This article appeared in Harvard Design Magazine, Spring/Summer 2009, Number 30.

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Delight in Sun, Wind, and Light

Sustainability and Pleasure Indoors/Outdoors by G. Z. Brown

I was beginning to feel faint as I trudged along Egypts scorching avenue of sphinxes, trying to shade my body with a hat brim and hoping for a breeze. The Temple of Luxor materializeda dark spot between the sky and bright sand taunting shade. Entering the temple ruin, I relaxed into its coolness, and as my eyes adapted to the interior, its hieroglyphic surfaces emerged, illumined by the reflected sunlight from one small opening. The sensation of difference light and dark, heat and coldwas exhilarating, but the coolness was mystifying on such a hot day until I realized that the low temperatures of the night before had infused the colonnades massive columns so that now cool air was invisibly cascading down on me. Understanding what caused the coolness was almost as pleasurable as feeling it. Humans take pleasure in sensing variation, especially that caused by the natural forces of sun, wind, and light.1 Even in ruins, Luxor demonstrates prin-

ciples that are useful in contemporary building design: variations in temperature and light level can be both comfortable and pleasurable; even in a bright desert environment, low light levels and glare-free daylighting can be achieved; and thermally massive construction washed with night air can absorb coolness and use it to ameliorate hot periods the next day. Ideas about what constitutes thermal and visual comfort have evolved in tandem with the development of building elements and technologies that supply heat, cooling, ventilation, and lighting. Standards have narrowed, driven as much by social status as by technological change.2 In the 20th century, mechanical and electrical systems became able to heat, cool, light, and ventilate buildings regardless of their envelopes. This independence gave architects the freedom to sculpturally shape building form and select materials more for their experiential than for their

On Ideas
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2009 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Not to be reproduced without the permission of the publisher

performative qualities. At the same time, experimental data quantified the temperature and relative humidity at which people were most comfortable, given assumptions about their clothing and activities. By the second half of the 20th century, the technological and social status goal of a comfort zone with un-varying temperature and relative humidity was established. Architects thus began to design buildings (especially those with large floor plates) that depended on mechanical and electrical systems, and comfort became the domain of engineers. While architects created buildings that provided pleasure through variations in form and facade transparencies, engineers designed systems that kept these buildings within a narrow temperature range regardless of orientation or glazing area, using electric lights to reduce glare resulting from the contrast between the window wall and the back of the room. The problem with this approach was that the buildings design exacerbated its heating, cooling, ventilating, and lighting loads, and its systems gobbled energy to offset these loads. While this wasnt a serious concern at the time (nuclear plants were expected to produce electrical energy too cheap to meter), we can no longer afford such architecturenot when we know that buildings account for 36% of our total energy use and 70% of electricity consumption and that the production of energy is the primary cause of climate change. While energy use is not the only measure of sustainability, it is a good indicator of our ability to design sustainable buildings. Energy use is a complex inter-woven web that touches almost all aspects of building design. If we can solve the problem of excess energy use, we can solve other sustainability problems as well. At the root of the problem is the way architects think about and design buildings. Most people have a predilection for either humanistic or scientific thinking, and our educational systems reinforce this split. Design courses are dominated by humanistic thinking, while performance issues are covered in

science-based technical courses. This results in an emphasis on either the humanistic or the performative aspects of buildingsnot botha way of thinking then carried into practice. Architects must strive to be as fluent in scientific thinking as they are in humanistic thinking if they wish to create buildings whose sustainable features are an integral part of the design, buildings that provide both pleasure and performance. A building that achieves broad architectural purpose and sustainable performance is elegant and, at its best, inspirational. Elegant is a useful term to describe the combination because its meaning implies both architectural purposerichness of designand the scientific goal of precision, neatness, and simplicity. The climate, building occupants, and site/building design determine a buildings heating, cooling, ventilating, and lighting loads, which are acted on by the systems that use energy. Our first response to a societal need to use less energy has been to increase the efficiency of the mechanical and electrical systems that meet these loads. If we double their efficiency, a building will use onehalf the energy, but the cost of its systems will increase. However, if we first reduce the loads the demands for energyby 50%, the systems can be smaller, cost less, and still be twice as efficient. Total energy use would be 75% less; the building would cost less to build and to operate. If we wish to achieve energy and resource performance goals such as carbon neutrality, load reduction is the critical first step. When used elegantly, sun, wind, and light can provide intense sensory and mental pleasure while reducing a buildings heating, cooling, and lighting loads. Building occupants can sensorially experience many load reduction strategies. For example, cross-ventilation is sensible as a fresh cooling breeze and visible as an artifactan open window. Cooling provided by mechanical systems is less directly registered by our senses. Ducts are usually not visible as artifacts, and being cool is different from the feeling of

being cooled. Two load reduction strategies that afford a rich sensory experience and have wide application are day-lighting and night ventilation of mass.3 What makes day-lighting pleasurable are the ways in which it connects us to the dynamics of the natural worldfor example, how the light in a room changes from lighted floor plane to lighted ceiling plane as snow blankets the ground outside. Windows can amplify natural differences. For example, the difference between cool north light and warm south light is clear when juxtaposed as they are in the Castle Drogos lunette window vaults. Windows are multivalent: they provide views in and out, ventilation, sitting places, and modulation of walls, all potential sources of sensory pleasure. By comparison, lighting fixtures are single purpose, provide less varied sensory input, and therefore have less potential for pleasure. But daylighting saves energy only when it replaces electric light use. Daylighting is complex and fraught with potential problems. There are performance conflicts: For example, the required glazing area can increase heating and cooling loads and cause glare. And there are conflicts with architectural purpose because the need for light can greatly influence building form and organization, openings placement, room depth, and reflectivity. Since the performance of a window is directly related to its physical characteristics but our experience of a window is only indirectly related and is filtered through our perceptions and modified by our knowledge of windows, it is useful to think of the window as having two aspects: its aperture and its architectural setting. The aperture defines the windows performance, and the aperture plus the setting determine ones experience. This makes it possible to design windows that provide both sensual pleasure and sustainable performance. For example, in this west-facing building facade in Milan, ornamentation is substituted for aperture scale to enhance the pleasure of the

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street experience while maintaining the shading performance of the relatively small aperture. In the Myyrmski Church in Vantaa, Finland, narrow apertures pour light onto reflecting surfaces creating receding luminous planes that define a light window completely different from the much smaller unseen aperture. With both the Milan example and this one, the windows are experienced as large but perform as if they were small, reducing heat loss and gain. This apparent paradox is a pleasure in itself. Within the Friday Mosque, Isfahan, Iran, solar shading lets in some sunlight, thereby revealing the excluded and linking performance to pleasure. Contemporary glazing often rejects solar radiation by using coatingsits uniformity does little to link experience and performance. At Versailles, mirrored surfaces reflect windows creating the experience of a room that is open to the garden on two sides while affording the thermal performance of a room with an opening on only one side. Night ventilation is a cooling load reduction strategy. At night drawn-in air cools the buildings thermal mass, which then absorbs heat the next day. Like daylighting, this strategy also influences building design. It requires mass area equal to twice the floor area, ventilation path-ways through the building, and large, secure openings. Making these openings secure can be an opportunity for using decorative patterns that are a source of pleasure; for example, the grille work of Louis Sullivan or the bamboo reinforcing revealed by stripping away the clay from a Japanese wall. Night ventilation can also provide aromatic pleasures. For example, side-byside identical classrooms at the University of Oregon were testedone with night ventilation of mass and one without. When faculty toured first the non-ventilated classroom and then the night-ventilated classroom in the morning, their comments centered not on the fact that the night-ventilated room was cooler but that it smelled fresh, recalling

the pleasure of teaching outside under a tree. A night ventilation strategy can meet the entire cooling load for many building types in several climates, eliminating the need for mechanical cooling and lowering initial costs. To realize both architectural purpose and sustainable performance, architects and engineers need to modify the way they design buildings. For example, because load reduction strategies using sun, wind, and light are more architectural (affecting building form, organization, and materials) than mechanical/ electrical systems, these strategies need to be integral in programming and the concept development phases. As building loads are reduced dramatically, systems can be eliminated or significantly downsized, and the savings used to increase the sustainable attributes of the building and the pleasure afforded by them. To ensure high levels of energy performance, design responsibility should be organized by performance area (such as lighting) rather than by discipline (such as electrical engineering). A synthesis of climate, use, design, and systems is crucial to achieving elegance of architectural purpose and sustainable performance. Of the four topical areas, use is often the catalyst for synthesis. After all, buildings dont use most of their energy on their own, people do. The comfort standards used to determine thermostat set points are probably the most important determinant of building energy use and the least expensive to change to improve performance. The comfort zone is usually defined as ranging from 67f to 81f, depending on relative humidity. However, designating this range the comfort zone is problematic because it suggests that outside of it we would be uncomfortable. In fact we can be comfortable at a higher temperature with air movement and at a lower temperature with a warmer radiant field. And variation in temperature can be a source of pleasure (like standing on a cold night next to a masonry wall that has been warmed all day in the sun). Allowing variation in temperature means that a

load reduction strategy such as night ventilation can take advantage of the cooler radiant field it produces to ensure comfort when air temperatures are above 80f. Thermostat set points for individual buildings are often based on asking occupants or owners what air temperature they would like rather than whether they are comfortable in various environmental conditions. People are not very good at judging absolute standards like temperature. Researchers from the Energy Studies in Buildings Laboratory (ESBL) at the University of Oregon recently occupied a comfort chamber where every fifteen minutes they estimated the air temperature and noted if they were warm, cool, etc. Of the fortytwo estimates, only three closely identified the air temperature. Building users know when they are comfortable, but they dont know whycomfort is a function of too many variables. Furthermore, our bodies temperature sensors measure rate of heat loss or gain not temperature, which is why metal feels cooler than wood when they are at the same temperature. Asking people what temperature they want their building to be limits the opportunity for saving energy as well as the pleasure of variation. A full-size ESBL prototype classroom at Mt. Angel, Oregon, uses daylighting and night ventilation strategies to realize both sustain-able performance and architectural purpose in ways that elicit pleasure. The project used an integrated design approach to create a classroom that performs 62% better than Oregon Energy Code requirements at no increase in first cost. The envelopes high resistance to heat flow meant that the mechanical cooling system could be eliminated and only night ventilation of mass and ceiling fans would be needed for comfort. Horizontal roof openings were preferred for day-lighting because in an overcast climate they let in more light per square foot than any other orientation. However, horizontal openings are vulnerable to heat gain from the high summer sun, and large openings can

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Efficiency Alliance, the University of Oregon, architectural products supplier CPI, and Mt. Angel Abbey. Notes 1. Lisa Heschong, Thermal Delight in Architecture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1979). 2. John E. Crowley, The Invention of Comfort (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001). 3. G.Z. Brown and Mark Dekay, Sun, Wind and Light: Architectural Design Strategies, 2nd Edition (New York: Wiley & Sons, 2001). 4. Barry Commoner, The Poverty of Power (New York: Bantam, 1976).

Ozymandias I met a traveler from an antique land Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand, Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command

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create a too bright area under them. To resolve this problem, the EBSL developed a top light reflector that uses photo-controlled louvers within the skylight to keep the light level within the desired limits, preventing excess heat gain while keeping the skylight large enough to daylight the room almost all the time the sun is up. The reflector redirects the light to the sides of the room, thereby eliminating glare directly under the skylight. The daylighting strategy not only affords visual comfort and an even distribution of light for workers, it also makes the ceiling and walls luminous, bathing the room in light and allowing the placement of a central window to view the Mt. Angel landscape. More than 100 teachers and administrators visited the prototype classroom. Before they entered the room, they were asked to imagine the classroom they currently taught in and to tell us which they would prefer to teach in the following yeartheir existing room or the prototype. None voiced a preference for an existing classroom. In the Poverty of Power (1976), Barry Commoner described the complex interaction among three basic systems the ecosystem, the production system, and the economic systemthat, when combined with the social/political system, govern all human activity.4 Given the hierarchy of dependenciesthe economic system on the wealth yielded by the production system, and the production system on the resources provided by the ecosystemlogically, the requirements of the ecosystem should be primary. Taking pleasure in the coolness of Luxors ruins and admiring the ingenuity of a once-great building culture, I reflected, with the help of Percy Bysshe Shelley, on the consequences of ignoring Commoners interdependencies:

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed. And on the pedestal these words appear: My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair! Nothing beside remains: round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Acknowledgments I would like to thank the following people with whom I have collaborated in the development of these ideas and projects: colleagues at the Energy Studies in Buildings Laboratory, University of Oregon; Mike Hatten and SOLARC Architecture and Engineering; Heinz Rudolf and BOORA Architects; Jeff Cole, Konstrukt; Kevin Nute, University of Oregon; Joel Loveland, Judy Theodorson, Kevin Van Den Wymelenberg, and Tom Wood; and Kent Duffy and SRG Architects. Related research projects would not have been possible without the support of the Northwest Energy