Adapting Buildings and Cities for Climate Change: A 21st Century Survival Guide

Sue Roaf, David Crichton and Fergus Nicol, Architectural Press, 2005

For those who take the threat of climate change seriously, Adapting Buildings and Cities for Climate Change is a must.

The book compounds the expertise of a designer, an insurance practitioner and a researcher into building technologies, a background of climate change and how it has already affected ecological building practices. ‘If only the global community had acted more firmly in the 1970s’, says Roaf, ‘when they saw the challenges ahead perhaps we would not now be facing the predicaments around us!’ But it didn’t and we do. A generation hence, ideas about alternative renewable energy production, energy efficient and emission reducing building technologies, car design, and combined heat and power are being dragged centre stage once again.

Roaf demonstrates the devastating effects of global warming on building technologies. Her archaeological work in Iraq shows the positive effects of passive heating and cooling of traditional mud brick houses; meanwhile in Dubai, copies of wind towers built in concrete are added as decorations to contemporary air conditioned ‘neovernacular’.

Throughout, she focuses on the interaction between buildings and their adaptability to their users. A thoroughly researched chapter by Nicol, Rudge and Kovats examines the effects

of cold and heat on adaptive behaviour, outlining the limits of discomfort. There are a number of chapters on specific climatic changes and their effects on living conditions and our responses to them. She also analyses the future of fossil fuels, concluding that we can no longer rely on a constant, reliable, high quality supply of energy. These chapters are packed with facts, well presented statistics and tables, easy to read scientific explanations and details on the Kyoto agreement, various forms of heat loss, the impact of 9/11, etc.

After this contextual material, Roaf returns to building technology and analyses air conditioning which had been achieved by passive buildings but shifted to high energy buildings in the 20th century, exposing other drawbacks.

Her alternative solution is to sell comfort and air quality as a product rather than an attribute or property of the building itself, where comfortable and healthy indoor conditions are created by good building design characteristics, including massing and micro-climates.

She criticises high technology missionaries, who push privatisation and market forces, which without regulation and planning would jeopardise the environment even more. The media, designers, architects, engineers, educators, the building industry, quangos, building owners, occupiers, managers, and insurers all have their role to play. She mentions the American Problem, being in denial of global warming, and concludes that people from all walks of life will ‘need to ‘reorder normality, by rearranging the paths they take, the costs they apportion, to make buildings happen, to plan carefully to futureproof their own lives’. Those who read her book can gain inspiration to think again and change the way they design the built environment.

(This review was first published in Urban Design 97, Winter 2005 and is reproduced with the Editor's kind permission)