Essay: The Air that We Breathe

The Air that we breathe

Has architecture lost its way en route to a post-carbon future? Brian Cody, Head of the Institute for Buildings and Energy in Graz, outlines his roadmap for carbon neutral architectural design to help get us back on track.

Text by Brian Cody
One Earth

TWO QUESTIONS

As “zero energy buildings” and the concept of “carbon neutrality” become the accepted ideal in contemporary architecture and urban design, the following questions pose themselves:

Is “zero energy” and “carbon neutrality” really a suitable goal?

Is the attainment of this goal feasible in the foreseeable future?
Three Obstacles

Against the prevailing background of global warming,
rapidly depleting energy resources, exponential population growth and the mounting geopolitical instabilities
that arise from insecurity relating to
future energy supply sources

The Potential benefits of achieving carbon neutral development and zero energy buildings can hardly be disputed.

However, in the light of recent
developments there appear to be
three main o b s t a c l e s to making
such a development mainstream:
I N E R T I A

i.e. the

r—e—s—i—s—t—a—n—c—e

to

CHANGE

in the established professional, commercial, industrial and political groupings involved.

 Commercial Lobbies

 as evidenced by the pressure brought to bear during the formulation of necessary guidelines, regulations and laws by interest groups driven by purely

commercial concerns.

 Political structures

especially with regard to the
discrepancy between the necessary time frame for considerations regarding sustainable development and that of the current political framework in most countries, leading to an exclusive focus on

short-term political goals.

On top of this, zero energy buildings and carbon neutral developments on the scale we need are, in physical and economic terms, technically extremely challenging.
FOUR STRATEGIES

In terms of the built environment, what do we as a society want? And given the difficulties described above, what should the architects today be striving to do?

In the design and construction of
HIGH PERFORMANCE ENVIRONMENTS.
these environments should…

Be of the highest architectural, spatial and urban design quality

Provide high comfort with minimum resource consumption

Be capable of meeting the challenges of the future
Furthermore, architects should …

Bring their influence to bear on the relevant political processes
Professionals must actively provide politicians with advice to enable them to make the right decisions.
FIVE IDEAS

…to help achieve high performance environments:

WHOLE SYSTEMS THINKING

The key to sustainable future development lies in systems thinking: an approach to problem solving in which the problem is understood to be part of a whole system. This is instead of placing a system boundary around the problem with subsequent ignorance of the effect potential solutions will have on other parts of the whole system (thus contributing unwittingly to an unsustainable development of the whole system). This applies particularly to the consideration of embodied energy in the design process, use of different qualities of available energy and the extension of building design into the realm of urban design.

DEFINING FOR HIGH PERFORMANCE

How we as a society measure, evaluate, reward and punish various strategies employed to achieve energy performance will strongly influence the future development of architecture. The development of evaluation methods is an important and fatally underestimated factor in the future development of the architectural discipline.

Today, the term "energy efficiency" in the building sector is misunderstood; low-energy consumption is often falsely equated with high-energy efficiency.

Energy efficiency is the relationship between output (benefit) and input (resources). The key issue is the quality of the benefit provided as a result of the energy consumed. Regulatory devices currently in use, including the new EU Directive on the Energy Performance of Buildings, deal solely with energy demand and not with energy efficiency.
(Fig. 1) Sketch sections for the Patna Museum in India by Coop Himmelb(l)au, showing the external double skin of concrete with a coating that captures solar heat energy, which is then transported away by integrated air ducts and used to power the building’s cooling system. (All images courtesy Brian Cody)
USING NATURAL FORCES

A building is designed to exist in a natural environment with continuously changing conditions (temperature, humidity, air movement, light, sound) and provide desirable and more or less constant internal environmental conditions within. Two approaches can be followed to achieve this goal; the conventional approach of sealing off the external environment as much as possible and employing mechanical systems to provide the desired internal conditions, or alternatively the deployment of building form, construction, and skin to utilize natural external environmental flows. I propose the second approach in which, similar to the strategies employed in some Asian martial arts, the energy of the “attacking” forces are captured and utilized to achieve the desired result (Fig. 1).

(Fig. 2) Sectional sketch showing the concept for the skin of a tall building in Singapore by Coop Himmelb(l)au, where the geometry of the building's form enables year-round energy production through “solar blades” with integrated photovoltaic cells, which still allow good daylighting and views out.
BUILDINGS THAT GIVE

In the future buildings will need to provide energy for the cities in which they are located; they will need to generate more energy than they need themselves. Figure 2 shows a concept for a tall building in Singapore by Coop Himmelb(l)au in which the geometry of the proposed building form enables year-round energy production at this equatorial location via specially designed “solar blades” with integrated photovoltaic cells. In Ortner & Ortner’s project for a peninsula on the coast of the Adriatic Sea, the architects designed an energy masterplan by for a carbon-neutral development with an area of approximately 100 hectares. The energy demand of the entire development, including all buildings and vehicles, is supplied by on-site renewable energy sources. (Fig. 3). Both buildings and cars can extract and supply energy to the grid.

(Fig. 3) Sketch diagram of the concept of an integrated building and vehicle network for a masterplan by Ortner & Ortner on the Adriatic coast, showing an energy grid supplyied with renewable energy from a mixture of centralised and decentralised sources.
- Brian Cody is Professor at Graz University of Technology and Head of the Institute for Buildings and Energy since 2004. His focus in research, teaching and practice is on maximising the energy performance of buildings and cities. He is founder and principal of the consulting firm Energy Design Cody, which is responsible for the development of energy and climate control concepts for construction projects all over the world. Professor Cody serves as a member on many advisory boards and juries and is Visiting Professor and Head of the Energy Design Unit at the University for Applied Arts in Vienna.
  
  energydesign-cody.com
DEVELOPING SYMBIOTIC RELATIONSHIPS

In our research on urban design strategies that provide spatial, temporal and digital densification, new typologies for vertical structures incorporating all the necessary infrastructural elements of society – including industry, agriculture, food production, and energy generation – were developed. These so-called Hyper Buildings function like cells in a city model. In this structure each cell is self-sufficient, yet when linked together they mutually assist each other so that the whole is more than the sum of the parts. The Hyper Building allows a population density roughly equal to that of Manhattan. It needs no external energy and water supply, produces no waste, emits no CO₂, and needs little or no external food supply. A central feature of this conceptual approach is the synergetic integration of the different systems and the exploitation of symbiotic relationships between nature, humans and technology (Fig. 4). I

About Brian Cody

(Fig. 4) A diagram summarising energy flows at the École Centrale University building by OMA in Paris, a project developed as a new building typology to improve communication, flexibility and adaptability, whilst simultaneously increasing energy performance by creating generous shared spaces with pleasant macroclimates under an overall climate envelope.