david coley university of bath are buildings evil stbah 14062018
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This document discusses whether buildings can be considered "evil" from an environmental perspective. It explores how buildings have improved in reducing carbon emissions over time as construction methods have advanced, but energy consumption in buildings has still failed to decrease due to factors like outdated building codes and a lack of post-occupancy evaluations. The document uses examples of energy use calculations and costs of green retrofits to examine why buildings continue to have a negative environmental impact through excessive energy usage. It ultimately revisits the question of whether buildings deserve the label of "evil" for knowingly harming the environment through high carbon emissions.
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david coley university of bath are buildings evil stbah 14062018
- 1. David Coley PROFESSOR OF LOW CARBON DESIGN
- 8. Evil Immorality. Usually perceived as the dualistic opposite of good. Commonly associated with: conscious and deliberate wrongdoing, discrimination designed to harm others, destructiveness. (Wikipedia)
- 9. Evil Immorality. Usually perceived as the dualistic opposite of good. Commonly associated with: conscious and deliberate wrongdoing, discrimination designed to harm others, destructiveness. (Wikipedia)
- 11. London, England Nice, France Climate Change
- 13. © Copyright for image http://www.hellomagazine.com/celebrities-news-in-pics/27-08-2002/4681/ http://www.dailymail.co.uk/travel/holidaytypeshub/article-611614/The-Crafty-Traveller-Booking- Bluestone.html
- 14. © Copyright for image http://www.hellomagazine.com/celebrities-news-in-pics/27-08-2002/4681/ http://www.dailymail.co.uk/travel/holidaytypeshub/article-611614/The-Crafty-Traveller-Booking- Bluestone.html Racism?
- 15. = 50%
- 16. 75 mpg20 mpg 75/20 < 4 £1,500 £50 1500/50 = 30
- 17. © Copyright for image Are we getting better at building? 0 2 4 6 8 10 12 14 16 Pre 1919 1919-1939 1946-1966 1967-1976 Post 1976 Post 1995 kgC/m2 Primary school (no pool) Secondary school (no pool) Current carbon emissions When building was built
- 18. Are we getting better at building?
- 19. © Copyright for image Are we getting better at building?
- 20. Why have we failed to reduce energy consumption in buildings?
- 23. Why have we failed to reduce energy consumption in buildings?
- 24. Why have we failed to reduce energy consumption in buildings?
- 31. Annual energy use (kWh) = --------------------------------- Internal area of building http://dizzythinks.net Post occupancy evaluation (POE), or how many miles per gallon do you get from your house / school / office?
- 33. http://cambridgevending.co.uk/?page_id=974 Question 1: Why do we heat buildings?
- 35. Question 2: Why do we cool buildings?
- 36. Question 2: Why do we cool buildings?
- 37. Some sums Person = 100 W = 100 humming birds
- 38. http://cambridgevending.co.uk/?page_id=974 3 people + lights + PC + fridge + TV + sunlight = 960 W = 960 humming birds GAINS
- 39. http://cambridgevending.co.uk/?page_id=974 = 1040 W = 1040 humming birds LOSSES
- 41. Costs http://www.conkerconservation.co.uk 6% increase in cost of building, therefore 3% of house price, or £6,000 typicaly. ✖ ✔
- 42. Some examples
- 49. Back to the question of evil
- 52. http://4legsgood.wordpress.com/ Spot the irony around you every day
- 53. Evil Immorality. Usually perceived as the dualistic opposite of good. Commonly associated with: conscious and deliberate wrongdoing, discrimination designed to harm others, destructiveness. (Wikipedia)
- 55. Thank you for listening
Editor's Notes
- Hello, and thank you for watching this lecture. What I’d like to do today is to change the way you look at buildings.
- I would like your eyes to be drawn automatically towards the over-glazed facades, the uninsulated walls, the unnecessary heating systems, the incomprehensible controls and the gaps around external doors that are all around you. If you start to recognise these elements of poor architecture and engineering I will have been partly successful. However if you start to see these as morally unacceptable and ugly then I will have truly succeeded: In short I want to change your aesthetic values.
- I probably need to be a bit clearer about the title of the lecture. I looked up the definition of evil and found this: Immorality. Usually perceived as the dualistic opposite of good. Commonly associated with: conscious and deliberate wrongdoing, discrimination designed to harm others, destructiveness. Being inanimate objects, it would be impossible for a building to be seen as conscious or capable of deliberate action. So, maybe a better title would be: are we who commission, purchase, design, build, operate or occupy buildings evil? Being that we all carry out at least one of these functions, this is clearly an unsettling question, particularly as we as individuals tend to each believe ourselves to be reasonably good people and our actions logical—even if others’ aren’t.
- The words in the definition that I would like you to pay particular attention to are conscious and harm. It is against these that I suggest we test ourselves.
- I only plan to talk about one aspect of buildings, their energy consumption and the implications this has for the planet’s climate. There are other environmental issues for the built environment, including water use, the use of harmful chemicals, indoor air quality, damp, mould growth, hypothermia and fuel poverty. However I believe climate change trumps all these as a global concern.
- How much will the climate change? This is unknown, but even if we rapidly rectify our behaviour, almost all the estimates point at least a 2 degree centigrade rise in mean global air temperature, and at least 4 degrees if we do little. Being that we are doing next to nothing, it might be best to make 4 degrees the working assumption. So, how much difference will 4 degrees make? Well the difference in annual temperature between Nice and London is only 5 degrees centigrade. And as the warming will be greater over land than the oceans, we might like to plan for at least such a rise. This is going to be a considerable challenge to the developed world, but what about for those already on the edge?
- REDRAW THIS TO REMOVE ALL TEXT The graphic shows in yellow and brown those parts of the planet that will not be able to support their populations because conditions will mean they will not be able to grow enough food, or they will simply be under water if we allow a 4 degree rise in temperature. There is little controversial in the image. The science is sound, and the assumptions that went into producing it are extremely conservative. So, what is the plan for those living in the yellow and brown areas? I can see only three possibilities: One, encourage mass migration into the green areas, like the UK, Canada, and Siberia. We might be talking about a billion people. So we need to ask if is this likely to be politically acceptable? Two, we force people to stay in the yellow areas and feed them through a massive permanent Berlin-style airlift. Three, we let them die. I can’t see any other options.
- It is worth reflecting that many of the countries that will suffer the most are those with the lowest per-capita carbon emissions, whilst those with the highest are likely to suffer the least, in part because they will be able to import food if necessary, or build sea defences. So, it would be true to say our carbon emissions will harm the poor and the already hungry in Africa and Asia far more than those in North America or Northern Europe, hence, any organisation that has an estate of buildings, and therefore emits carbon, yet cannot show sustained, measured progress towards greatly reduced emissions might be accused by future generations of something akin to institutional racism.
- Racism is a strong word to be using, but it is hard to escape it.
- So, to what degree are buildings implicated in climate change? If we look at where in an industrial society carbon emissions come from we find that half are associated with heating, cooling, lighting and other non-industrial activities in our buildings. This makes the buildings sector the largest single emitter of carbon. Not, as many people assume, industry, aircraft or 4x4’s. If we could zero-carbon the built environment, we would have gone a long way to solving the problem of climate change. The sad truth is that, unlike other sectors, we DO know how to do this, and in a cost effective way. This is our first hint that we might be evil, as we clearly and consciously are not doing so. There is another relevant characteristic that buildings have—they last a long time. A new energy inefficient building built today will continue to be inefficient long after its occupants have bought new efficient cars or computers.
- *THESE IMAGES AND THE TEXT SHOULD BE PHASED IN ONE BY ONE ** It is interesting to compare the difference in energy efficiency between a fuel-efficient car and a non-efficient one, and of an efficient and inefficient house. A highly efficient car might do 75 miles to the gallon; a 4x4, 20 miles to the gallon: a difference of less than a factor of 4. An inefficient house however might cost £1,500 a year to heat, yet an efficient one only £50: this is a factor of 30. So why is there increasing criticism of the gas-guzzling car and its owner, but little of the owner of the gas-guzzling house or office? I’m not sure that we have got to a position where we see the energy related issues of buildings in any kind of visceral way. We need a new way of thinking, a new language to relate the form of such buildings to the harm they are starting to do to those around the world less fortunate than ourselves. We need to be able to spot the difference between an efficient and an inefficient building as we walk around town or across campus, or view a set of plans. Once we can do this, we then need to react to poor architecture not just intellectually, but emotionally, much as we have learnt to do over issues of slavery, famine, racism and gender. Only then will we be able to bring enough passion to the issue and create enough momentum to force those designing or purchasing buildings to apply technologies that reduce this harm. Interestingly, the problem isn’t in many ways the building. A simple house built of little more than stone, mud and straw 200 hundred years ago would have been heated and lit by an open fire and a few candles and hence used very little energy, and none of it from fossil fuels. The problem is that now we wish to cut ourselves completely off from the seasons around us and experience much higher temperatures in winter and cooler ones in summer, and to have lots of light, and to do this with total disregarded to the planet’s wellbeing or of much of its population. Most of us don’t live or work in mud cottages. Surely, with the invention of modern materials and techniques we must be using a lot less energy, per building? After all, we have loft insulation, cavity walls and double-glazing. Unfortunately the evidence doesn’t look good.
- The graph shows the current mean energy use of a large number of schools in England as a function of the date of their construction. So, in general, a new school uses no less energy today than an old Victorian school does today. This doesn’t look good if our philosophy towards future low energy buildings is to just add a bit more insulation every few years. We have had a bit more luck with domestic properties, but even here the suppression of energy use has been modest, and only recent: a 1980’s house uses no less energy today than a Victorian one does today. We urgently need to have a totally different philosophy and to make the jump to buildings that use almost no energy.
- In commercial properties the story is much the same. Here’s one example from the university sector. This very recent, well insulated, triple glazed university office building uses the same amount of energy per metre-squared as
- this old single glazed uninsulated 1950’s office block on the same campus. No one would accept the same level of performance from a car or aeroplane built today as one built 60 years ago, yet in construction this is seen as fine. Some of you are possibly wondering why we have so dramatically failed to reduce energy consumption in our buildings. The really embarrassing thing is that we don’t know. However we have a list of possibilities. Here are just a few, and I would like you to reflect on this list as you look at buildings.
- 1. Given better insulation people simply heat their buildings to higher temperatures. In 1980 the mean internal wintertime temperature in UK houses was 14 degrees centigrade (this is the whole-house mean, not the temperature of the sitting room). Now it is 20 degrees and rising. In Sweden it is already 22 degrees. Although some increase seems understandable, it is worth noting that people with relatively little money heat their homes to the point where they can wear only shorts and a t-shirt in mid winter, rather than put on a jumper. In air conditioned offices we see the same, with people wearing jumpers in summer. We need to be aware of these desires when designing low-energy buildings.
- 2. New buildings have many more lights and they normally don’t get turned off during daylight hours.
- 3. Fossil fuels are cheap and easy to use, so we leave doors and windows open with the heating system on because the boiler can make up the difference. In an old under-heated property we are less likely do this, because it would take much longer to reheat the building.
- 4. Architects love glass. Even a modern triple glazed window loses more heat per metre-squared than a simple cavity brick wall with a little insulation in it, and ten times that of a well insulated wall. Over-glazing is also one of the main reasons for buildings needing air conditioning.
- 5. Sticky out bits. The heat loss from a building is not just a function of what it is built from, but of its shape. In general, simple shapes have a lower surface area for a given floor area and hence lose less heat.
- 6. Computers. The newer the building, the more complex the IT system is likely to be, and it is unlikely that energy efficiency was a priority in its selection.
- 7. Thermal mass. Lightweight buildings tend to overheat more easily, which can increase air conditioning loads.
- 8. Inappropriate heating and cooling systems. We have lots of new options: for example heat pumps and under floor heating. However unless these are designed correctly by people with a proven track record, and only used on buildings of the right type, they can lead to very high energy use.
- 9. Controls. A building can simply be out of control, with no one understanding how it is meant to work.
- 10. Poor build quality, with insulation missing or gaps that allow heat to escape.
- 11. Lack of post occupancy evaluation – by this I mean checking that the building operates as it was meant to.
- The post occupancy evaluation of buildings is in its infancy. When it comes to energy, at its simplest all that post occupancy evaluation requires is an idea of the annual energy consumption and the floor area. From these we get the annual energy use per metre-squared of floor area. This value can then be compared to a table containing good, average and poor values for similar buildings. In essence, this is equivalent to the measured miles-per-gallon of a car, which accounts for the performance of the building and the performance of the operator. Most of us have an idea that for a car 20 miles to the gallon is poor and that 70 is good. But how many of us know if 50 kWh/m2 is good or bad for a house, school or office? I find it amazing that few in the building industry have ever calculated this number for the buildings they have built—all it takes is the annual energy bill, and the desire to do it. Few CEO’s know the answer for their buildings, even when their energy bills might run to millions of dollars.
- In some countries we are starting to see such figures being highlighted at the entrances of public buildings in the form of display energy certificates, but most of the public are still unaware of them. We can expect the use of such name-and-shame tactics by governments to increase. Whenever you go into a building, see if there is such a certificate on the wall and whether you are in an A-rated building. It is particularly fascinating that most architectural or engineering practices don’t know the measured energy efficiency of buildings they have designed. Often the excuse is given that there wasn’t enough money in the budget to complete a post occupancy evaluation, however, since a quick phone call to the facilities manager will provide all the information needed, this doesn’t ring true. With a decent post occupancy evaluation we can learn far more. We can see, when the heating is coming on, if the daylight dimming that the client paid for is working, where the energy is being spent, whether the engineer’s estimates of energy use and system sizing were reasonable? If you are paying for the building and don’t bother to discover this, how will you know whether you should use the same architectural or engineering practice again? You could even use post occupancy evaluation to discover if the occupants are happy. Now, that would be radical. I strongly believe that without post occupancy evaluation we won’t get very far along the low carbon road—the first step has to be to find out what works and what doesn’t. Before I present some examples of low energy buildings that work, I’d like to take you on a quick tour of some building physics. I plan to do this via two questions. Question1. Why do we have heating systems and why do we heat buildings? This might seem a strange question, with an obvious answer: to keep us warm us. However we typically only heat buildings to not much more than 22 degrees centigrade, yet we are already at 37 degrees. As the second law of thermodynamics indicates, heat flows from the hotter to the cooler body: so we heat our buildings, they don’t heat us. This suggests that if the building needs little heat to stay warm, we might be able to use our body heat to maintain its temperature. All any heating system does is to make up for the losses from the building. Unfortunately we have spent many generations focusing on the heating or cooling system, not on the loses.
- This is just the same as what I call the “madness of the filter coffee pot”. The coffee is hot when it first enters the glass pot: the only reason for the heating element in the base is because the pot is uninsulated. This is poor design and we need to see it as such. So stupid in design that it is displeasing—again we need a new language to describe such “inefficiency by design”. We need to get angry at the stupidity of such thinking, we need to look at such objects (or buildings designed using much the same principles) and think of the harm they are doing to someone trying to grow enough to eat from a small patch of dust in sub-Saharan Africa. (It doesn’t even make good coffee!).
- An alternative that works just as well, and doesn’t need electricity to keep warm, is the insulated flask. This is more than capable of keeping the coffee warm enough for the hour that it is drinkable. Such approaches to design are simple, clever and elegant, and need to be appreciated as such. It also illustrates that it is ridiculous to heat hundreds of tonnes of building fabric to moderate the flow of heat between our skin and this fabric. Much of the time we simply need to add a layer of insulation to ourselves, not the walls. This insulation is called clothes, but it seems to be a forgotten technique. The most ridiculous example being that in air-conditioned offices it is common to cool them in summer to a lower temperature than that to which they are heated to in winter. But the big question we should be asking is whether buildings need to lose so much heat that we need a boiler just to make them liveable? The answer is that they don’t.
- Question 2. Why do we chill office buildings? It is tempting to think it is because they would get too hot otherwise. A building in a climate such as the UK’s doesn’t get hot all by itself.
- It gets hot because of sunlight pouring in through the highly glazed facade, the lights being on all day, the mass of people and the IT equipment. All these should be considered as exciting engineering challenges, not shuffled into the “too difficult to think about” drawer. We need to ensure we don’t use a ridiculous amount of glass, and that if overheating might be problem glass is shaded in summer. We to ensure the lights are off when they can be and make minimising energy the core of the IT purchasing and location strategy. Often a company will chill a server room, only to be heating the room next door with a gas boiler. This is madness.
- It is worth doing so sums. Each one of us produces around 100 watts of heat. By the way 1 watt is the output of a humming bird in flight, so 30,000 humming birds the output from a typical domestic boiler.
- Modern low energy house lights are about 10 watts per room, the TV another 100 watts, a computer another 100 watts, a fridge and other items maybe 200 watts, light through windows might provide 200 watts averaged over a year. So with three occupants a house might naturally produce around 960 watts of heat.
- So, is this enough heat to make up for the losses from a super-insulated, well-designed house? A typical house might have a surface area of about 340 metres-squared, of which, 20 metres-squared might be glass. A triple glazed window loses 1 watt per metre-squared for every 1 degree centigrade of temperature difference between the inside and the outside of the building, a super-insulated wall, roof or ground floor 0.1 watts per metre-square. If the inside of the house is at 20 degrees centigrade and garden is at zero, then we have a 20 degree temperature difference, and the house will be loosing 1040 watts.
- This leaves an energy gap of around 80 watts, or about 3 candles. So we can definitely throw the boiler out, together with all those ugly radiators. So, yes, we can in theory build a house such that the losses are so small that they can be compensated for with little more than the gains from other sources, we just have to build it well and using the best materials—luckily, these materials are cheap. With commercial buildings it should be even easier, as the gains from people and equipment are normally much higher and the ratio of the wall area to floor area smaller. Some of you may have spotted that I haven’t supplied the occupants with any air to breathe. This can be done in winter with a very simple mechanical ventilation system that transfers the heat from the expelled air into the fresh, incoming air. The savings from not needing the normal array of radiators and pipes will roughly pay for the capital cost of such a system. For most of the year though we can simply open the windows to provide all the air we need.
- Over 40,000 such buildings have been built across the world, from Norway to Australia, from homes to offices to schools and factories. Measured data indicate that a typical house built using this approach costs on average £50 a year to heat. The increase in build cost is around 6%, so assuming the house and land has a cost of £200,000, of which the building represents half, the increase is around £6,000 to almost remove the heating bill for ever. Those that have built a lot of such buildings, claim to have reduced the uplift in cost to zero. The City of Frankfurt has declared that they can’t afford to build any other form of social housing. Their analysis is likely to be true for many landlords that pay for the energy use in their buildings, for example universities and commercial landlords. Or those that have some form of responsibility for fuel poverty or rates of hypothermia. It is now the only form of new build allowed in the greater Brussels area. It is also possible, although difficult, to refurbish older buildings to almost the same standard. We still need some energy input for the lighting (although with good controls the lights will only be on at night) and other electrical items. A small photovoltaic system on the roof should be able to provide this, and solar hot water panels provide much of the water for showers etc. If all the windows are left open for an extensive period, the extremely modest heating system that is typically fitted in the air ducts will not be able to keep up, and the occupant will have learnt a lesson, but a less harsh lesson than those surviving against climate change are learning today.
- The photographs show examples of buildings built using this technique. I encourage you to visit such a building in winter. You will notice that the benefits go far beyond energy savings. They are simply much nicer places to be. There are no cold walls and no draughts, and every part of the building feels warm. In short, they fulfil one of the main requirements of a building—to provide shelter—whereas for several generations we have got used to heat and cooling from fossil fuels providing this shelter, with a building being little more than a box to put such services in.
- I would now like to return to the question of evil. We have already successfully changed many things in buildings and in our societies over the last few decades. As one example, it is worth considering Pirelli-like calendars and similar items from the 1970’s. At the time these would have been typical items on the walls of many a workshop on campus, or canteens in offices. Not so now. Why is this? Although part of the answer is that society’s views about such items and the values they represent have changed, it is also true that they were removed because it was easy to do so—because they weren’t holding the roof up.
- Most elements of poorly performing building cannot be removed so easily, or so cheaply. Given the reality of climate change and its impact on the poorest peoples, the acres of glass and poorly insulated walls, and the miles of heating and cooling ducts with which we surround ourselves, can all been seen as direct statements about our morals. If nothing else, we need to future proof our decisions about new buildings and not get suck with the equivalent of sexist calendars we cannot afford to remove. If we can give up slavery and still survive economically, we can put insulation in our walls without economic collapse. We need to make sure we aren’t constructing liabilities that will reflect badly on us for a long time to come, and that will leave us with high costs when we are forced by a change of heart or by a change of law to upgrade them. And we will be forced to do so as the UK and many other developed countries are aiming for an 80% cut in carbon emissions. I believe that the public will start to recognise what in architecture is profligate, what is unacceptable. That they will see all that glass or the presence of a big fat boiler as plain wrong and will not want to be associated with it. In the past we have seen people throwing red paint at those shops selling certain types of fur, consumers withdrawing their custom from businesses seen as immoral, and those with better moral profiles finding it easier to employ higher quality staff. Thus a building that is energy hungry, or even looks energy hungry, could haunt an organisation for a very long time.
- As I have said, in many counties you will find Energy Display Certificates, or the equivalent, placed by law in the lobby of larger buildings. These are designed to encourage change amongst building owners and those commissioning new buildings. They are placed in the lobby for a reason—to make occupants and visitors aware. The question is how as customers, employees and occupants we should react if these indicate high levels of climate-changing emissions?
- But we don’t always need a certificate to tell us when a building is profligate with our future. We just need to look at a building and work out for ourselves whether we think it well insulated and being used in a sensible and moral way. Here’s another image: fair trade coffee being sold in a highly glazed, poorly insulated, building with the lights on. How’s that going to help an Ethiopian coffee grower as the planet warms?
- Returning to our definition of evil: Well, we know our buildings are the greatest single cause of climate change, we know climate change is likely to be catastrophic for some of the poorest people on the planet, and we know how to build buildings that use almost no energy, but we stubbornly refuse to build such buildings.
- This means we can tick the destructiveness, harm others and conscious boxes in the definition. So look around you as you walk past and through buildings and rank them as evil, or not. And if you design or purchase buildings, rank yourself.