Why the Orders Belong in Studio

The Orders, the long-time emblematic centerpiece of architectural education, were banished from studio in the United States a half-century ago. They were exiled to the curriculum's sparse offerings in history when the Bauhaus system of education in architecture displaced the Beaux Arts system. The Orders stand for an entire system of design based on recognizable building components, proportionality, and coherence. Their presence would improve the formal qualities of designs across the entire spectrum from buildings addressing the increased interest in traditional qualities in buildings to those pushing forward the legacy of Modernism's founders, men who themselves knew the Orders well.     

Lukomir: Tradition and Change in a Bosnian Village

Abstract

The village of Gornji Lukomir, set in high mountains 50km south-west of Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina, comprises a substantial number of houses and farm buildings that conform in terms of plan, construction and use of materials to long-established traditional building types found elsewhere in the region. Lukomir, however, was built anew in the 1950s — a remarkable instance of 'cultural inertia'. Subsequent changes, such as the transition from open to enclosed hearths, commonly observed in older buildings and often difficult to document with any precision, have here been made within living memory. Today, changes continue at an accelerating pace and threaten the vernacular character of the place just at a time when eco-tourism is being promoted to encourage visitors who are more sympathetic to the intrinsic qualities of these traditional buildings and the wild environment around the village.     

Sustainable construction in China: status quo and trends

The structural challenges facing China's construction industry are reviewed here. China's current practical intitatives, barriers and problems in moving towards sustainable development are considered: demonstration ecological villages, innovative walling materials, research on passive solar buildings and the improvement of earth buildings.     

Environmental Messages in Multiple-family Housing: Territory and personalization

The home and its private outdoor space may be characterized as primary territory. As such, it allows the occupants the opportunity to exert control over the activities and behaviours taking place. This paper examines how certain mechanisms are used to enhance or reflect residential territory and, thereby, promote one's sense of privacy, in the design of the adjoining outdoor spaces of homes in multiple-family housing in Abu-Nuseir, Jordan. Two surveys were conducted in Abu-Nuseir, comprising (1) a questionnaire and (2) a field inspection of the territorial marking and personalization of the immediate outdoor environment adjoining residential buildings. Occupants' use of actual and symbolic barriers as a means of manipulation and personalization is reviewed. Results suggest that the presence of actual and symbolic barriers is interpreted as a deterrent to intrusion and an indication of stronger occupant territorial attitudes. Territorial personalization in the environmental setting of multiple-family housing provides an ecological mechanism indicative of one's membership in a group and domain. Territorial features depend upon their inherent physical qualities, general symbolic meanings and the cultural milieu in which they exist.     

The Interpretation of Vernacular Architecture

Abstract

The Birmingham University Field Archaeology Unit's method of recording standing buildings is described and the record sheets illustrated. It is argued that detailed recording by this method would be desirable for all standing buildings of stone or brick.     

Framed Buildings of England

Abstract

It has been suggested that the present concentration on archaeological studies of traditional buildings might benefit from the work of social and economic historians. This article therefore examines accounts for the enlargement of one Cumbrian farm building in 1739-40. The source, price and use of most building materials, the organization of work and even the identity of work men become clear. Aspects of ownership, local geology, transportation and other buildings are discussed. Though the building was demolished in about 1970 and the internal arrangement is uncertain, the accounts provide a remarkable insight into farm building construction work during Cumbria's 'Great Rebuilding'.     

Construction costs comparison between ‘green’ and conventional office buildings

The actual construction cost of certified green office buildings in New Zealand is compared with conventional buildings. Although a large body of research exists on the financial and environmental benefits of green buildings, there is little evidence on capital cost implications for building green. This study serves as the first empirical study to analyse detailed cost plan data in New Zealand to quantify the impact of green building on construction cost. Data from 17 Green Star NZ v1-certified office buildings were paired with a set of modelled cost estimates derived from the Davis Langdon Blue Book and the Rawlinsons New Zealand Construction Handbook (the authoritative published sources for New Zealand construction cost data). The paired data were analysed across five panels using the non-parametric Wilcoxon matched-pairs signed ranks test. When benchmarked against the modelled costs, green building construction costs were higher on average, but the difference was not statistically significant. This was true across all five panels tested: the entire green building dataset, mid-rise buildings, high-rise buildings, 4 Green Star-rated buildings, and 5 and 6 Green Star-rated buildings. Each panel featured buildings that were above comparative costs as well as several whose actual costs were below modelled estimates.

Le coût de construction réel des immeubles de bureaux certifiés verts en Nouvelle-Zélande est comparé à celui des immeubles classiques. Bien qu'il existe un important corpus de recherche sur les avantages financiers et environnementaux des bâtiments verts, il y a peu d'éléments probants sur les implications en termes de coût du capital pour la construction de bâtiments verts. Cette étude constitue la première étude empirique qui analyse les données des plans détaillés des coûts en Nouvelle-Zélande pour quantifier l'impact du bâtiment vert sur les coûts de construction. Les données provenant de 17 immeubles de bureaux certifiés Green Star NZ v1 ont été couplées à une série d'estimations modélisées des coûts tirée du Livre Bleu de David Langdon et du Rawlinsons Manuel de Construction de Nouvelle-Zélande (les sources publiées qui font autorité concernant les données relatives aux coûts de construction pour la Nouvelle-Zélande). Les données couplées ont été analysées sur cinq panels en utilisant le test non paramétrique des rangs signés de Wilcoxon pour échantillons appariés. Lorsqu'ils ont été comparés aux coûts modélisés, les coûts de construction des bâtiments verts étaient supérieurs en moyenne, mais la différence n'était pas statistiquement significative. Ceci s'est vérifié sur la totalité des cinq panels testés : l'ensemble des données des immeubles verts, les immeubles de hauteur moyenne, les immeubles de grande hauteur, les immeubles classés Green Star 4, et les immeubles classés Green Star 5 et 6. Chaque panel comprenait des immeubles qui se situaient au-dessus des coûts comparatifs, ainsi que plusieurs dont les coûts réels étaient inférieurs aux estimations modélisées.

Mots clés: coût du capital, construction, coût, immeuble vert, Green Star [Etoile Verte], immeubles de bureaux, durabilité     

Exhibition Review

Abstract

Point—Counterpoint is an installation at Eastern State Penitentiary National Historic Landmark in Philadelphia. Operational from 1830 to 1971, the prison is now a museum. One of the largest and most technologically advanced buildings of its day, Eastern State “linked solitude with moral and vocational instruction, exemplified the Pennsylvania System of penology, and became a model for over 300 prisons worldwide.”¹ This installation initiates a conversation with the prison's architect, John Haviland (1792–1852), about Eastern State's influential role in establishing an architectural type—the radial prison.     

Whole Community Resilience: An Asset-Based Approach to Enhancing Adaptive Capacity Before a Disruption

Problem, research strategy, and findings: Conventional hazard mitigation and pre-disaster recovery planning processes typically begin with hazard scenarios that illustrate probable events and analyze their impacts on the built environment. The processes conclude with responses to the hypothetical disruption that focus on “hardening” buildings or structures or removing them from threatened areas. These approaches understate the importance of natural and social sources of adaptive capacity. Three “proof-of-principle” exercises designed to strengthen the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA)'s Risk MAP (Risk Mapping, Assessment, and Planning) process in Washington State suggest how better to conduct hazard mitigation and recovery planning. Each begins with workshops where stakeholders identify built, natural, and social assets that contribute to human wellbeing (HWB) before introducing earthquake scenarios that affect HWB. Participants then identify assets that could facilitate adaptation to changed circumstances (a “new normal”). Participants discuss how these assets would achieve the goals of comprehensive community planning as well as hazard mitigation and recovery from disaster. Neighborhood-scale social organization emerges as an important priority.

Takeaway for practice: Asset-based approaches enable communities to better recover from disaster and adapt to a post-disaster “new normal.” By premising planning discussions on a more holistic set of assets, communities can balance physical recovery goals with qualities that help them to adapt to future change. Furthermore, thinking about recovering before an event actually occurs can enlarge the menu of mitigation strategies. Planning for adaptation can also help communities achieve many non-risk-related objectives.     

Tectonics

Abstract

Although Le Corbusier's debt to vernacular architecture has been frequently discussed, the particular effects that the architect searched for in his postwar buildings have been insufficiently studied. The Maisons Jaoul (1951–1955) are a case in point. Le Corbusier's search for a direct, expressive, and tactile quality of building is here also related to his interest in the ideas and practice of Jean Dubuffet. Le Corbusier was not a regionalist but he particularly admired craftsmen from the Mediterranean basin, who, he believed, retained a vigorous and comprehensive sympathy for materials. This article, using firsthand interviews with Le Corbusier's craftsmen, explores the complex and subtle ways that Le Corbusier and his assistants negotiated the textural effects they desired, which Le Corbusier described ironically as mal foutu (messed up).     

An Unusual Early Fifteenth-Century Scarf Joint in Pembridge,Herefordshire

Abstract

In volume 28 of Vernacular Architecture David and Barbara Martin identified a group of buildings in eastern Sussex that they interpreted as detached kitchens. Anything from two to four bays long, with at least two ground-floor rooms and two or more upper chambers, they 'closely resemble small houses.' It is often their location, close to the rear of a main house of more standard layout, which indicates the true function of these buildings. 'After houses and barns, detached kitchens were once the most common building type present in the landscape of south-east England ...' The authors suggested that surviving kitchens are likely to be the larger examples of their kind, and that many that have been lost were no more than single-story one-room outhouses. The cited examples were believed to date between 1450 and 1550.     

Teaching Hazards Mitigation

Abstract

This article examines the formation, activities, and significance of a group dubbed the “London Conceptualists” by Peter Cook that were students of Bernard Tschumi at the Architectural Association School of Architecture during the mid-1970s. Through RoseLee Goldberg, director of the Royal College of Art, the students were introduced to theories of performance along with radical experiments in performance art. Goldberg's conception of space as an arena for the realization of theory goaded the London Conceptualists away from writing and drawing toward installations and performance in disused buildings. This article situates their activities in London in the late 1970s and analyzes their relationship to other performance art practices and to conceptual architecture.     

Book Reviews

Abstract

A recent paper on the origin of crucks (Hill, VA 36) relies on the linguistic roots of the word furca, to suggest that it refers to forked posts rather than cruck blades, and that cruck construction did not appear until c. 1250. This response proposes that Hill's linguistic arguments are untenable. The evidence of both standing buildings and documents is only consistent with crucks having a much earlier origin, probably in the early twelfth century, with base-crucks appearing in about 1200.     

The City Crown by Bruno Taut

Abstract

Translator's Introduction In the early part of the 20th century, Bruno Taut developed an urban concept for the planning and reconfiguration of European cities to overcome national and social differences by means of architecture. A communal center modeled after the medieval cathedral or temple crowned Taut's city. In his anthology Die Stadtkrone (The City Crown) (1919), a critical text for the history of European Modernism, Taut championed the use of individual structures to define and affect the planning of an entire city.¹ Taut's anthology encouraged young architects to envision and build the ideal rather than perpetuate the quotidian. This first English translation of The City Crown maintains Taut's original goal.     

Center for Women's Studies and Gender Research,University of Florida, 1994–2000

Abstract

Issues of gender theory, interdisciplinary education, and resistance to conventional academic hierarchies inform and qualify our programmatic charge to renovate a historic structure for the recently established Center for Women's Studies and Gender Research at the University of Florida. Although a clear, insistent design vision guides our proposal, we believe this vision should be implemented without the hero-architect rhetoric we were trained to deliver. Instead, we hope that participation in ongoing campus decision-making processes will contribute thoughtful commentary on gender and education to the project's evolution. To carefully cultivate the larger context will entail absorption into the process of institutional bureaucracy, advocating the proposal's value interstitially rather than autonomously.     

Thirtieth Anniversary of the Vernacular Architecture Group

Abstract

1984 has seen the thirtieth anniversary of the inaugural meeting of the V.A.G., which took place on 8 April 1954, as recorded by Sir Robert de Zouche Hall in VA 5, 1974. It was therefore thought appropriate to ask a number of people to offer their views on the achievements of the Group so far and on the direction which its work, and vernacular studies in general, should take in the future.

Cary Carson writes from the point of view of an overseas member; Christopher Currie contributes an historian's opinion; Linda Hall belongs to the younger generation of buildings researchers; Eric Mercer writes as one of the pioneers of vernacular studies in this country; John Newman presents an outsider's view of the material published in this journal, suggesting that the divide between 'vernacular' and 'polite' can be overemphasised and that the relationships which can be demonstrated in the seventeenth-century and later may be applicable to the study of the domestic architecture of earlier periods.     

Evaluating unauthorized appendages in private apartment buildings

Hong Kong is a densely populated city where high-rise buildings are common. In such an environment, building failures can pose a serious threat. Unauthorized building works, which are constructed without prior approval and consent from the government, are responsible for certain building-related accidents. In particular, those unauthorized building works attached to the external envelopes of buildings endanger the lives not only of their occupants, but also of passers-by and they cause damage to properties themselves. An overview of the proliferation of unauthorized building works in Hong Kong is provided followed by the first known empirical study on this topic. After inspecting 323 apartment buildings in two districts, the factors affecting the proliferation of unauthorized building works were analysed. It was found that buildings with amenities incorporated into their designs generally had fewer unauthorized building works on their external envelopes. However, owners associations or property management companies did not have any influence on unauthorized building work numbers for their buildings. These findings have far-reaching implications on the formulation of government policies for building safety. The formation of statutory owners associations or the engagement of property management companies is not effective in containing the unauthorized building work problems in Hong Kong. Community education and stricter law enforcement would be more effective.

Hong Kong est une ville très peuplée où les bâtiments de grande hauteur sont très répandus. Dans un tel environnement, les défauts de construction peuvent constituer une menace sérieuse. Les travaux de construction non autorisés, exécutés sans l'approbation préalable et le consentement du gouvernement, sont responsables d'un certain nombre d'accidents liés aux constructions. En particulier, les travaux non autorisés sur les enveloppes extérieures des bâtiments mettent en danger non seulement la vie des occupants mais aussi celles des passants; elles peuvent aussi provoquer des dégâts sur les bâtiments proprement dits. Cet article contient une vue générale de la prolifération des travaux de construction non autorisés à Hong Kong ainsi que la première étude empirique connue concernant ce sujet. Après inspection de 323 immeubles d'habitation dans deux quartiers, on a analysé les facteurs concernant la prolifération des travaux de construction non autorisés. Il en ressort que les bâtiments avec des commodités intégrées à la conception comportent généralement moins de travaux non autorisés sur leurs enveloppes extérieures. Toutefois, les associations de propriétaires ou les sociétés de gestion immobilière n'ont eu aucune influence sur le nombre de travaux de construction non autorisés en ce qui concerne leurs bâtiments. Ces conclusions ont des implications lourdes de conséquences sur la formulation des politiques officielles en matière de sécurité des bâtiments. La constitution d'associations légales de propriétaires ou l'engagement d'entreprises de gestion immobilière ne sont pas efficaces et ne parviennent pas à résoudre le problème des travaux de construction non autorisées à Hong Kong. Il serait plus efficace de former les communautés et de faire respecter la loi avec une plus grande vigueur.

Mots clés: immeubles d'habitation, sécurité des bâtiments, gouvernance, bâtiments résidentiels, annexes non autorisées, travaux de construction non autorisés, Hong Kong     

Evaluation of BIM energy performance and CO2 emissions assessment tools: a case study in warm weather

ABSTRACT

The EU members have adopted regulations and official methods for evaluating the energy performance in buildings. Most of these methods are applied at the end of the project phase, with few opportunities to correct erroneous design decisions when the desired building energy performance is not achieved. It is demonstrated that there is no European standard for sustainability and that the decision-making process during the development of a building project is compromised by the methodologies and some concepts, as thermal inertia, are withdrawn. Currently, the industry has been developing alternative tools for evaluating energy performance and CO₂ emissions in buildings over their entire life cycle. These software programs, which belong to the BIM environment, use databases and make simplifications adapted to the stage of design when the software can be applied. The main objective of this paper is to evaluate the accuracy of this software and how the databases and simplifications influence the decision-making process in building design. Calculation examples are carried out with various tools and compared to real building performance data. The results demonstrate that, as with the official methods, the tools influence the results and therefore condition, sometimes wrongly, the decision-making process to produce better buildings.