The Recovery of Natural Environments in Architecture: Air, Comfort and Climate

The Recovery of Natural Environments in Architecture challenges the modern practice of sealing up and mechanically cooling public scaled buildings in whichever climate and environment they are located. This book unravels the extremely complex history of understanding and perception of air, bad air, miasmas, airborne pathogens, beneficial thermal conditions, ideal climates and climate determinism. It uncovers inventive and entirely viable attempts to design large buildings, hospitals, theatres and academic buildings through the 19th and early 20th centuries, which use the configuration of the building itself and a shrewd understanding of the natural physics of airflow and fluid dynamics to make good, comfortable interior spaces. In exhuming these ideas and reinforcing them with contemporary scientific insight, the book proposes a recovery of the lost art and science of making naturally conditioned buildings.

C. Alan Short was educated at Trinity College Cambridge and Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design. He has been the Professor of Architecture at the University of Cambridge since 2001 and his work focuses on the design of sustainable buildings. He also designs buildings, one of very few architects in the UK deeply involved in Higher Education and Research, maintaining Short & Associates Architects as a vehicle for putting research concepts into practice.