̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - Alan Short

Clare Hall, Cambridge and LUT ̽��ֱ��, Finland sign agreement on fellowships and global climate prize

plc32 — Tue, 28 May 2024 15:11:40 +0000

Clare Hall, Cambridge and LUT ̽��ֱ��, Finland, establish a Visiting Fellowship programme and joint Global Prize for Solutions to Climate Change Threats. Please read more about this story here

We very much look forward to welcoming high-flying academics from LUT over the years to come to our unique interdisciplinary research community

Clare Hall President Alan Short

Credit/Clare Hall

LUT Rector Juha-Matti Saksa and Clare Hall President President Alan Short and signing the joint agreement

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A retrofitting revolution

cg605 — Thu, 06 Oct 2022 12:01:37 +0000

Laying the foundations for buildings to stay cool in extreme heat.

Coronavirus pandemic: making safer emergency hospitals

lw355 — Tue, 28 Apr 2020 08:50:22 +0000

Simple, low-cost ventilation designs and configuration of wards can reduce the dispersal of airborne virus in emergency COVID-19 hospitals, say Cambridge researchers.

Back to the future of skyscraper design

sjr81 — Wed, 01 Mar 2017 09:09:44 +0000

Newly-published, ̽��ֱ��Recovery of Natural Environments in Architecture by Professor Alan Short is the culmination of 30 years’ research and award-winning green building design by Short and colleagues in Architecture, Engineering, Applied Maths and Earth Sciences at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge.

“ ̽��ֱ��crisis in building design is already here,” said Short. “Policy makers think you can solve energy and building problems with gadgets. You can’t. As global temperatures continue to rise, we are going to continue to squander more and more energy on keeping our buildings mechanically cool until we have run out of capacity.”

Short is calling for a sweeping reinvention of how skyscrapers and major public architecture are designed – to end the reliance on sealed buildings which exist solely via the ‘life support’ system of vast air conditioning units.

Instead, he shows it is entirely possible to accommodate natural ventilation and cooling in large buildings by looking into the past, before the widespread introduction of air conditioning systems which were ‘relentlessly and aggressively promoted’ by inventor Willis Carrier and rival entrepreneurs.

“ ̽��ֱ��majority of contemporary buildings have absolutely no resilience to climate at all,” he added. “To make them habitable, you have to seal them and air condition them. ̽��ֱ��energy use and carbon emissions this generates is spectacular and to a large extent unnecessary. Buildings in the West count for 40-50% of electricity usage, generating substantial carbon emissions. ̽��ֱ��rest of the world is catching up at a frightening rate, China at 31% and rising in 2017.

“Modern buildings cannot survive unless hard-wired to a life support machine, yet this fetish for glass, steel and air-conditioned skyscrapers continues; they are symbols of status around the world on an increasingly vast scale.”

Short’s book highlights a developing and sophisticated art and science of ventilating buildings through the 19th and earlier 20th centuries, including the two chambers of the Houses of Parliament, and the design of ingeniously ventilated hospitals. Of particular interest were those built under the aegis of John Shaw Billings, designer of the first Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore (1873-1889).

“We spent three years digitally modelling Billings' final designs and a brilliant alternative design,” added Short. “We put pathogens in the airstreams, modelled for someone with TB coughing in the wards and we found the ventilation systems in the room would have kept patients safe from harm.

“We discovered that nineteenth century hospital wards could generate up to 24 air changes an hour– that’s similar to the performance of a modern-day, computer-controlled operating theatre. We believe you could build wards based on these principles for the NHS now. Single rooms are not appropriate for all patients. Communal wards appropriate for certain patients – older people with dementia, for example – would work just as well in today’s hospitals, at a fraction of the energy cost.”

Professor Short contends the mindset and skill-sets behind these designs have been completely lost, lamenting the disappearance of expertly designed theatres, opera houses, and other public buildings where up to half the volume of the building was given over to ensuring everyone got fresh air. Early twentieth century climate determinists like Ellsworth Huntington at Yale inadvertently promoted the export of cool, temperate climates around the world and explicitly condemned the inhabitants of hot climates as uncivilised and backward.

Much of the ingenuity present in 19th century hospital and building design was driven by a panicked public clamouring for buildings that could protect against what was thought to be the pernicious threat of miasmas – toxic air that spread disease.

Bad, malodourous air was considered lethal by huge swathes of the populace. Miasmas and other quasi-mystical phenomena were feared as the principal agents of disease and epidemics for centuries, and were used to explain the spread of infection from the Middle Ages, right through to the cholera outbreaks in London and Paris during the 1850s. Miasma theory attracted the attention of luminaries such as Florence Nightingale who believed that foul air, rather than germs, was the main driver of 'hospital fever' leading to disease and frequent death. ̽��ֱ��prosperous steered clear of hospitals.

While miasma theory has been long since disproved, Short has for the last thirty years advocated a return to some of the building design principles produced in its wake.

“ ̽��ֱ��air conditioning industry has persuaded us that you can’t do this naturally any more and that it would defy progress to do so. Huge amounts of a building’s space and construction cost are today given over to air-conditioning instead.

“But I have designed and built a series of buildings over the past three decades which have tried to reinvent some of these ideas and then measure what happens – publishing what works as well as what doesn’t.

“To go forward into our new low energy, low carbon future, we would be well advised to look back at design before our high-energy high-carbon present appeared. What is surprising is what a rich legacy we have abandoned. There is an analogy with the widespread introduction of affordable antibiotics and the relaxation in the ferocious cleanliness regimes in hospitals and the frightening consequences emerging now.”

Successful examples of Short’s approach include the iconic Queen’s Building at De Montfort ̽��ֱ�� in Leicester. Containing as many as 2,000 staff and students, the entire building is naturally ventilated, passively cooled and naturally lit, including the two largest auditoria each seating more than 150 people.

Conventional wisdom in the ventilation and heating industry was that this omission of mechanical and electrical equipment was impossible. Confounding its critics, the building was awarded the Green Building of the Year and RIBA’s Education Building of the Year in 1995 and was at the time the largest naturally ventilated building in Europe, influencing guidance in Europe and the USA. ̽��ֱ��building uses a fraction of the electricity of comparable buildings in the UK.

Following success there, Short and industry associates have also experimented with theatre design, including the Contact Theatre in Manchester, which uses the abundant heat sources of theatre lights and audience to drive air flows around the building and the passive downdraught cooled School of Slavonic and East European Studies in Bloomsbury, epicentre of the London Heat Island.

Short contends that glass skyscrapers in London and around the world will become a liability over the next twenty or thirty years’ time if climate modelling predictions and energy price rises come to pass as expected. He points to the perfect storm of the skyscraper boom in China, where huge high-rise, all-glass metropolises expand at an exponential rate. Meanwhile, 550 million people south of the Qin-Huai line in that country are not allowed to centrally heat or cool their own homes because of the energy that would demand and consume.

Short is convinced that sufficiently cooled skyscrapers using the natural environment can be produced in almost any climate, pointing to his research work on cooling an 11-storey tower at Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge. He and his team have also worked on hybrid buildings in the harsh climates of Beijing and Chicago – built with natural ventilation assisted by back-up air-conditioning – which, surprisingly perhaps, can be switched off more than half the time on milder days and during the spring and autumn.

“I think you can upscale these designs,” he added. “As you go higher, airspeeds increase and it becomes easier to control the climate within tall buildings.

“My book is a recipe book which looks at the past, how we got to where we are now, and how we might reimagine the cities, offices and homes of the future. There are compelling reasons to do this. ̽��ֱ��Department of Health says new hospitals should be naturally ventilated, but they are not. Maybe it’s time we changed our outlook.”

̽��ֱ��Recovery of Natural Environments in Architecture: Air, Comfort and Climate, published by Routledge, is out now.

Answers to the problem of crippling electricity use by skyscrapers and large public buildings could be ‘exhumed’ from ingenious but forgotten architectural designs of the 19th and early 20th century – according to a world authority on climate and building design.

̽��ֱ��air conditioning industry has persuaded us that you can’t naturally ventilate buildings any more.

Alan Short

Advertising Archive

Post-war advertisement for air conditioning by Carrier

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New partnerships for ‘low carbon cities’ in the UK and China

sc604 — Fri, 23 Oct 2015 07:00:00 +0000

̽��ֱ��projects will receive over £3 million in funding from the UK’s Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), with matched equivalent resources from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC).

Funded under the Low Carbon Cities programme, the projects will encourage collaboration between leading UK and Chinese academics, combining research to reduce the carbon emissions of existing technologies.

̽��ֱ��projects will also deliver fundamental research into alternative energy sources and a reduction of energy demand, all with a focus on future urban environments.

By using comparative research to examine social, political and technical challenges, this will help the UK and China to successfully transition towards future low carbon cities. This programme and joint funding process has been facilitated by the RCUK China office.

“ ̽��ֱ��aim of this UK-China research collaboration will be to reduce worldwide CO2 production and ensure energy security and affordability,” said Professor Philip Nelson FREng, EPSRC’s Chief Executive. “This is the first of three low carbon innovation projects between EPSRC and NSFC. ̽��ֱ��projects build on the strength of our internationally renowned research and will benefit both the UK and Chinese economies.”

“NSFC has been working closely with EPSRC for several years to address challenges related to achieving a low-carbon economy,” said Professor Che Chengwei, Deputy Director General, Department of Engineering and Material Sciences, NSFC. “This latest programme, with a focus on future urban environments, will build substantially stronger links between Chinese and UK research communities in relevant areas. It will also brighten the future bilateral collaboration between both countries.”

̽��ֱ��four projects funded are:

1. Low Carbon Transitions of Fleet Operations in Metropolitan Sites
(Newcastle ̽��ֱ��, Imperial College London, and Southeast ̽��ֱ��)

2. City-Wide Analysis to Propel Cities towards Resource Efficiency and Better Wellbeing ( ̽��ֱ�� of Southampton and Xi’an ̽��ֱ�� of Architecture & Technology)

3. ̽��ֱ��‘Total Performance’ of Low Carbon Buildings in China and the UK ( ̽��ֱ�� College London and Tsinghua ̽��ֱ��)

4. Low carbon climate-responsive Heating and Cooling of Cities ( ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, ̽��ֱ�� of Reading and Chongqing ̽��ֱ��)

̽��ֱ��Cambridge project, led by Professor Alan Short of the Department of Architecture and also involves Professor Peter Guthrie from the Department of Engineering, will focus on how to deliver economic and energy-efficient heating and cooling to cities of different population densities and climates.

Low Carbon Cities forms part of the Low Carbon Innovation programme, a £20 million three-year investment announced in March 2014. Facilitated by Research Councils UK (RCUK) China, this programme builds on five years of successful collaborative research funded jointly by EPSRC and NSFC in energy research. Low Carbon Innovation will also support research to develop new low carbon manufacturing processes and technologies, as well as offshore renewables.

Adapted from an EPSRC press release.

Researchers from UK and Chinese universities, including the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, are collaborating on four new projects to work towards achieving low carbon cities in the UK and China. ̽��ֱ��projects were announced as Chinese President, Xi Jinping visited the UK this week.

Jim Trodel

Skyline - Hong Kong, China

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