to maintain our internal temperature with
minimal effort. This extrasomatic energy use began with the use of fire,
providing warmth and assisting digestion through cooking. In primitive
cultures, the amount of energy used for fire was about equal to the amount
needed for metabolism what Stephen Boyden describes as Human Energy
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Equivalents (HEE).
Yet since that time, fire has proven to be so useful for
a range of agricultural, industrial and cultural tasks that we now use many
xxv
times this amount of energy in Australia, around 65 HEE per person.
In evolutionary terms, our disposition toward energy use may result from our
metabolism. Unlike reptiles, who are able to use ambient energy to alter their
body temperature, mammals must harvest a regular supply of energy to
maintain a constant internal temperature. Although inefficient, this high
energy metabolism is likely to have given evolutionary advantage in the
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competition for survival.
Agriculture and animal husbandry improve this
harvesting in calorific terms, allowing a regular supply of foodstuffs that
overcome diurnal and seasonal variation. Yet this harvesting also occurs with
energy used extrasomatically, originally with wood and eventually with fossil
fuels. The use of these fuels to maintain constant conditions within buildings
may simply be a projection of our own metabolism, used to counter the
fluctuations of the natural environment.
To describe an office as a house of nature is of course to ignore the
separation between work and kinship structures that gives organisations an
inherent flexibility necessary for survival. It is also to ignore the separation
between the workplace and the ecologies that support it, with food, water, and
energy transported via the various types of infrastructure that make cities
possible. In these terms, the ecological model needs to apply to cities as a
whole as well as the buildings they contain. In this sense, humans are the
ultimate niche builders, able to maintain complex social structures through the
vii
Peter Blundell Jones, Hugo Hring: the organic versus the geometric, Stuttgart;
London: Edition Axel Menges, 1999; Peter Blundell Jones, Hans Scharoun, London:
Phaidon Press, 1995.
viii
Richard Sennett, Flesh and Stone: The Body and the City in Western Civilization,
London: Faber and Faber. 1994, Chapter 8.
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Francis Duffy, Design for change: the architecture of DEGW, Basel: Birkhuser;
Haslemere: Watermark, 1998; Francis Duffy, The new office, London: Conrad
Octopus, 1997; Francis Duffy, Andrew Laing, and Vic Crisp, The responsible
workplace: the redesign of work and offices, Oxford; Boston: Butterworth
Architecture in association with Estates Gazette, 1993; Francis Duffy, The changing
workplace, London: Phaidon, 1992.
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R.V. O'Neill, D.L. DeAngelis, J.B. Wade, and T.F.H. Allen, A Hierarchical Concept
of Ecosystems, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1986.
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Stewart Brand, How Buildings Learn: what happens after they're built, New York:
Viking, 1994.
xii
Ian Donnachie and George Hewitt, Historic New Lanark: the Dale and Owen
industrial community since 1785, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1993.
xiii
See especially P. O. Fanger, Thermal comfort: analysis and applications in
environmental engineering, New York, McGraw-Hill, 1970.
xiv
Fergus Nicol, et al (eds). Standards for thermal comfort: indoor air temperature
standards for the 21st century, London; New York: Chapman & Hall, 1995; Michael
Humphries, Thermal Comfort Temperatures and the Habits of Hobbits, in Fergus
Nicol, et al (eds). Standards for thermal comfort, pp. 3-13.
xv
Shove, Elizabeth. Comfort, Cleanliness and Convenience: The Social Organization
of Normality. Oxford: Berg, 2003; See also Toms Maldonado, The Idea of
Comfort, in Victor Margolin, and Richard Buchanan, (eds.) The Idea of Design: A
Design Issues Reader, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1995, pp 248-256.
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Jacqueline C. Vischer, Environmental quality in offices, New York: Van Nostrand
Reinhold, 1989; Derek Clements-Croome (ed.), Creating the Productive Workplace,
London; New York: E & FN Spon, 2000.
xvii
See, for example, Richard Lewontin, The Triple Helix: Gene, Organism, and
Environment, Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000.
xviii
F. John Odling-Smee, Kevin N. Laland, and Marcus W. Feldman, Niche
construction: the neglected process in evolution, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 2003.
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George Hersey, The Monumental Impulse: architecture's biological roots,
Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999; Eugene Tsui, Evolutionary architecture: nature
as a basis for design, New York: John Wiley, 1999.
xx
Luis Fernandez-Galiano, Fire and Memory: On Architecture and Energy, translated
by Gina Cario, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000; Joseph Rykwert, On Adam's
house in Paradise: the idea of the primitive hut in architectural history, Cambridge,
Mass.: MIT Press, 1981.
xxi
Tim Low, The New Nature, Camberwell, Vic.: Penguin, 2002.
xxii
J. Scott Turner, The Extended Organism: The Physiology of Animal Built
Structures, Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002.
xxiii
G.R. Newsham, Occupant movement and the thermal modelling of buildings,
Energy and Buildings 18, 1992, pp. 57-64; Dean Hawkes, The Users Role in
Environmental Control, in Derek Clements-Croome (ed.) Naturally ventilated
buildings: buildings for the senses, economy and society, London; New York: E & FN
Spon, 1997, pp. 93-103.
xxiv
Stephen Boyden, The Biology of Civilisation, Sydney: UNSW Press, 2004.
Boyden defines one HEE as 10 Megajoules, which is about the average amount of
somatic energy used per capita in a human group living under natural conditions. p.
170.
xxv
Boyden, The Biology of Civilisation, p. 139. On the use of fire, see Stephen J.
Pyne, Vestal Fire: an environmental history, told through fire, of Europe and
Europe's encounter with the world, Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997;
Johan Goudsblom, Fire and Civilization, London: Allen Lane, 1992.
xxvi
Chris Lavers, Why elephants have big ears: nature's engines and the
order of life, London: Gollancz; 2000.