Reviving Drivers for Sustainable Architecture and Urban Design—Ecology and Energy

1. Looking Back—Mainstream Greening Architectural Design

It all started towards the end of 1990s, when we first heard of the concept of building environmental performance assessment for which assessment or rating tools started to roll out to the world market of architectural design and building construction. The author was then a cadet sitting around and listening to technical discussions and witnessed the evolution/emergence of tools such as BREEAM (UK), GBTool (Canada) and LEED (US) (hereto referred to as green tools). Many of the contents of green tools caught the attention of design professionals, some of whom responded by flagging a movement to change the approach of the design profession. Called ‘Mainstream Greening Architecture’ or something akin to that, it was hoisted in professional societies and schools. However, it was like a tide that came and left, leaving behind waves or impacts that are a mere function of influx. In my young mind back then, the mainstream movement was ambitious in its attempt to replace those mainstream concerns such as aesthetics, form making, technology, etc. The critique of the new approach was the quantitative premises, which went against much of the prevailed design preoccupations, which are qualitative-based. The discussion among professionals in the field was soon overtaken by local governments’ consensus over the quantitative–measurable approach. Numerous governments implemented mandatory policies for environmental assessment using green tools for new building projects. The Sustainable Building SB-11 Conference Helsinki 2013 was initiated by a “40 + 40” themed session addressing how much/how little change took place by looking back and forward, reviewing greening efforts over time, followed by a prediction of future. The “40 + 40” worked on an assumed average human lifespan of 80 years. All in all, the changes in terms of daily practice, business, social attitude, and individual life style were far from satisfactory. Many ideas for changing habits and practices emerged from discussions such as market transformation, which became the next items on the agenda. More recently, some have favored technology-determinism and advocated best practices, e.g., near zero energy, positive energy building or human–machine interactive building control. Others have turned to human-oriented building design focusing on wellness in addition to health and safety of building occupants. For instance, the author has spent the past five years setting up a human-oriented research-teaching paradigm exploring biophilic concepts (1984, 1993) advocated by biologists Edward Wilson and Stephen Kellert, for office and campus workers in tropical climates.

2. How Are These Drivers for Design?

For this Special Issue, I would like to put forward Ecology and Energy as the themed areas for contributions from researchers, practitioners, managers, users, investors, and those who are deemed stakeholders, to reveal their respective attempts and experience sharing. Discussions shall be based on academic research, surveys or questionnaires of buildings-in-use, or scientific investigations based on real projects. Bearing in mind that architecture and urban design are both means and ends to shape and promote habitation, human interaction, space, and/or building design regardless of whether indoor or outdoor, the making of architecture and urban design depends on knowledge covering history, culture, engineering, science, technology, climate, and the environment.

2.1. Ecology

First of all, Ecology covers a wide range of considerations across a variety of disciplines such as biology, geography, and sociology. For this Special Issue, I would like to focus on various related subdomains of Ecology. The breadth of the concept of ecology has extended beyond its own knowledge domain and turned it into a buzzword for many facets of scientific research and the human world. A basic understanding of its underlying principles enables one to extend the concept’s usage in describing the scientific study of different forms of organism interactions within a particular context, human or nonhuman; hence, the concept of Ecology has been widely used beyond the biological sphere of knowledge. For the sake of this Special Issue, I have put forward ‘urban ecology, social ecology, cultural ecology’ as keywords for potential discussions. In these cases, human interaction and conditions vary due to different changing factors and contexts, while conditioning force and end result might come from both external (human and nonhuman forces) as well as internal (interactions among human subjects). For the nonhuman, science side, I have highlighted ‘landscape ecology’, which “is the science of studying and improving relationships between ecological processes in the environment and particular ecosystems (Wu, J. 2006. Cross-disciplinarity, landscape ecology, and sustainability science. Landscape Ecology 21:1-4.). By definition, Ecology ‘is a branch of biology concerning interactions among organisms and their biophysical environment, which includes both biotic and abiotic components. Topics of interest include the biodiversity, distribution, biomass and populations of organisms, as well as cooperation and competition within and between species. Ecosystems are dynamically interacting systems of organisms, the communities they make up, and the non-living components of their environment’ (Odum, Barrett, 2005, Fundamentals of Ecology). In summary, I have formulated a research question to link the above keywords.

Research Question: How is Ecology a driver for architectural design?

(1). Ecology comprises the subjects of biodiversity, distribution, biomass, and populations of organisms, as well as cooperation and competition within and between species (Odum, Barrett, 2005). Hence, landscape ecology and ecosystem are ingredients for eco-architecture and eco-city design. 

(2). On people as users, urban, social, and cultural ecology refers to the specific relationships of built environment (land use, building, neighborhood, landscape, open space, infrastructure, etc.) with people. Biophilia refers to the intimate relationship among nature, Ecology, and humans. Human-centered studies and design applications are the other ingredients for eco-architecture and eco-city design.

The above two statements underline the scope for sustainable design at the building and urban design scale. Nature-relatedness and ecological and biophilic design patterns and elements are all emergent knowledge, strategies, and technologies that derive from scientific research of building science, climate, and user behavior from a social to an individual level in order to induce behavioral change in consumers. Arguably, the ecological design paradigm is the core of green building, user health, including wellbeing-evaluative tools which try to mitigate human adverse impacts on the environment, halt climate change, and restore ecology.

2.2. Energy

Energy for sustainable building and urban design. Recently, attention has been focused on the diminishing of negative environmental impacts due to global building stock. Inevitably, buildings are predators of resources which are deemed to have a negative impact. From an energy perspective, there is a legitimate demand for innovative means to design positive instead of negative buildings. Thus, it follows that positive energy buildings refer to buildings which generate more energy than they consume over the lifespan of the building-in-use; in other words, on a long-term basis. To date, while positive energy buildings are round the corner, they remain a dream yet to come true for many nations due to challenges in terms of technology, investment, and national priority. At the same time, tremendous efforts have been made and propaganda has been created on the prospect of zero-energy buildings (ZEB) that primarily use renewable energy (RE) sources, as a midway target. More and more designers are exploring ways to achieve ZEB through different RE strategies, such as off-site, alternative sources of energy (power) generation, offsetting of energy consumption by tradeoffs, and many other green design imperatives. Dependent upon the technology deployed, ZEB is achievable by means of the concepts of ‘Net’ zero energy (NZEB) or, more recently, ‘Nearly’ zero energy (nZEB) which has been advocated by the European Union. However, how a building consumes energy depends largely on how its users behave. Occupancy behavior has become a hotspot in the arena of building research. The two, like the preceding discussion of Ecology involving organism and human subjects in a natural or urban setting, represent great potential for either research into building science or human behavior and, furthermore, machine learning and building controls in shaping building energy use pattern. All these new developments which are coupled with more and more experimentation have happened all over the globe and continue to inspire scientific research, generating more knowledge and publications than ever before.

Prof. Stephen Lau
Guest Editor

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• biodiversity
• ecological design
• occupant behavior
• landscape ecology
• renewable energy
• nZEB