Get Sust! Issue 32

Author, Author — well-thumbed volumes from the professionals' bookshelves

If you’re seeking inspiration, or you know someone who doesn’t take sustainable construction as seriously as perhaps they should, why not slip a little something into their Christmas stocking? Get Sust! asked three experienced researchers and authors to tell us about the books that influenced them:

Walt Patterson writes: “Twenty years ago four authors from four continents published a landmark study entitled Energy for a Sustainable World.

“Jose Goldemberg from Brazil, Thomas B Johansson from Sweden, Amulya K N Reddy from India and Robert B Williams from the US combined vast and varied experience, striking and persuasive data, visionary insight and lucid prose to present a comprehensively different approach to energy use, energy provision and energy policy worldwide. All previous studies of ‘energy policy’ focused on supplying fuels and electricity. Energy for a Sustainable World focused on supplying energy services, and on the end-use technologies providing the services, particularly in buildings, and especially to the billions worldwide still without modern energy services.

“Ten years later Ernst von Weizsaecker, Amory B Lovins and L Hunter Lovins published a report to the Club of Rome entitled Factor Four. Its subtitle was ‘Doubling Wealth, Halving Resource Use’. It demonstrated with abundant variety the wealth of practical opportunities to do just that, once again by focusing not on fuels and electricity but on end-use energy services, once again particularly in buildings.

“Two decades and one decade after these two books first appeared, the data are different; but the commentaries, analyses and prognoses remain as cogent as ever, and more urgent than ever.”

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Colin Porteous, Professor of Architectural Science at the Mackintosh School of Architecture, Glasgow, nominates ‘The Book Of The New Alchemists’ edited by Nancy Jack Todd:

“I have chosen this book as a construct for sustainability or, quoting Todd, a ‘basis for human sustenance’ — words more resistant to divergent interpretations than sustainable,  especially when linked to development.

“Despite their quirky name, the New Alchemists’ message is as relevant now as it was when written after late-60s campus bio-ideology in San Diego reified eastwards to Massachusetts in 1973. Key concerns were engineered loss of genetic diversity and energy-intensive food production… just as the Yom Kippur War challenged fossil fuel complacency, ten years before the first transgenic plant and twenty years before the first GM commercialisation.

“Their ‘Ark’ manifesto was a counter to corporate might, a rationale for organically sustaining devolved cooperative life — emulated recently in rural paradigms such as the Hockerton Housing Project in Nottinghamshire or ‘Earth Balance’ in Northumbria; and to an extent in urban experiments like BedZED in London or ‘Wohnen & Arbeiten’ in Vauban, Freiburg.

“Todd’s book inspires by illustrated holistic example, encapsulating passive design techniques in sectional perspectives. But to motivate the architectural mainstream today, environmental books must take the syntax of sustainability forward to whole-building, eco-sensitive, tectonic critique via evaluated case studies. There are gaps on bookshelves!”

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Professor of building energetics, Claude-Alain Roulet, says: “Natural ventilation offers several advantages over mechanical ventilation: it is very cheap, well accepted by the inhabitants, uses no energy to move the air, never fails nor breaks down and can provide as well small and very large airflow rates. There are, however, several barriers to its implementation, perhaps the main one being the need of a careful and difficult design.

“’Natural Ventilation in Buildings’ is a book written by seven experts within the frame of the AIOLOS European project. This book proposes solutions for overcoming the barriers and greatly helps in designing naturally ventilated buildings that present a good indoor air quality together with a top energy performance. It presents the physical phenomena driving the natural ventilation, the mathematical models for predicting the airflow patterns, several diagnosing techniques, the barriers limiting the use of natural ventilation together with possible solutions, comprehensive design guidelines and finally six exemplary buildings. A piece of software for calculating airflow rates in naturally ventilated building is also delivered with the book.”

Learn more:

	•	Walt Patterson is author of the newly released ‘Keeping the Lights On’, Earthscan, 2007 http://shop.earthscan.co.uk
	•	Energy for a Sustainable World, by Jose Goldemberg, Thomas B Johansson, Amulya K N Reddy and Robert H Williams; Wiley Eastern, 1988, ISBN 81-224-0000-0
	•	Factor Four, by Ernst von Weizsaecker, Amory B Lovins and L Hunter Lovins; Earthscan, 1997, ISBN 1-85383-407-6 http://shop.earthscan.co.uk/
	•	Colin Porteous, Professor of Architectural Science at the Mackintosh School of Architecture, Glasgow, lead author of ‘Architecture in Cool Climates’, Earthscan, 2005, and solo author of ‘THE NEW eco-ARCHITECTURE’, alternatives from the modern movement, Spon Press, 2002.
	•	The Book Of The New Alchemists Edited by Nancy Jack Todd, E P Dutton, New York, 1977.
	•	Claude-Alain Roulet is professor of building energetics at the School of Architecture, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne, France and author of this month’s Earthscan featured book: ‘Ventilation and Airflow in Buildings’.
	•	Natural Ventilation in Buildings, Earthscan.