Building human agency: a timely manifesto

Abstract

The 2009 Passive and Low Energy Architecture Conference (PLEA), held in Québec City, Canada, was themed ‘Architecture, Energy and the Occupant's Perspective’, with the ambition of positioning building inhabitants as key ‘active’ determinants of energy performance in ‘passive’ design through adaptive opportunities. Conference delegates committed to a Manifesto that embodied both the key longstanding priorities of PLEA and explicitly conveyed the priorities of the conference hosts. The Manifesto is examined in terms of how it captures and represents a shift in thinking that has occurred over the past few years, away from technological and technocratic solutions to comfort provisioning and towards reframing building energy consumption as a social and ethical challenge in which comfort plays a key role.

La Conférence 2009 sur l'Architecture Passive et Basse Energie (PLEA), qui s'est tenue à Québec, au Canada, avait pour thème « Architecture, Energie et la Perspective de l'Occupant », avec pour ambition de positionner les habitants d'immeubles comme principaux déterminants « actifs » de la performance énergétique dans un design « passif » par des opportunités d'adaptation. Les délégués de la conférence se sont engagés en faveur d'un Manifeste qui, tout à la fois, incarne les principales priorités qui sont depuis longtemps celles des Conférences PLEA et traduit explicitement les priorités des hôtes de la conférence. Cet article examine le Manifeste quant à la manière dont il appréhende et reflète le changement intervenu au cours de ces dernières années dans la manière de voir les choses, consistant à se détourner d'un confort fourni par des solutions technologiques et technocratiques et à aller dans le sens d'un recadrage de la consommation énergétique des immeubles considérée comme un défi social et éthique dans lequel le confort joue un rôle clé.

Mots clés: comportement adaptatif, agence, confort, fourniture du confort, qualité environnementale intérieure, habitants, manifeste, Conférence sur l'Architecture Passive et Basse Energie (PLEA)

Keywords:

• adaptive behaviour
• agency
• comfort
• comfort provisioning
• indoor environmental quality
• inhabitants
• manifesto
• Passive and Low Energy Architecture Conference (PLEA)

Introduction

The stated mission of Passive and Low Energy Architecture (PLEA) is the

development, documentation and diffusion of the principles of bioclimatic design and the application of natural and innovative techniques for sustainable architecture and urban design.

(PLEA, 2010)

In an account of the origins and history of PLEA, Cook (n.d.) acknowledges the role of American architect/academic Arthur Bowen in the creation of the organization and identifies the three key reasons why such a movement was deemed necessary in the early 1980s:

• the potential of bioclimatic architecture was an untapped source that could renew and redirect architectural practice

• architectural practice at that time was ignoring well-established building science knowledge and the collaborative interests of consulting engineers and research scientists

• architectural design was not heeding the lessons offered by nature and indigenous architecture

Infusing these attributes into architectural practice was considered ‘a mission of social responsibility that had a revolutionary sense of urgency’ (Cook, n.d.). Throughout its 30-year history, PLEA has provided a recognized forum for proponents of regionally based, passive design strategies, and its early luminaries include the likes of John Yellott, Harold Hay, James Marston Fitch, Aladar and Victor Olgyay, Don Watson, Steve Szokolay, Jeffrey Cook and Simos Yannas. In addition to enabling academics to meet and exchange current research and knowledge on bioclimatic and passive design, one of the most significant contributions of PLEA continues to be shaping the agenda of practice through ideas conveyed to architectural and other design students.

The 2009 PLEA Conference held in Québec City, Canada, on 22–24 June, was themed ‘Architecture, Energy and the Occupant's Perspective’. This conference was the 26th in a long succession of meetings that began in Bermuda in 1982 and that have covered a broad range of themes related to the consequences and opportunities of energy, climate, sustainability on regional building design practices and urban design. The ambition of the 2009 Conference was to

position [building] inhabitants as a key ‘active’ determinant of energy performance in ‘passive’ design, through adaptive opportunities.

(PLEA-2009, 2010)

The overall thematic intent of the PLEA-2009 Conference was presented in the call for papers and was subsequently emphasized in many of the technical papers and discussions. Significantly, at the concluding session of the conference, 170 delegates committed to a Manifesto that embodied both the key longstanding priorities of PLEA and explicitly conveyed the priorities of the conference hosts.

Conditions

The Manifesto is framed by five ‘Conditions’:

• Considering the current urgency for carbon reduction to counteract climate change and that the building sector alone accounts for 40% of the world's energy use and the resulting carbon emissions.

• Considering that absolute comfort is a privilege, not a right, and that comfort is a relative state strongly dependent on the liberty to choose.

• Considering that the overall mechanization of architecture has led to a disconnection between the occupants and the building.

• Considering that a dynamic and responsible interaction between inhabitants and architecture can lead to important energy and carbon reductions; and consequently

• That buildings do not consume energy; inhabitants do through the medium of architecture.

Directives

The Manifesto continues and provides five ‘Directives’ for different actors. The PLEA delegates assembled to debate on Architecture, Energy and the Occupant's Perspective agreed to the Manifesto's stated Directives:

• Communities should provide comfortable and healthy outdoor environments in order to sustain the applicability of passive environmental strategies such as daylighting, passive heating and cooling.

• Buildings should provide their inhabitants with multiple adaptive opportunities optimizing health, satisfaction and productivity.

• Inhabitants should be responsible to take an ‘active’ role for the provision of relative comfort using robust ‘passive and low-energy’ strategies.

• Pre- and post-occupancy evaluations in new and existing buildings should become mandatory steps within the integrated design process to accelerate our understanding of the systemic inhabitants–architecture interactions.

• Professionals, educators, and developers should reconsider the design and building process as an opportunity for the rehumanization of architecture through inhabitants' increased autonomy rather than automation.

The Manifesto represents a logical continuation of the long-held beliefs and philosophical commitment of the original founders and subsequent generations of PLEA members. Moreover, when viewed through the lens of building ‘inhabitants’ (who take an active role in adaptation of and to the indoor environment as opposed to occupants who take a more passive, accepting role), the Manifesto provides a timely and fresh perspective on the PLEA mission. A key objective of this paper is to examine the ways and extent to which the Manifesto captures a shift in thinking that has occurred over the past few years away from technological and technocratic solutions to comfort provisioning, and to one that reframes building energy consumption as a social and ethical challenge in which comfort plays a key role. This shift in thinking has a number of important implications for the knowledge and understanding of comfort provisioning, professional roles and capabilities to deliver comfort, lay and professional education and training on the optimization of comfort and the management of comfort expectations.

Since the conference organizers – Claude Demers and André Potvin – developed the wording of the Manifesto amidst the event, this paper concentrates on its scope and emphasis rather than offering a critique of its structure and internal logic. In this regard, since the Manifesto Directives do not map one to one with the Conditions from which they emerge, the paper will first explore each of the declared Conditions individually and then each of the five key Directives individually. The paper concludes with an assessment of the collective mission represented by the Manifesto and its potential implications from a number of different vantage points including public policy for the built environment, changing demands on and roles of building professionals, education and training, public engagement and empowerment, and challenging of social norms around comfort expectation and behaviour.

Manifesto conditions

The stated Conditions – individually and collectively – provide the context from which the subsequent Directives emerge. This section examines each Condition in turn, with the aim of expanding on their significance and placing them within a larger discourse.

Urgency of climate change

The first Condition ‘considering the current urgency for carbon reduction to counteract climate change’ has long been recognized as a priority concern for PLEA, beginning with the 1992 PLEA Conference focusing on the theme of ‘Architectural Responses to Climate Change’ in reply to the 1992 United Nations Rio de Janeiro Conference on Environment and Development (the ‘Earth Conference’) and the emergence of Agenda 21. In recent years, the need to engage and counter the causes of global warming and climate change has gained increasing urgency within the public and political arenas. This urgency is presented as the first Condition and thus is seen as an overarching framework for the balance of the Manifesto.

Global warming and climate change is anticipated to affect almost every human endeavour, including building design and occupant comfort expectations and behaviour. Although mitigation strategies continue to be the primary emphasis of current building environmental assessment methods and design practice, the climate change research community and political rhetoric are increasingly emphasizing the need to prepare for the inevitable consequences of climate change. Adaptation strategies will need to embrace both – and equally – the technical attributes of buildings and occupant expectations and behaviour.

Understanding the multifaceted and interdisciplinary nature of comfort in a carbon-constrained world is an increasing area of exploration (for example, see the 2008 Building Research & Information special issue on ‘Comfort in a Lower Carbon Society’). In particular, acknowledging and accepting the uncertainty associated with climate change is becoming more explicit in comfort-related research. Shove et al. (2008), for example, suggest that

[e]xpectations may change in ways that exacerbate or reduce problems of climate change, but the crucial point is they will change and that neither direction is a foregone conclusion.

(p. 307)

Since comfort provisioning can be seen as a:

permanently puzzling, always dynamic achievement (not as something that has been definitively modelled and captured), moving towards a lower carbon future is no longer a hopelessly intractable problem.

(p. 311)

Within a period of a rapidly changing and warming climate, an emerging strategic issue will be the potential limitations of passive strategies to maintain comfort. Many currently advocated bioclimatic strategies that aim at reducing greenhouse gas emissions from buildings may be ineffective in coping with this impending and uncertain context.

Comfort as a privilege

The second Condition that

absolute comfort is a privilege, not a right, and that comfort is a relative state strongly dependent on the liberty to choose

combines a number of interrelated notions regarding comfort expectations and its provisioning.1

Acceptable thermal comfort in buildings – currently defined by the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE) and used by other professional bodies – is attained when 80% of occupants are satisfied with the provided conditions. The recognition of variation in comfort levels of the remaining 20% of occupants suggests that the notion of ‘absolute comfort [as] a privilege’ in this second Condition refers to how individuals experience comfort rather than the collective. ‘Absolute’ in this sense relates not only to thermal comfort, but also to the range of possible comfort determinants including indoor air quality, visual and acoustic conditions, as well as important psychological, cultural and behavioural aspects. Having the ability to choose, for example, in a home or personal workspace where adaptive opportunities tend to be higher, represents a different state of individual comfort than in a shared or group situation.

Social dynamics within the workplace are now recognized to be an important consideration in the definition and experience of comfort. The collective understanding of what is ‘comfortable’ can affect individual notions of comfort, just as every individual arrives with a set of personal comfort standards that feed into the collective understanding. Some level of personal comfort may be compromised consciously or unconsciously for the greater good of collective comfort. Personal technologies and strategies for comfort may reinforce the comfort of others, such as dressing in removable layers; or compromise the comfort of others, such as wearing perfume that affects the local air quality, or blocking daylight and views with furniture and moveable walls. Social comfort, therefore, relates to the relationships between inhabitants and includes issues of adjacencies of workplaces and sense of territory, status associated with open and closed offices, or proximity to windows, privacy and communication, opportunities for interaction, sense of collective agenda, etc. Additionally, social comfort depends on the phenomenon of collective understandings of experienced comfort and the co-development of agency for achieving comfort.

Adaptation is central to current comfort discourse and

those with more opportunities to adapt themselves to the environment or the environment to their own requirements will be less likely to suffer discomfort.

(Nicol and Humphreys, 2002)

The notion of ‘liberty to choose’ is, in part, related to this ability to engage in adaptation strategies and behaviour changes and tolerances, and these may need to become much greater in an increasingly carbon constrained world. Moreover, if comfort is considered a privilege, then the provision and expectation of its delivery is not a constant – even assuming ‘a liberty to choose’. In a similar manner that limitations on the availability of natural resources can influence and limit consumption patterns, there will be times that an individual or group will be uncomfortable – and this may have to become an ‘acceptable condition’.

While the majority of the discussion is directed at design strategies and comfort provisioning for new buildings, the notion of ‘comfort as a privilege’ would seem to be qualitatively different for the majority of existing buildings and how they will function in their role in comfort provisioning in a low-carbon world. Even without the anticipated consequences of climate change, Rudge and Nicol (2000) offer a set of links between social and environmental agendas in UK housing policy and provide convincing leverage to justify affordable adequate standard of all energy services, particularly ‘affordable warmth’. Given the competing pressures on low-income households, many already cannot spend the amount needed to stay warm. Discomfort and the risk of adverse effects: respiratory infections, bronchitis, heart attacks, stroke increase as temperatures fall below 18°C, and below 10°C the risk of hypothermia becomes appreciable, especially for the elderly (Wilkinson et al., 2000). A critical issue therefore for existing buildings – particularly housing – is whether there will be the capacity to change all these buildings, and if not, how to ensure that the ‘privilege’ definition of comfort does not translate into privileging certain places and segments of the population over others when less energy is available.

Disconnection between occupants and building

The third Condition that

the overall mechanization of architecture has led to a disconnection between the occupants and the building

alludes to the widely acknowledged historical transformation over the past century where technological innovation led to a shifting of design responsibility in comfort provision from architects to mechanical engineering consultants, and control responsibility from occupants to technology. Increased faith in technologically sophisticated environmental control systems meant that building occupants played little or no role in shaping the interior comfort conditions or indeed had little awareness and understanding of the systems that did and the energy required to operate the building.

By contrast, many green buildings over the past 10–15 years have begun to reverse this century-long trend. Hartman (2006, p. 17), for example, suggests that the

history of the green building movement to date shows a subtle but persistent bias by architects away from the application of more advanced technologies in the comfort systems that serve buildings.

In North America, there has been a discernible pendulum swing over the past two decades away from a fully mechanically controlled environment back towards one that is largely provided passively. This has been driven by the combination of perceived environmental and occupant-productivity benefits of passive systems and a growing antipathy to reliance upon mechanized building systems among the design community. The shift toward simpler forms of comfort provisioning – orientation, building mass, flues, operable windows, etc. – clearly embraces the embraces PLEA's core values and design priorities.

More recently, there has been a tendency to deploy mixed-mode approaches – raising the expectation of a greater and more effective synergistic relationship between simple, climate or occupant-activated controls (passive intelligence) and advanced, automated technologies (automated intelligence). In all cases, since the opportunity for ‘intelligence’ resides in the interaction between inhabitants and environmental control technologies, the ways and extent that occupants are considered an integral part of the overall control system is critical.

Interaction between inhabitants and architecture

The fourth Condition that

a dynamic and responsible interaction between inhabitants and architecture can lead to important energy and carbon reductions

is a logical extension of Condition 3. Many ‘green’ building strategies essentially and explicitly rely on shared comfort and control in order to achieve environmental objectives. Inhabitants are more directly involved with building systems and operations through opening and closing windows, doors, lights, shading devices, thermostats, vents and other manual controls. Increasingly, field studies and simulation of users' behaviour in buildings confirm that inhabitants' presence and activities in a building aimed at modifying indoor environmental conditions can significantly influence building energy use, with a relative greater influence of user behaviour in passive over mechanized buildings (Bourgeois et al., 2006; Rijal et al., 2007; Hoes et al., 2009). User engagement in positive environmental practice beyond comfort provision, such as turning off electrical appliances, reducing water consumption, limiting waste production, using sustainable transportation, etc., can further help reduce building energy and carbon consumption.

On the whole, this fourth Condition makes a subtle, yet highly significant, shift from the use of the term ‘occupant’ to ‘inhabitants’. The term ‘inhabitant’ more accurately captures the active participation and potential agency of building users with building systems than the term ‘occupant’ used in conventional comfort research to portray a passive recipient of universalized comfort standards (Cole et al., 2008).

Inhabitants consume energy not buildings

The final Condition that ‘buildings do not consume energy, inhabitants do through the medium of architecture’ is a restatement of the fact that buildings are necessary to support human activity and, depending on how well or poorly they have been designed, will require greater or lesser amounts of energy in doing so.

The overall performance of a building derives from the combination of its design features, the effectiveness with which it operated, the expectations of inhabitants (and other stakeholders) for levels of ‘comfort’, and from the engagement of its users. A central issue in the operational efficiency of buildings and their effectiveness to provide functionality and occupant comfort is where ‘intelligence’ is assumed (Cole and Brown, 2009) and by consequence the degree to which building systems are automated or individually controlled by occupants. Several points are linked to this issue:

• Building automated control systems and their set-points are often at odds with occupants' comfort levels and their desire to make changes leading to increased inefficiencies.

• Manual building environmental controls are often not accessible, usable or sufficiently responsive.

• The way and extent to which knowledge and intelligence are transferred between building professionals, operators and inhabitants and enacted upon to support the improvement of the environmental performance of buildings is currently ineffective.

• The phenomenon of ‘take back’, whereby building inhabitants use technical energy-saving measures to improve their comfort conditions rather than reduce energy use, can inadvertently confound progress in reducing carbon emissions (Lomas, 2010).

The metrics currently used to describe building performance are limited in the extent to which they acknowledge and account for inhabitants. Operating energy, for example, is typically described in MJ/m²/year or kWh/m²/year and thereby both blur building design and intensity of use and favour area over other spatial characteristics affecting inhabitant experience. Normalizing energy use by volume (MJ/m³/year) or by use (MJ/m³/inhabitant) could begin to more explicitly highlight the relationship between inhabitants and buildings.

Directives

In building on the above stated conditions, the Manifesto offers five Directives each representing a combination of idealism, polemic and possibility around priorities for future passive low-energy architecture.

Community context

The first of the Manifesto's Directives, that

communities should provide comfortable and healthy outdoor environments in order to sustain the applicability of passive environmental strategies such as daylighting, passive heating and cooling

reinforces the cross-scale link of the performance of buildings with their social, cultural and environmental context, and vice versa. A broad range of issues are important to this discussion, including the ways and extent that surrounding buildings and landscaping modify the microclimate, as well as the social and economic aspects of place-making – resilience, security, livelihood, capacities, etc. Moreover, cross-scale relationships and experiences – building, neighbourhood, city – are increasingly being recognized as seamless rather than distinct.

PLEA has consistently engaged in a discussion that involves both urban design and building design. This proposition is consistent with an increasing need to set the strategic choices related to building design within a broader context – both spatially and temporally. The New Economic Foundation's (NEF) Good Foundations report (Aked et al., 2010), for example, proposes an alternative vision of success of the design of the built environment as

one where our neighbourhoods better support a good life for their inhabitants while also respecting the environmental resource limits upon which all our lives depend.

(p. 3)

While the framing of assessment methods is clearly broadening, most assessment tools still focus on individual buildings. Many of the major building environmental assessment methods offer a suite of products each targeted at a specific building type or situation. The sequence in the development of assessment methods is important in revealing the increasing acknowledgement of a broader context. The majority began with a version for new office buildings and then subsequently expanded the range of products to include existing office buildings, multi-unit residential and then other broader applications – schools, homes, etc. Several existing systems have recently introduced versions that address a broader context, e.g. the US Green Building Council's (USGBC) LEED for Neighbourhood Development (LEED-ND) and CASBEE for Urban Development (CASBEE-UD). The fact that these were developed after gaining experience with assessing individual buildings is remarkably telling – development has overwhelmingly been from the scale of individual buildings upwards to that of a larger scale rather than setting building performance within the overarching context of a neighbourhood, community or city. This first directive recognizes and aims to change this framing.

Provision of adaptive opportunities

The second Directive that ‘buildings should provide their inhabitants with several adaptive opportunities optimizing health, satisfaction and productivity’ raises a number of consequences:

• While there is now substantive research on the relationship between personal control and comfort, productivity and well-being, this Directive specifically uses the term ‘adaptive opportunities’, which suggests extending beyond the notion of personal control to include broader categories of spatial adaptation, temporal adaptation and cultural adaptation.

• The Directive has implications not only for building design and form, but also for revisiting organizational culture and social norms around flexibility and adaptability at home and in the workplace. These may include mobility within the workplace and between workplaces to accommodate micro-variations in indoor environmental quality (noise, thermal conditions, visual comfort), non-assigned workstation design based on the understanding that people may and can choose to work from home on some days, seasonally appropriate dress codes, and the re-introduction of traditional patterns of locally adapted populations such as siestas and heat holidays.

• Interestingly, the optimization is viewed from the perspective of human needs or actions rather than energy/environmental performance of the building, although the link between the two is explicitly acknowledged in the fourth condition on interactions between inhabitants and architecture. Moreover, the notion of optimization of building inhabitant's needs and actions seems paradoxical to that of privilege which speaks to those of the individual.

Relationships between occupants themselves, and between occupants and building systems, are interactive and multidirectional, not linear or predictable as in the conventional deterministic approach. Contemporary design can shape a new context of comfort to address an active ‘inhabitant’ who responds to environmental conditions, adapts, and works with system controls to adapt the system to his or her own needs. This suggests a re-orientation of the approach to comfort in which the goals and objectives of the building systems and the inhabitants are equally engaged and equally attended to. A complex web of heterogeneous interdependencies thus replaces the conventional approach that values the optimization of building systems above the complex and changing needs of inhabitants.

Active role of inhabitants in comfort provisioning

The third Directive that

inhabitants should be responsible to take an ‘active’ role for the provision of relative comfort using robust ‘passive and low energy’ strategies

takes a clear position within the larger discussion regarding human and automated approaches to comfort provisioning and building performance.

Passive approaches to design place a greater responsibility on occupants in building operation, based on the assumption that:

• Systems are readily accessible and comprehensible to building users and clearly accompanied by a willingness to use them.

• Users will make appropriate and intelligent choices when engaging with controls available to them.

• The various systems are able to accommodate/respond to a range of (desired) comfort requirements and that the building will permit these in all its spaces and at all times. This final point suggests that the inhabitants not only have a role in controlling aspects of comfort within the building, but particularly given the longer lag time associated with many passive systems from control trigger to effectuation of change, they may need to move within the building (from one area to another) depending on extreme conditions at different times.

The process of building systems and inhabitants dynamically responding to changing conditions and needs has been described by Cole et al. (2008) as ‘interactive adaptivity’ and refers to the ongoing, bidirectional dialogue between building and inhabitant in which the outcome is not predetermined by building design parameters or performance metrics, but is rather an evolving process. (See also Potvin et al., 2004 regarding the ongoing development of an adaptability index to measure the degree of a building's adaptive opportunities.) A necessary correlate to interactive adaptivity is open communication and dialogue between all components of the system. In particular, in order to enhance inhabitant engagement with their building, more attention should be spent on developing innovative methods and applications for communicating both the new context and the need for assertions of agency and responsibility of inhabitants.

Engaging inhabitants is needed through all phases of building, from design to handover to building operation and use, recognizing that how the information is communicated and knowledge gained is more critical than the provision of information alone. For inhabitants to understand their building is important not only from the standpoint of learning to engage appropriately with building systems and controls, but also in terms of psychological benefits of knowing how the building works and comfort is provided, and feeling a sense of responsibility around its performance, which can in turn shape comfort and comfort-related behaviour (Brown et al., 2009b).

The key is that the communication and interaction are bi-directional, where the experience of comfort and the building systems performance are both dependent on a form of ongoing dialogue. Moreover, the dialogue/interaction needs to recognize (either explicitly or implicitly) the limits of available comfort provisioning and consumption, which link back to the concept of privilege and potentially reduced consumption patterns due to climate change.

Mandatory pre- and post-occupancy evaluations

The fourth Directive that

pre- and post-occupancy evaluations in new and existing buildings should become mandatory steps within the integrated design process to accelerate our understanding of the systemic inhabitants–architecture interactions

draws together a number of processes that can further advance building environmental performance. It emphasizes the necessity of basing building environmental assessment and future design on evidence of actual performance and (inhabitant) acceptability or tolerance of conditions, and beginning to chart new areas and roles that enhanced feedback can offer designers and other stakeholders in promoting innovation and the promulgation of greener buildings.

The notion of making both pre- and post-occupancy evaluations mandatory implies the consistent use of a legitimate building environmental assessment method both to guide design and construction and to evaluate performance in use. Given that it is widely recognized that actual performance differs significantly from that anticipated at design (Leaman and Bordass, 2001), there has been increasing interest in how buildings actually perform. Hence, the renewed interest in post-occupancy evaluations and other techniques (Soft Landings, etc.) both to understand and to improve building performance.

Although the formulation of current assessment methods has spawned debate and investigation into the broad range of technical issues and their consequences on design implementation, the ways, extent and effectiveness of results from post-occupancy evaluations finding their way back to design professionals remains limited. Vischer (2009) advocates evidenced-based design as a logical and necessary evolution of post-occupancy evaluation. Evidenced-based design, Vischer suggests, is

predicated on a new relationship between research and design by basing design decisions on research results – knowledge – and thereby requiring that design decisions make a meaningful shift away from simple intuition towards empirical truth.

(p. 240)

As these emerging requirements become increasingly explicit expectations, one can anticipate a more fundamental institutionalizing of feedback mechanisms that will continue to change qualitatively the kinds of research questions asked, the disciplines involved in research and practice, and the approaches necessary to support their future developments and implementation. A critical issue within this process will be ensuring that specificity of evidence and associated caveats do not get lost in its transfer and translation to practitioners.

Re-humanization of architecture

The final Directive that

professionals, educators and developers should reconsider the design and building process as an opportunity for the re-humanization of architecture through inhabitants' increased autonomy rather than automation

implies getting back to somewhere the design community was before. The assumption is that this prior condition was when building inhabitants had greater engagement with the buildings they occupied and thereby it further reinforces the importance of human agency – enabling occupants to make choices and affect change.

Human agency adds a level of uncertainty and unpredictability that conventional comfort studies have attempted to minimize by designing and implementing systems that either eliminate the need for human intervention due to increasingly high levels of automation or dictate permissible occupant actions under pre-set conditions. Managing occupant agency as a perceived risk to building systems indicates that conventional designers view the uncertainties inherent to human agency as a destructive force. The alternative is to view human agency

as an advantage and not just a weakness – it is the means by which we manage risk and take advantage of opportunities by deviating from business as usual.

(Jones, 2004, p. 32)

Overall consequence of the Manifesto

This section examines the possible consequences that the issues presented in the Manifesto have for the reframing building design and professional practice.

Policy and regulatory implications

The issues embodied within the Manifesto have implications for the framing of building policies and regulations. Building codes, for example, are already moving away from prescriptive requirements towards performance-based approaches to enable greater flexibility in the design of buildings. Perhaps more importantly, the notion of sustainability is emerging as an explicit issue in building codes. While building codes currently focus on the health and safety of building users and evolve primarily in reaction to past catastrophes, David Eisenberg of the Tucson-based Development Center for Appropriate Technology advocates a much broader and positive emphasis, extending the notion of health and safety to embrace the broader and intergenerational environmental consequences of buildings and

re-envisioning building departments as not just governmental agencies responsible for preventing the worst practices, but as true community resources for the best design and building practices.

(Eisenberg, 2004, 2005, p. 8)

Building codes, as currently written, are based on a societal decision that it is important to protect the health and safety of people from the built environment. If, by ignoring their impacts on resources and the destruction of ecosystems, current building codes are inadvertently jeopardizing the health and safety of the human population, Eisenberg argues that we are obligated to re-invent the codes with that larger perspective.

Changing professional roles and capabilities

The potential benefits of an integrative design process in terms of developing both a shared vision for a project and the opportunities for discovering synergies are now well established. The Manifesto reinforces the shift from a more passive role on the part of design team members and stakeholders in their accepting as given the conventional manner of doing things to a more interactive process of engagement and adaptation where the rules of the game are in part created through such interactions. For example, a shift from passive occupant to engaged inhabitant was experienced as a transformation by the stakeholders, partners, and institutions involved in the conception, design, construction and implementation of the Centre for Interactive Research in Sustainability (CIRS) as they began to realize and fulfil their critical role in the integrated design process (Brown et al., 2009a).

Design professionals also hold the potential for ongoing responsibility for the performance of the building, for engaging with ‘end-users’ and inhabitants and for how this might also feed back into the design process. There are two possible strands:

• New forms of involvement to improve the design of buildings through understanding their actual performance (e.g., Soft Landings). However, a current limitation of this proposition is public access to the actual performance information of high-profile buildings.

• New business/professional models for the creation of a ‘building doctor’ (to keep the building and its occupants well) over the life of the building. In fact, this is not a new concept as many cathedrals have a cathedral architect or ‘surveyor of the fabric’ which allows for the consideration of the building over time.

Education and training

The primary position on regionally based passive design strategies advocated by PLEA – together with valuing the knowledge of how indigenous and vernacular practices offered solutions that did not rely upon mechanical systems to heat, cool or light buildings – remains central to architectural education. However, these ideas have yet to find widespread adoption by mainstream architectural practice. Much of this collective knowledge needs to be rediscovered and reinterpreted into a contemporary context by the design professions as well as by inhabitants. Equally significantly, accepting a greater understanding of the interaction between building inhabitants and building environmental systems has significant consequences to reflect different skill sets needed for new forms of professionalism, one that more explicitly bridges architectural and engineering responsibilities in comfort provisioning.

While education and training efforts regarding improving building environmental performance are typically directed to design students and professionals, as alluded to in the third section, there would appear to be a strong need to engage and educate building inhabitants. Janda (2009) calls on architects both to develop professional expertise and to seek ways of integrating user involvement in building performance. Moreover, Janda argues that ‘no one is accepting responsibility for the education of the 99.3% of the population who use buildings’ and speculates that a possible educational option might be the creation of a new profession ‘based around teaching people how to use buildings in less consumptive ways’.

Feedback and knowledge

Leaman and Bordass (2007) present the result of post-occupancy studies that suggest users are more tolerant of green buildings, but they offer caution regarding the interpretation of the evidence. Their analysis of occupant surveys from 177 buildings in the UK revealed that rating scores for green buildings tended to be better than conventional buildings for more all-embracing, summary variables such as ‘comfort overall’ or ‘lighting overall’, but were less conclusive for individual variables. The question of whether occupants are actually more ‘forgiving’ of conditions in green buildings versus conventional, and why this might be the case, is an area that merits further research and exploration. Brown and Cole (2009) suggest that occupant knowledge of their building and expectations around its performance may be influential. However, there are many other important cultural and contextual factors that may play a role in augmenting or diminishing occupants' experience of a space which can be difficult to disentangle from building-related factors, such as workplace design, organizational culture, socio-psychological dynamics within a workforce, etc.

Existing post-occupancy evaluation tools such as questionnaires are limited in their ability to capture the wider range of measures known to influence how users experience buildings. The incorporation of additional means of understanding and evaluating human factors such as interviews, focus groups, etc. could ultimately improve the relevance and accuracy of post-occupancy evaluation methodology. Moreover, understanding how cultural and contextual factors relate to occupant satisfaction in buildings could lead to synergistic benefits in terms of gains in comfort, productivity, health and well-being. As Heerwagen (2000) suggests, organizational and green building factors are highly interrelated, some would even argue dependent on one another for success, in the sense that the benefits of both are more likely to occur when the building and organization are treated as an integrated system from the outset.

Social norms

Building design is shaped by numerous norms and conventions. Similarly, comfort and consumption practices are shaped by social norms and ideologies, technological progress, cultural convention and habit. The consequences of the Manifesto for social norms related to building performance and comfort expectations can be described in light of two emerging strategies.

Feedback mechanisms

Given the combined contexts of climate change, carbon accounting, and increasingly reported gaps between building energy consumption as designed and in use, there is seen to be a growing need for access to reliable, measured data from permanent metering and monitoring capabilities installed in buildings. Granderson et al. (2009) broadly define an emerging class of energy information systems (EIS) to include

performance monitoring software, data acquisition hardware, and communication systems used to store, analyze and display building energy data.

(p. 4)

While the idea of ‘smart’ buildings has been around for decades, advances in Internet technology now provide a standard communications infrastructure so that building systems which were previously isolated can now talk to one another. Information flow between building systems alone can lead to significant efficiency gains, while many commercially available EIS offer advanced functionality such as real-time data display and visualization, benchmarking, data analysis, and anomaly flagging, designed for use by building owners, operators and inhabitants.

The growing update and acceptance of such real-time feedback mechanisms can shape industry norms by:

• requiring metering and monitoring capabilities to be installed in new and existing buildings, along with the education and training of operators and inhabitants to make use of such data

• calibrating industry expectations around building performance and moving towards greater accuracy in design predictions

• sharing real operating results to help improve the design of new buildings and the management of existing buildings by closing the feedback loop (e.g. Bordass et al., 2004)

• reinforcing the active role of inhabitants in building performance and comfort provision by communicating in real time the environmental consequences of their actions

The question of whether and the extent to which energy information systems and real-time feedback tools actually lead to measured gains in energy and environmental performance of buildings represents an important area of future research.

Sustainability charters

A second emerging strategy that is influencing inhabitant norms is having inhabitants sign a charter that commits them to contributing positively to the success of building performance and comfort provisioning through their actions and choices. In return for their commitment and behaviour, the charter assures inhabitants have some individual control of ventilation at their workstations, access to real-time feedback and monitoring of the building's technical systems and performance (including the opportunity to express preferences about operating conditions), improved air quality, and access to natural light. Inhabitants will thus play a crucial role in the success of the building and its community while enjoying the benefits of a humane workplace that optimizes inhabitant comfort and productivity.

Discussion and conclusions

A primary objective of this paper was to examine the PLEA-2009 Manifesto in terms of how it captures and represents a shift in thinking that has occurred over the past few years towards reframing building energy consumption as a social and ethical challenge in which comfort plays a key role. In broad terms, the Manifesto reasserts that the efforts required to address climate change and chart a path toward a sustainable future involve both technological advances and human engagement and an understanding of the interaction of the two.

There are several parallels between the ideas embedded within the Manifesto and those occurring within environmental discourse of the 1970s. Implicit within PLEA's philosophy is acknowledging and respecting the biophysical limits of the planet and working within the boundaries of resource availability. The Club of Rome's The Limits to Growth (Meadows et al., 1972) – the genesis of this view – translated into architectural responses that sought ‘autonomy’ and ‘self-reliance’ at the individual building and community levels as a positive mechanism to set a limit to consumption. The PLEA Manifesto combines the requirements of resource limitation with notions of requisite changes in inhabitant comfort expectations and behaviour. Similarly, Alex Gordon opened the 1972 Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) Annual Conference with a remarkable set of challenges to Institute members including:

to make no demands on nature that nature cannot continue to answer, and to refrain from squandering the limited resources, whether of material biological capital, on which all future generations, as well as ourselves, depend for survival.

(Gordon, 1972)

This was to become the basis of the often-cited mantra Long Life – Loose-Fit – Low Energy. Viewing buildings as catalysts for the current necessary shift in building performance and an opportunity to build human agency could serve as a similarly powerful framing for a new design responsibility.

Manifestos serve several functions. They are of the moment, that is, they address and often redefine pressing issues of a particular time. They bring urgency and often clarity to those issues: defining problems, identifying their sources and proposing their resolution. They seek an audience, they address their peers and envision the pubic at large (or claim to speak in the public good); they aim to be conspicuous. They offer a critique of the existing and outline a strategic direction, a call to immediate action and a strategy for the future.

The period between the mid-19th and the mid-20th century, convulsed by rapid political, social and cultural change, saw a plethora of responding manifestos.2 They responded variously to the challenges of industrialization, population displacement, devastations of the built environment, new fields of expertise and altered modes of production and distribution of goods, people and services.

The purposes and hence methods of manifestos vary, from shock tactics to rational argumentation, from street performance to professional press, but they depend upon a public forum. While manifestos may be authored by an individual, they are born within identifiable groups and seek wide circulation. Their response to the present is not only a call for immediate change, but also a forecast of the future. Their value resides in the clarity and accuracy of their assessment of present ills, the cogency of their prospect and the usefulness of the alternative system, process or product they advocate. Manifestos are an engagement with an existing debate and contribute to the definition of issues and identification of assumptions, and provide the envisioning of possibilities and futures within that debate. They can potentially galvanize action, focus effort and allow the imagining of alternative futures.

As would be expected, the 2009 PLEA Manifesto embodies the fundamental philosophical underpinnings and aspirations long held by the PLEA organization and its members. Over the past 30 years, PLEA has maintained a commitment to regionally and culturally specific architectural practice and deploying passive design strategies to reduce building energy use. Such a position, one suspects, is strongly advocated by those instructors in architectural schools and related disciplines responsible for courses dealing with environmental controls. That stated, a consistent discussion within the Society for Building Science Educators (SBSE) – an association of university educators and practitioners – is the continued failure of mainstream architectural practice to embrace these principles. Many current building projects published in the mainstream architectural press are often lacking in the extent to which they embrace the principles advocated by PLEA. A critical question is, therefore, whether the current urgency to address climate change and facilitation of human agency creates a context more permissive of the adoption of the Manifesto's Directives. Moreover, the past 50 years have witnessed an increasing culture of individualism that may have diminished the possibility of a commitment to a shared ideal and consensus that manifestos attempt to garner. Again, the question emerges regarding whether the combination of climate change and an occupant-focused approach is sufficiently potent to create and maintain a more concerted engagement.

Notes

Although not explicit, it is assumed that the Condition relates to the notion of comfort as a developed world concept as opposed to the developing world where people often face far more pressing needs and concerns than maintaining indoor environmental quality.

Manifestos appeared, for example, in political thought, The Communist Manifesto (1848); in architecture and the arts generally, the Futurist Manifesto (1909); and in architecture and planning, the Athens Charter (1942), etc.