Figure 1 All Electric House with its archetypical shape. The facade is completely covered in PV panels.
green building lacks the rich mystery of inspiring architecture due to monotone lighting. 6 Most building physics researches on ‘the perfect shape’ of buildings are too general since the models do not take context into account. The environmental circumstances in an urban area are completely different than in a rural surrounding for example. An example of such a research is done by Ken Yeang, who defined the perfect skyscraper shape in his book “The Green Skyscraper”. His conclusions may be true to a certain extent, yet it is still too superficial and too general. (fig. 2)
Figure 2 Yeang’s skyscraper shape principles.
Figure 3 Biomimicry. Wuhan Energy center by Soeters and van Eldonk
Introduction “Form follows function” is a wellknown architectural principle by Sullivan 1, it is related to rationalism and modernism, these days it is still a popular design approach. So if form follows function, and we consider sustainability as a function, form should follow sustainability. This would lead to visible sustainable architecture with a complete integration between sustainability and the shape of a building. Reality however shows, that there is little connection between shape and sustainability. A quote by Peter Eisenmann in a 2009 interview is characteristic for sustainable architecture in general: “Green and sustainability have nothing to do with architecture” 2. He said this because designers care about image whilst the green movement has the reputation of not caring about image at all. In most cases beauty or integration is not a topic. It seems that virtue wins over design. 3 Sustainable buildings mostly have green add-ons, like solar panels, which are not integrated in the
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architectural design of the building. For the shape of a building the same values seem to apply. Shape is hardly related to the sustainable intentions of a building. Sometimes it is used to make solar panels more effective thanks to the angle of the roof, but it can be questioned if the shape of a building would be different if solar panels would not have been applied. The All Electric house in Goutum, the Netherlands, (fig. 1) claims that the shape is related to
buildings - due to its checklist-architecture - have in common, is their universal appearance. There are some exceptions, like the Academic of Science by Renzo Piano. Furthermore the shape is mostly reduced to a square block, since this is the most energy-efficient shape. The problem with many sustainable building designs is that they all try to do the same, they flatten the daylight that is falling in, since this is comfortable for the office workers inside commercial buildings. The typical
The opposite trend of these pragmatic sustainable designs are the icons. When it comes to icons, sustainable buildings are highly represented. The Bahrain World Trade Center for example is shaped in such a way the wind turbines should work more efficient, a very large statement of sustainability, more information on this building an be found in the essay ‘Why We Need (some) Sustainable Expressionism’. Ironically, the buildings are shaped the wrong way round. Bert Blocken, professor at the TU Eindhoven, showed with wind tunnel experiments that the wind flows are not optimal. “Ideas about wind flows are often based on intuition, but that leads to suboptimal designs” 7, Blocken says on the TU website.
of species which survive will evolve further. It is more about give-and-take than cause-and-effect. In the building industry, straight buildings are being built since they are easy to produce, this makes it more sense to state: “form follows industry”. 5 But since architects have the power to improve the causeand-effect theory of a building we can make buildings that actually survive with less energy, in a socially accepted and durable way.
“Form follows industry” sustainability, but in fact it is just an archetypical house. 4 The first sentence of this essay is exemplary for the problem, since the suggested relation between form and function is not entirely valid. Form follows function is a statement which is incompletely borrowed from nineteenth century’s biology. Darwin showed that in natural selection, morphology shows up randomly. Only the morphology
There are many examples which claim to be sustainable, sometimes they even claim that they are shaped according to sustainability arguments. Some architects see sustainability checklist certifications like BREEAM and LEED as a way to design ‘sustainable’ buildings. Buildings which have this certification reduced their energy consumption and sometimes these buildings even saved on construction materials. What these
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