Adaptive Reuse Alternative name for Creative Reuse, in which, rather than being demolished, a building is reused by being converted from one purpose to another.
BedZED Beddington Zero Energy Development is a housing development in southwest London, opened in 2003, that was designed to be environmentally friendly. The aim was for each resident to have an eco footprint of 1.0 planet (neutral), and this was to be achieved through, among other factors, use of low embodied-energy building materials, water and energy efficiency, and encouraging ownership of LPG vehicles and providing charging points for electric cars. Resident satisfaction is high, although green targets have not been reached with each person causing a footprint of 1.7 planets, which, while around half the UK average, is not neutral.
BIM Building-information modelling, a type of CAD for managing a whole building project through the creation of a three-dimensional model to a fourth dimension, time, and a fifth, cost. In this way, every aspect of a building project can be managed and outcomes predicted. Any changes that occur during construction can be easily factored in and will be reflected in the way the overall model accommodates this.
bioclimatic architecture Refers to the design of buildings based on local climate conditions, aimed at providing thermal, acoustic and visual comfort, utilizing solar energy and other environmental sources. The basic elements of bioclimatic design are passive solar systems which are incorporated onto buildings and use such natural sources as the sun, air, wind, water, soil and vegetation to heat, cool and illuminate buildings.
biomimicry Alternative term for biomimetics – biomimesis and bionics are others – in which models from the natural world provide the template for manmade materials and machinery.
biomorphism The use of human or animal forms in architecture. One example is Félix Candela and Santiago Calatrava’s L’Hemisfèric in Valencia, Spain (1998), which is shaped to resemble a giant eye – appropriately, as it houses a planetarium, laserium and IMAX cinema.
CAM Computer-aided manufacturing, where CAD software is used to design, then control and direct the manufacture of components and tools.
CNC Computer-numerical-control software is used for the operation and management of tools, often employed by architects and designers to create three-dimensional models of designs.
embodied energy Term used to describe the total resources and energy spent in producing an object. In architecture, the embodied energy of any building project can be calculated – and, for eco-friendly projects, be offset over time by built-in efficiencies and green planning for transport and other services.
Gaia hypothesis Also called the Gaia theory, this was put forward in the 1960s by British scientist and environmentalist James Lovelock. It proposes that the Earth’s biosphere is a single organism formed by a complex interacting system comprised of all organic and non-organic material contained within it.
greenwashing A green form of whitewash, the term was first used in 1986 by American environmentalist Jay Westervelt to describe PR and marketing that attempted to exploit the public’s eco sensibilities with erroneous or exaggerated green claims for a given product.
in silico Phrase used to describe simulations or experiments done on a computer ‘in silicon’ – the cyber counterpart to in vivo, which refers to experiments done on living organisms.
rapid-prototyping printers Printers that create three-dimensional models from data output from CAD programs.
solid-modelling software Programs that create extremely accurate three-dimensional images, inside and out, so that surface elements can be peeled away and the inside viewed.
thermocuring photopolymers Polymer used to create three-dimensional printed models that can be heat-cured.
three-dimensional additive layering A form of three-dimensional printing in which a model is made up from very thin layers, some as fine as 0.00197 in.
The use of computers for design purposes originates in the aerospace and automotive industries of the 1960s. The development of software and applications expanded 20 years later when computers became more affordable, and early solid-modelling packages from that period are still used – CATIA (1981, Dassault Systèmes) and AutoCAD (1982, Autodesk), for instance. Today, design-and-engineering practice is unthinkable without CAD and CAM (computer-aided manufacturing) technologies, and architecture students are thus required to be proficient in several CAD applications – including parametric modelling, scripting, and programming – as well as BIM (building-information modelling). BIM responds to the increasingly complex workflows and data management involved in building construction by producing a bespoke, comprehensive, three-dimensional representation of the design as parametric and shared objects. These can be accessed and amended by the professionals involved (architects, surveyors, engineers, contractors). Since the objects are defined by parameters and are related to other objects, local changes will affect the global attributes with instant feedback on emerging construction and costing problems.
3-SECOND FOUNDATION
CAD (computer-aided design) refers to the use of computer systems in the process of drafting, creating, modelling, analysng, simulating and optimizing a technical design.
3-MINUTE ELEVATION
CAD software packages are ubiquitous in the design and engineering professions. They are implemented for 2D-drafting and painting, 3D-modelling and rendering and 4D- simulations and animations. Output can be electronic files for visualization, print, or fabrication by CAM programs, and CNC (computer-numerical controlled) machines such as cutters (laser, plasma, water-jet, oxy-fuel), rapid-prototyping printers (using three-dimensional additive layering or thermocuring photopolymers) or industrial robots.
RELATED TOPICS
3-SECOND BIOGRAPHIES
FRANK GEHRY
1929–
American architect and a pioneer of CAD architecture
WILLIAM JOHN MITCHELL
1944–2010
Australian-born architect, and author of Computer-Aided Architectural Design (1977)
GREG LYNN
1964–
American architect, known for his CAD design and theory
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Marjan Colletti
Modern architectural practice is heavily reliant on CAD and 2D- and 3D-drafting software packages.
Lord Rogers is regarded as the coinstigator and promoter of the High-tech style of architecture along with his former partner Sir Norman Foster, Sir Michael Hopkins, Sir Nicholas Grimshaw, Santiago Calatrava, and Renzo Piano. High tech – a radical take on late Modernism – eschews the Classical tradition and embraces the technological future, expressing itself through an industrial aesthetic using steel and prefabricated elements and, in Rogers’s hands, bright primary colours on key elements, injecting a bit of fun into the functional.
After early, mainly conceptual, work on prefabricated housing – the Zip-Up house (1964), for example – Rogers received wider public attention in 1971 when, together with Renzo Piano, he won the commission to design the Pompidou Centre in Paris. They delivered a radical ‘inside-out building’, featuring service ducts and staircases on the outside and leaving the interior space uncluttered for exhibitions and crowd circulation. Although extremely influential, the new style was not without its critics, some of whom referred to it as ‘Bowellism’ because of the intestinal pipework that snaked over the buildings.
Rogers went on to build the iconic Lloyd’s Building in London, a building that, in being uncluttered by the trappings of architectural custom, bears a strong resemblance to the Italian Futurist Antonio Sant’Elia’s 1914 vision of a modern city. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s his partnership concentrated on public buildings, museums, airport terminals, large-scale housing blocks and industrial premises such as the Inmos Microprocessor Factory in Newport, Wales – a marriage of High-tech aesthetic with high-tech purpose and a model of what architectural historian Reyner Banham has called the ‘serviced sheds’.
One of his better-known designs that unwittingly courted controversy was the Millennium Dome in London (1999), a huge and rather elegant tent that was tainted by the badly received exhibition it housed – although Rogers’s Dome itself has since been successfully used to house the O2 Arena for concerts along with other event spaces.
Despite his sometimes controversial approach, Rogers is popular with architects and the general public. He has received almost every award for architecture, including the Pritzker Prize, and is one of the few architects familiar to those outside the profession. Latterly, Rogers has concentrated on tackling the problems of urban decline, becoming advisor to two mayors of London and contributing to urban policies in Shanghai, Paris, Barcelona and New York. Knighted in 1981, he was created a life peer in 1996, Lord Rogers of Riverside.
Born in Florence, Italy
1962
Graduated from Yale School of Architecture
1963–7
Set up Team 4 with Norman Foster, Wendy Cheeseman and Su Brumwell
1964
Designed the conceptual Zip-Up House
1971
Won commission, with Renzo Piano, to build the Pompidou Centre in Paris
1977
Founded the Richard Rogers Partnership
1980–2
The Inmos Building, Newport, Wales, built
1979–84
Worked on the Lloyd’s Building, London
1989
Designed the European Court of Human Rights, Strasbourg
1993–2001
Worked on 88 Wood Street, London
1998
Invited by the British Government to set up the Urban Task Force to investigate and offer solutions to urban decline in Britain
1999
Worked on the Millennium Dome, London
2001–8
Worked on London branch of Maggie’s Centre
2005
Madrid-Barajas Airport Terminal 4 opened
2006
National Assembly for Wales, Cardiff, completed
2006
Chosen as architect of Tower 3 for the new World Trade Center, New York
2007
Awarded the Pritzker Architecture Prize
2007
Set up Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners
2007
Worked on One Hyde Park, London
2008
London Heathrow Airport Terminal 5 completed
2012
Completion of Neo Bankside development, London
It is often simpler and probably cheaper to demolish a building and construct a replacement than it is to reinvent or ‘reprogramme’ an existing structure. However, for a building to which a certain cultural value is attached (such as a heritage listing, particular aesthetic properties, or its function as part of a familiar skyline), it may be more appropriate to modify rather than replace it. This can involve a mix of approaches, spanning restoration, conservation, reconstruction, the insertion of new services, radical structural interventions, or the design of an interior that shelters within the ‘envelope’ of the original building. The conversion of London’s Bankside Power Station into Tate Modern is an internationally acclaimed example of the practice of creative reuse, as it embodies significant spatial changes to a structure that was conceived for entirely different purposes. The reworking of Germany’s Thyssen Steelworks as a public leisure space is a bold example of such practices. Creatively reused buildings often contain the traces of previous functions, for example, form, volume, materiality and unique (usually redundant) features such as chimneys or industrial fixtures. Rather than working against the new use, however, these can often enhance it.
3-SECOND FOUNDATION
Creative reuse – or adaptive reuse – describes the conversion of a building from one function to another, subverting the maxim ‘form follows function’.
3-MINUTE ELEVATION
Creative reuse is now commonplace, especially in countries undergoing industrial and social change. Awareness of ‘embodied energy’ – where buildings have outlived their original purpose, but for which the ‘energy investment’ of constructing them has been met – means that recycling buildings is a sustainable act, as well as preserving architectural heritage. Architects often wrestle with the question of whether to make their changes permanent or reversible. Some buildings resist reuse, however, due to complexity and cost.
RELATED TOPICS
3-SECOND BIOGRAPHIES
CARLO SCARPA
1906–78
Italian architect who remodelled the Castelvecchio Museum, Verona, Italy
HERZOG & DE MEURON
1978–
Swiss architectural partners, designers of Tate Modern, London
LATZ & PARTNER
1968–
German architects, known for landscaping the Thyssen Steelworks, Germany
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David Littlefield
Creative reuse adapts buildings by designing in uses not conceived during the original design process.
From Native American tepees, Egyptian lotus, papyrus, or palm columns, to Greek Corinthian ornamentation, architecture has always looked to nature for inspiration. Beyond the zoomorphic and phytomorphic formal imitation of organic architecture, biomimetics looks closely at how evolutionary processes have optimized living organisms over billions of years to adapt efficiently to their environments. It evaluates manufacturing, organizational, and mechanism strategies on various levels (organism, behavior, ecosystem), and thus is seen as one of the most promising emerging principles in sustainable 21st-century design. Since the 19th century, among the most notable architects inspired by nature are Alvar Aalto, Santiago Calatrava, Buckminster Fuller, Antoni Gaudí, Bruce Goff, Hugo Häring, Imre Makovecz, Frei Paul Otto, Eero Saarinen, Rudolf Steiner and Frank Lloyd Wright. In recent decades, starting with Janine M. Benyus (Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature, 1997) then Steven Vogel and Julian Vincent in the 2000s – but due mostly to the advances of computation and digital fabrication – biomimetic principles are being simulated in silico with increasing precision, pushing the boundaries of computational form generation, material engineering and environmental performance.
3-SECOND FOUNDATION
Biomimetics is the study, distillation and development of the structure, form, formation, or structure of biological systems and materials as models for design.
3-MINUTE ELEVATION
The term ‘biomimetics’ is rooted in the Greek words for ‘life’ and ‘imitation’. It was first coined in the 1950s by American biophysicist and polymath Otto Schmitt, and it is often used synonymously with biomimicry, biomimesis, and bionics. Besides the most famous example of biomimetics, Velcro (in imitation of the burrs of the burdock plant), is the recent and award-winning kinetic façade of the Al Bahar Towers by Aedas (2012) in Abu Dhabi.
RELATED TOPICS
3-SECOND BIOGRAPHIES
FREI PAUL OTTO
1925–
German architect, engineer and authority on biomorphic lightweight structures
JOHN FRAZER
1945–
British architect and CAD pioneer
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Marjan Colletti
Like a protective skin, fibreglass mesh parasols on the façade of the Al Bahar Towers open and close in response to the movement of the sun, reducing heat and glare.
Sustainable architecture emerged in the late 1960s with counterculture’s criticism of Modernism’s tenet that technology could solve any problem. The 1973 oil crisis was the first sign that a fossil-fuel-free future was essential, and sustainable architecture became linked with an awareness of finite resources. It has evolved to encompass several narratives, not least the threat of global warming. Architectural design responded with green architecture, which incorporates several key strategies. First, reducing energy consumption, which in colder climates essentially means using passive solar heating and conserving heat by improved insulation and using heat exchangers; in warmer climates, the emphasis is on excluding heat and using passive ventilation to reduce dependency on air conditioning. Second, adopting carbon-free energy generation for electricity and heating – such as photovoltaic panels and wind turbines. Third, using natural, replaceable, or recyclable materials, and taking account of the ‘embodied energy’ of building components as well as their extraction, transport, production, and eventual disposal or reuse. Ken Yeang’s bioclimatically designed building, Menara Mesiniaga (1992), in Subang Jaya Selangor, Malaysia, is a high-profile example of sustainable architecture.
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The concept behind sustainable architecture is that our architectural-design decisions today should not negatively impact on the health, opportunities, or prosperity of future generations.
3-MINUTE ELEVATION
While environmental considerations dominate the discourse, ideas on sustainability have developed to include other areas – economic and social concerns in particular. Precise definitions of sustainability are difficult to agree on, resulting in the term being used for political or economic gain, a technique known as ‘greenwashing’. However, one thing is certain: in the developed world buildings are responsible for using a significant proportion of the planet’s finite resources.
RELATED TOPICS
3-SECOND BIOGRAPHIES
JAMES LOVELOCK
1919–
British environmentalist
KEN YEANG
1948–
Malaysian architect, known for designing ‘green’ skyscrapers
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Steve Parnell
Designed in response to the specific climate of Malaysia, Menara Mesiniaga has in-built passive low-energy features, including solar shading, natural ventilation and lighting.
