Friendly and beautiful
environmental aesthetics in twenty-first-century architecture
pp. 459-469
in: Robert Kirkbride (ed), Geometries of rhetoric, Berlin, Springer, 2010Abstract
Until recently, environmental control systems have been more often suppressed than expressed, hidden from casual observers and building users, rarely featured as architectural design elements, or considered aesthetically. While the impact of the overall form of a building on its thermal environmental performance may not always be apparent, the mutual influences of shape, form and orientation should be evident to — if not a basic activity of — a wellinformed professional. A primary aim of this paper is to encourage a new aesthetic sensibility for the 21st century; one that conceives architectural form with respect to environmental context and ecological efficiency. Toward this end, I propose a method of comparative analysis, using several recently completed and speculative architectural projects.