Sustainable Building Design

Chapter 1Introduction

Miles Keeping¹, David Shiers², Ann-Marie Aguilar³ and Michael Beavan³

¹Hillbreak Ltd., Buckinghamshire, HP18 9TH, UK

²School of the Built Environment,, Oxford Brookes University, Oxford, OX3 0BP, UK

³Arup Associates, London, W1T 4BQ, UK

The term ‘Total Architecture’ implies that all relevant design decisions have been considered together and have been integrated into a whole by a well organised team empowered to fix priorities. This is an ideal which can never - or only very rarely - be fully realised in practice, but which is well worth striving for, for artistic wholeness or excellence depends on it, and for our own sake we need the stimulation produced by excellence.

Ove Arup, 1970, http://publications.arup.com/publications/o/ove_arups_key_speech.

Achieving excellence in design and construction is, arguably, an even greater challenge today than when Ove Arup first began practice as an engineer and architect in the 1920s.

Now, as then, each project design and construction team must tackle what is a unique combination of variables, particular to an individual building or piece of infrastructure. Site-specific technical and aesthetic considerations, the functional needs of the eventual users, financial and contractual constraints, macro-economic conditions, Building Codes and legal requirements (all of which are subject to constant change), mean that every new project is, in effect, a prototype.

But as awareness has grown of the potentially devastating ...