The socialization of building science: the emblematic journey of R. J. Cole

This special issue is offered as a festschrift to celebrate the distinguished research career of Raymond J. Cole. It contains papers by Cole’s colleagues and students and by others who have worked with and been inspired by him, or who have further developed his ideas. This special issue illustrates both the range of his research interests and how, following his example, researchers are seeking to integrate the social sciences and humanities with building science. This integration is being pursued in order, for example, to reduce CO₂ emissions by addressing the multiple performance gaps between how buildings are designed, constructed, commissioned and then operated in use.

Across nearly five decades, Cole has travelled a long way, not just geographically but in terms of his research concerns and broadening expertise. He began his academic career in 1966 in the UK studying mechanical engineering at Brighton Technical College before transferring to an undergraduate degree in Civil Engineering at City University, London. He worked briefly as an Experimental Officer at the UK’s Building Research Establishment in Watford making field measurements of condensation in high-rise buildings of large-panel construction (Cole, 1970). He then became Professor Pat O’Sullivan’s first doctoral student at the Welsh School of Architecture (WSA) in 1970, helping to pioneer the early application of architectural science to computer modelling in order to predict building performance. He taught the thermal environment to undergraduate students at the WSA briefly before moving to Vancouver, Canada, in 1977, where he has remained, eventually becoming the inaugural Director of the merged School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture at the University of British Columbia (UBC) in 2006 and Director of UBC’s Centre for Interactive Research on Sustainability in 2013. Although trained as an engineer, he is an honorary member of the Architectural Institute of British Columbia and a fellow of the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada. He has also served as the Director of the Canada Green Building Council and received the World Green Building Council’s Chairman Award in 2013 as an ‘individual who has made an outstanding contribution to the global sustainability movement’.

Over the past 43 years, Cole’s published research has shown a consistent (but constantly expanding) focus of attention – centred on the performance of the built environment. Originally, his target was quite narrow: just the thermal performance of buildings. But, over the decades, his gaze has expanded, first into a broader consideration of the whole environmental performance of buildings, then neighbourhoods and beyond. Subsequently, it has stretched considerably to encompass not just buildings as socio-ecological systems but the impact on their design and use of contextual factors such as changing technologies, culture and values.

This evolving development can be clearly discerned by referring just to changes in the titles of Cole’s research publications over the past five decades (as the themed bibliography in the supplemental data online illustrates). Six themes emerge:

• modelling building performance

• environmental assessment methods and tools – originally for building performance but subsequently at larger scales

• the Green Building Challenge (an international process for developing and testing a new system for assessing the environmental performance of buildings)

• shifting from green to regenerative approaches to building design

• moving from passive building occupants to active inhabitants

• the effects of change, technology, culture and values

These themes do not represent a simple linear or serial progression in Cole’s research gaze (Figure 1). Rather, once a theme has emerged, it has remained or (as illustrated by modelling building performance) become the bedrock underpinnings of subsequent work. This expansion of Cole’s gaze has been driven by what Cooper (2003, p. 15) labelled as ‘the socialisation of building science’, when invited to write a commentary on Cole’s (2003) contribution to his jointly edited book Buildings, Culture and Environment: Informing Local and Global Practice (Cole & Lorch, 2003). This expansion arose in response to a growing realization amongst researchers that building physics, material science and computational mathematics alone are incapable of explaining the environmental (including energy) performance of the built environment. The impact of human agency, social practices and cultural issues are also now recognized as important. So too is the need to examine the performance of the built environment at spatial scales beyond individual buildings.

Figure 1. Key themes in Cole’s publications over the past five decades.

Between them, the contributors to this special issue are fulsome in their praise of Cole’s research and its trajectory, using one aspect or another of it as a point of engagement or as their benchmark reference (Table 1). All six of the themes listed above are touched upon in this special issue. One of them – the modelling of building performance based solely on the use of the physics of building materials and the environment and on computational mathematics to explain building performance – is treated as a former touchstone, to be judged and found wanting. Instead, authors argue for the use of a range of socio-technical, social constructionist or humanities-based approaches to address a variety of different types of performance or knowledge gaps associated with the production and use of the built environment.

Table 1. Authors and titles of articles in this special issue ‘Environmental Performance of Buildings: Festschrift for Ray Cole’, Building Research & Information (2018), vol. 46(5); guest editor: Ian Cooper.

Authors	Title	doi
I. Cooper	Editorial: The socialization of building science: the emblematic journey of R. J. Cole	10.1080/09613218.2018.1400328
R. Lowe, L. F. Chiu and T. Oreszczyn	Socio-technical case study method in building performance evaluation	10.1080/09613218.2017.1361275
S. Coleman and J. B. Robinson	Introducing the qualitative performance gap: stories about a sustainable building	10.1080/09613218.2017.1366138
F. Stevenson and M. Barborska-Narozny	Housing performance evaluation: challenges for international knowledge exchange	10.1080/09613218.2017.1357095
A. Oliver and D. S. Pearl	Rethinking sustainability frameworks in neighbourhood projects: a process-based approach	10.1080/09613218.2017.1358569
S. Kawakubo, S. Murakami, T. Ikaga and Y. Asami	Sustainability assessment of cities: SDGs and GHG emissions	10.1080/09613218.2017.1356120
K. K.-L. Lau, E. Ng, C. Ren, J. C.-K. Ho, L. Wan, Y. Shi, Y. Zheng, F. Gong, V. Cheng, C. Yuan, Z. Tan and K. S. Wong	Defining the environmental performance of neighbourhoods in high-density cities	10.1080/09613218.2018.1399583
C. Tweed and G. Zapata-Lancaster	Interdisciplinary perspectives on building thermal performance	10.1080/09613218.2017.1379815
P. Jones	A ‘smart’ bottom-up whole-systems approach to a zero-carbon built environment	10.1080/09613218.2017.1374100
N. Kohler	From the design of green buildings to resilience management of building stocks	10.1080/09613218.2017.1356122
T. Lützkendorf	Assessing the environmental performance of buildings: trends, lessons and tensions	10.1080/09613218.2017.1356126

Lowe et al.’s paper ‘Socio-technical case study method in building performance evaluation’ seeks to move away from methods for predicting energy use and assessing the environmental performance that ‘have remained predominantly within a reductionist approach common to physics and engineering’. They argue that the:

recognition that building performance is characterized by [in Cole’s phrase] interactive adaptivity and the co-evolution of the physical with the social has not been matched by the generation of new methods

for investigating building performance. They advance ‘the fecundity’ of their chosen approach, the case study method (CSM), as ‘providing a more nuanced understanding of the interaction between social and technical systems in performance’ by asserting the ‘agency and responsibility of inhabitants’. This requires, they seek to demonstrate, not simply just an understanding of ‘occupants' responses and lived experience’ but of ‘the technical systems that co-constitute them’. They conclude that:

designed and applied appropriately, CSM is capable not only of producing primary empirical data to support modelling and design, but also of capturing the contextual complexity that is often required for causal inference – understanding what the performance gap is and also how it arises, and how therefore it might be changed.

Cole has long been involved in teasing out reasons for performance gaps between how buildings are designed and how they behave when occupied. The notion of a ‘qualitative performance gap’ arose from work done by him with one of the authors who have contributed to the festschrift (Cole, Robinson, Brown, & O’Shea, 2008). In their contribution to this special issue, ‘Introducing the qualitative performance gap: stories about a sustainable building’, Coleman and Robinson explore this concept through a case study of the Living Lab at the Centre for Interactive Research on Sustainability (CIRS) in Vancouver, Canada – a ‘regenerative’ building for an interdisciplinary research group of which Cole was the director. Through pre- and post-occupancy evaluations of the building and interviews with its inhabitants, they explore the gap between what its inhabitants expected and their actual ‘lived experience’ of the building environment. Based on their exploration, they argue that their case study reveals the building has itself acted, for its inhabitants, as a flagship: ‘as an icon of a new kind of sustainability called regenerative sustainability, requiring engagement and interactivity adaptivity’.

Cole demonstrated his own interest in the changing cultural circumstances underlying building design fairly early in his research career. He spent a sabbatical from UBC at the University of Cambridge in 1983–84 examining changes in how ‘information’ and ‘science’ were viewed by British architects over the previous 150 years (Cole & Cooper, 1988). This interest found much fuller expression 15 years later in the book he co-edited , Buildings, Culture and Environment: Informing Local and Global Practice (Cole & Lorch, 2003). In this, the editors sought:

[to] begin to define and engage with cultural issues that researchers, practitioners, clients, user groups, product suppliers and policy makers in the built environment need to consider in creating, utilising and exchanging knowledge. (p. vii)

This theme of cross-cultural knowledge exchange is the focus of attention in Stevenson and Barborska-Narozny’s paper, ‘Housing performance evaluation: challenges for international knowledge exchange’. Here they seek to take into account the influence of national and local building cultures for those looking to develop an international platform for sharing good practice in the evaluation of building performance. Their cross-cultural comparison of the UK and Poland leads them to conclude that variations in how building performance evaluations (BPEs) are conducted in different countries are:

related to the historical and embedded cultural values in particular countries [which] highlight[s] the need to understand the limits to any global homogenization of BPE methodology due to differing assumptions, attitudes and approaches.

Accordingly, they agree with Vlasova and Gram-Hanssen (2014) that international research programmes need to develop more reflexive methods to help draw out the situated tacit knowledge and values underlying the ‘scientific objectivity’ of BPE studies.

In their contribution ‘Rethinking sustainability frameworks in neighbourhood projects: a process-based approach’, Oliver and Pearl also employ qualitative methods for exploring building sustainability assessment tools, employing Cole’s (2005) ‘process’ approach to examine the shift from buildings to the neighbourhood scale. Their paper looks specifically at neighbourhood-scale pilot projects (in Malmö, Sweden, and Barcelona, Spain) that have employed sustainability tools or frameworks striving towards more regenerative or resilient definitions (Cole, 2012) of sustainability. Their approach reveals that the success of both these projects, particularly in relation to stakeholder collaboration and community participation within the project-development processes, was largely the result of how the projects were framed. They conclude that if projects are properly framed:

neighbourhood-scale sustainability tools represent opportunities to bring different sectors together (private, public and third party) around a common vision to create infrastructure investment partnerships and truly integrated communities.

Kawakubo, Murakami, Ikaga and Asami are also concerned with widening the scope of sustainability assessment methods. Their contribution ‘Sustainability assessment of cities: SDGs and GHG emissions’ is hugely ambitious. Their aim is to provide an assessment method that can be used to monitor the progress of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals and of its Framework Convention on Climate Change’s Paris Agreement, both at the local level and internationally. What they offer for doing so is the Comprehensive Assessment System for Built Environment Efficiency (CASBEE) for Cities, a ‘method that allows users, such as local government officers, citizens and other stakeholders to understand the actual conditions of their cities [ … ]’.

Referring back to Cole’s (2005) work on redefining the intentions and roles of assessment methods, they present a new addition of their existing CASBEE portfolio of tools. This seeks to allow users to understand the sustainability of their cities and communities along both quality and environmental load dimensions – to understand their own current actual conditions, not just in comparison with other cities around the world, but explicitly across the developed/developing country divide. The authors’ international application of the assessment tool described in their paper allows them to identify what they portray as an ‘ideal development path’ toward sustainable cities in which:

Developed cities have to decrease their GHG [greenhouse gas] emissions, while maintaining quality. In contrast, developing cities should focus on improving quality without increasing their environmental load.

Lau et al.’s paper ‘Defining the environmental performance of neighbourhoods in high-density cities’ is also concerned with widening the scope of assessment methods. But they seek to do this by tailoring such methods to take account of local context – in their case, the high-rise, high-density nature of urban development in Hong Kong, China. They pursue this contextualization by employing a regenerative design framework to ‘engage a broader range of possibilities by moving beyond the immediate building and site boundaries’ (Cole et al., 2012) since ‘The interactions between buildings and neighbourhoods, particularly the spaces between buildings, are important to the environmental conditions to which urban inhabitants are exposed’.

Their paper seeks to highlight the distinctive features of the environmental performance of neighbourhoods in a high-density urban context and how these influence professional practices in Hong Kong. Contextual problems encountered in high-density cities require revisions to conventional assessment methods in order to address constraints encountered in them. This involves, for instance, bespoke tools to design for daylighting and ventilation because of the urban form of Hong Kong. Lau et al. also point to the need for an information platform to bridge the gaps between urban climatology and urban planning and design in order to transfer scientific climatic knowledge into planning language. They offer their experience of developing bespoke assessment tools and methods as a useful reference for designers and policy-makers when tackling the issue of rapid urban development. They see assessing the environmental performance of neighbourhoods in high-density cities as particularly relevant to those developing countries that experience considerable pressure due to population density compounded by the limited availability of land for development.

In their paper ‘Interdisciplinary perspectives on building thermal performance’, Tweed and Zapata-Lancaster start from a similar problem definition to that employed by Lowe et al. They, too, argue that people must now be recognized as ‘active creators of their environment not simply as passive recipients of conditions created by buildings and their technical systems’:

In everyday practice, the concept of ‘performance’ and definitions of ‘good performance’ are taken for granted and rarely considered problematic. Discussions tend to be dominated by technical understandings of how buildings behave with reference to agreed standards. The existing methods and tools are good at telling us what happens in buildings and in quantifying various aspects of measurable performance. While some of the methods consider human aspects, these methods do not aim to explain why inhabitants feel or behave as they do.

Without this kind of understanding, they contend, it is difficult to propose solutions to address poor performance or to design future buildings that will address human concerns about performance. Accordingly, theories of performance that neglect wider concerns of the experience buildings create for their inhabitants are presented as being at risk of missing important determinants of people’s satisfaction with the buildings they encounter and the influence this has on how they use buildings. The premise of their paper is that a dialogue between natural sciences, social sciences and the humanities can be called upon in attempts to improve the systemic performance of buildings. To achieve this, they look especially towards the humanities and, in particular, to phenomenology to enrich understanding of ‘human environmental experience in architecture’. Their purpose in doing so is to discuss the extent to which a humanities-informed approach to the evaluation of the performance of buildings can be used to ‘enhance proposals for better performance in operation and as a tool for designers to learn/reflect from buildings in operation’.

As Jones signals in his contribution to the festschrift, ‘A “smart” bottom-up whole-systems approach to a zero-carbon built environment’, previous work by Robinson and Cole (2015) argued that societal responses over the past half century to complex environmental problems have been led by a negative approach. This has been focused on scarcity and sacrifice, on making things ‘less bad’. Jones notes that the alternative – regenerative sustainability – is directed towards contributing positive outcomes, and is both systems and place based. Regenerative design considers the interconnections within and between ecological, social and economic systems at various scales, but with an emphasis on local thinking, experience and delivery. For Jones, this ‘whole-systems thinking’:

not only includes integrating technologies and architecture from a people perspective, including both the designers and the users of the built environment, but also links to government regulations and industry needs, spinning out bottom-up activities through the so-called knowledge triangle of research, industry and government.

He argues that the emphasis should, therefore, change from harm and damage to creating net-positive outcomes in both environmental and human terms at the building and neighbourhood scales. Jones reviews top-down and bottom-up approaches to the energy-reduction agenda. He advocates a greater emphasis on a ‘whole-system’ bottom-up approach because this is seen as being capable of delivering multiple benefit solutions. He considered this in relation how the concept of ‘smart’ bottom-up initiatives can be implemented at the regional scale. He notes that if a future zero-carbon performance is to be achieved, then many of the buildings currently being constructed will soon need a major retrofit or they will face demolition.

Kohler’s paper, ‘From the design of green buildings to resilience management of building stocks’, is concerned with the performance of existing buildings. He posits that, arguably, the most important contribution to the green-building movement has been the development of different environmental assessment models and tools. Here, he points to Cole’s own contribution, in terms of both the development of the Green Building Challenge (Larsson & Cole, 2001) and via his understanding of how environmental assessment tools have continuously been reframed over time by ideas arising from prevailing societal values and priorities (Cole, 2004). Kohler notes that:

The green and the subsequent sustainable building movements have been framed by changing societal contexts. Their main focus has been on the design of new buildings. However, these movements have neglected the life span of existing buildings and the long-term management of building stocks.

This paper raises concerns about what the transition toward a ‘risk society’, in particular, one with an increasing diversity and frequency of threats, means for assessment tools. These threats, he argues, challenge the current optimistic definition of sustainability. Instead, we need to focus on resilience since this addresses both fast- and slow-moving threats that can lead to unknown consequences and new risks. He points to possible heuristics that can be found for doing so in social–ecological systems, in resilience engineering, and in the historic evolution of the built environment

Lützkendorf also points to the great service and contribution provided by Cole:

to the issue of environmental and health protection in the building design and construction field, not only with his own work but also by summarizing in several cases the current state of development.

In his paper ‘Assessing the environmental performance of buildings: trends, lessons and tensions’, Lützkendorf seeks to add to this historical understanding by tracing the integration of environmental performance into a sustainability assessment, the ongoing development of life cycle assessment (LCA) methods, and the rise of clients’, financiers’ and assessors’ different demands for environmental performance assessment. He then examines seven further factors that he thinks now need to be taken in consideration: the further development of the classic ‘three pillars’ sustainability model; the suitability of assessment criteria and indicators; the handling of technological progress; the discounting of environmental impacts; the environmental assessment of existing buildings; the further development of legal requirements; and the topic of time. He concludes that the last of these is important because:

The inclusion of time encompasses the need to take a longer view of the building and its life cycle and to recognize that conditions will change over time, a trend that needs to be factored in to the design and assessment of building performance.

Conclusions

The research landscape that Cole entered when he published his first research paper in 1974 is now difficult to re-imagine. Entrants to built-environment research today would find it strangely narrow and unduly constricting. True, it did contain some features still common today. As Cole’s first paper (O'Sullivan & Cole, 1974) on the thermal performance of school buildings showed, it was already concerned with the energy consumption of buildings – a concern driven, in part, by the ‘energy crisis’ of the previous year induced by the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries’ (OPEC) oil embargo. But, for example, carbon emissions were not an issue. As Cole’s paper illustrated, while researchers were already engaged in building more detailed modelling techniques for predicting building performance, these did not attempt to engage with ‘user effects’. And researchers’ attention was still firmly fixed on (individual) buildings, rather than the built environment at the larger scales of neighbourhoods, cities and regions, let alone globally. Five decades ago, the ‘performance-related’ research landscape on buildings remained dominated by a small number of disciplinary perspectives: mainly physics, material science and computational mathematics.

As the contents of this special issue demonstrate, the hegemony of the gaze imposed by these disciplines has been judged as wanting. Now the debate is about just what other perspectives, using precisely which methods, and drawing on what theoretical and conceptual frameworks are deemed to be fruitful, not just appropriate. As the contents of the special issue indicate, attempts are being made to integrate the social sciences and humanities with building science, at multiple spatial scales. Now researchers need to explain how people – as social beings with diverse motives and intentions – make and transform the world in which they live (Shove, 2017; Shove, Pantzar, & Watson, 2012). In addition, they also need, as Lowe and co-authors demand in their paper, to translate this understanding into practical actions that designers, operators and inhabitants of the built environment can act on effectively in their everyday (working) lives.

As the papers in this special issue show, Raymond J. Cole has played a significant role in enlarging and enriching both the discipline perspectives now deemed important as well the actors that have to be taken into account. And, unlike the advocates of social practice theory, for instance, Cole has done so from within the citadel, from within building science. The space that he and others have constructed is, as this special issue makes evident, still highly contested. And so the journey – on which Cole himself embarked as a doctoral student nearly 50 years ago – is obviously still far from over.

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Ray Cole for his assistance in collating the online thematic bibliography compiled to support this editorial.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the guest editor.

ORCID

Ian Cooper http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4415-7988