Preface

Better Buildings – learning from buildings in use

This book started life as a successor to David Turrent’s popular Sustainable Architecture, first published in 2007 by RIBA Publishing. Since that book’s appearance, much has changed in the UK: we have seen the birth, accompanied by a great fanfare, of a Zero Carbon Buildings policy both for new homes and non-domestic buildings. Considering the comparatively low starting point, the proposed trajectory for achieving zero carbon was astonishingly rapid, and in the interim the Building Regulations have been updated twice and become increasingly complicated. But neither the technical standards nor the intended programme for zero carbon have built in space for analysis, reflection and measurement, or for learning. Surprisingly, far fewer than half of the buildings originally featured in Sustainable Architecture have been subject to a post-occupancy review or even revisited by their designers. This book sets out to redress this balance by considering how buildings work and are occupied, and the methods used to study them.