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Head in The Point Clouds - Feet on the Ground
The Problem of Thermal Comfort in Climatic Design
Associate Professor Jörg Rekittke, Doctoral Researcher Yazid Ninsalam
Assistant Professor Chang Jiat Hwee
There is no need for soothsayers to predict the future of digital technology for the purpose of site-specific landscape architectural terrain analysis, measurement, and documentation. It will be handheld, respectively mobile and light, broadly affordable, and will allow digital landscape capture in the form of three-dimensional data progressively in high precision, high density, and geo-referenced manner. Landscape data of that ilk, which emanate from high-capacity depth cameras as well as terrestrial laser scanners, can be made available with high visual clarity and aesthetic allure. A common result of the capture technique is their interim, respectively final transformation into point clouds, contingent upon their way of generation, purpose and application. Point clouds of every occurrence and scale at present become the most relevant digital slug as well as virtual modelling clay of the landscape architectural design discipline. With our heads in the point clouds, operating as research-oriented landscape architects in the context of academic design projects, we insist upon the necessity of working in situ and putting our feet on the ground.
Buildings are responsible for a large percentage of the record levels of energy consumption and carbon emission in the Anthropocene epoch, and significant proportion of these are associated with mechanical cooling. In face of peak oil and climate change, many advocates are calling for a reduction in our reliance on mechanical cooling and for us to turn to non-air-conditioning technologies. For many architects, historians and theorists, not only do mechanical cooling (as provided by air-conditioning) and “natural” cooling (through sun-shading and ventilation) represent contrasting technologies and philosophies, the architectural forms associated with these technologies are also seen as diametrically opposed physical and cultural entities: productform versus placeform, active cooling in contrast to passive cooling, conservative mode against selective mode, etc.
This axiom enables us to do fieldwork in undocumented or data-poor megaurban environments, often under the urban canopy and in urban canyons where remote sensing technology fails to act. We experiment with all sorts of independent measuring and urban terrain data gathering technology that can be carried in the field. We continue to advocate the creative utilisation of inexpensive, ordinary tools and off-the-shelf technology. Having said that, the grasp at more sophisticated, more expensive, and more flamboyant technology remained appealing during the past years of our research. When such costly state-of-theart technology became available to our university department, we took them to harsh megacity environments and tested their capacities and limits. This move signified a review of the theses and methods inherent to our general concept of Grassroots GIS – inclusive surprises and reassurances. For example, working in crowded informal narrow city layouts makes operations with laser-beam emitting terrain scanners Gordian. While the use of unmanned aerial vehicles carrying powerful cameras does not always have to end admissibly. These are the moments when the reliability of mature and frugal technology, as well as improvisation and tinkering skills, may steal the show.
Published in Peer Reviewed Proceedings of Digital Landscape Architecture 2014 at ETH Zurich. 198-207.
This paper questions these oppositions. Examining the emerging discourse of tropical architecture in the British imperial contexts of the 1950s and 1960s, this paper argues that, like mechanically cooled architecture, tropical architecture was underpinned by a mechanistic and reductionist understanding of the complex relationships between human well-being, climate and society. Looking at the research and teaching by figures such as Otto Koenigsberger and George Atkinson at the Department of Tropical Architecture at the AA and the various Building Research Stations in the British Empire, this paper shows that thermal comfort, as established in early twentieth century by the airconditioning researchers associated with ASHVE and industrial physiologists, was the “fundamental principle” upon which tropical architecture was constructed. Thermal comfort experiments, however, assumed human beings as passive biological receptacles of environmental stimuli and reinforced the old colonial perception that tropical climate was a source of thermal stress. Thus, tropical architecture ignored how comfort was not an environmental-biological attribute but an achievement inextricably linked to social practices and cultural perceptions. The subsequent failure of tropical architecture can be attributed to these oversights.
Presented at “Architectural History of the Anthropocene” session, Society of Architectural Historians Annual Conference April 2015 in Chicago.
^ Source: Winslow, C.-E. A, and L. P. Herrington, Temperature and Human Life, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1949.