The upcoming Centre for Architecture and the Sustainable Environment (CASE) Open Lecture will be given by Professor Alan Short with his talk titled, ‘The Recovery of Natural Environments in Architecture’. Professor Short’s open lecture will take place on Tuesday 24 November at 18.00 GMT via Microsoft Teams. Please use this link to join.
Professor Alan Short’s book, The Recovery of Natural Environments in Architecture, fundamentally questions the capability of the contemporary architectural idiom and its antecedents to cope with a changing climate. The recurrent forms for our principle building types were devised in the very different conditions of the mid-twentieth century and now need to be fundamentally re-invented. Prototypes for this reinvention were developing in very interesting and increasingly sophisticated ways until the introduction of ‘artificial weather’ in the late 1920s. Artificial weather released the design of buildings from the need to be responsive in any way to their external environments, impoverishing their meaning and their occupants’ experience. This book exhumes these lost ideas, reinforces them with contemporary scientific insight and proposes a recovery of the lost art and science of making more naturally conditioned buildings. It is illustrated with a series of innovative buildings including those designed by the author’s research-based practice which have won international recognition and awards.
Professor Alan Short was a Senior Scholar at Trinity College Cambridge with a spell as Exchange Fellow at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard. He was appointed the 5th Professor of Architecture at Cambridge University in 2001, succeeding Sir Leslie Martin, Bill Howell and Sir Colin St. John Wilson. He leads a highly interdisciplinary group working on how to deliver very low carbon buildings and cities. In China, he is a Ministry of Education Distinguished Professor, and a Guest Professor at Zhejiang University.
Professor Short built important sustainable buildings for real, winning the Green Building of the Year Prize, the RIBA President’s Research Award and numerous other professional prizes. His research group produced a film of its EPSRC funded work on the adaptation potential of the NHS acute hospital estate, ‘Robust Hospitals in a Changing Climate’ which won the tv/e Global Sustainability Film Award 2013. He was the Principle Investigator for the UK-China EPSRC/NSFC funded ‘Low carbon climate-responsive heating and cooling of cities’ (LoHCool) 2015-19 focussing on carbon reduction opportunities in China’s Hot Summer-Cold Winter mega-cities. The film of the outcomes, ‘A Low Carbon Future for China’s Furnace Cities‘ won the tv/e Global Sustainability Film Award 2019. It has just won Best Short Documentary at the Vegas Film Awards and co-winner at the Amsterdam Film Festival. He currently leads the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council AMR project Excising Infection in Surgical Environments (ExISE) focused on the design of operating theatres.
All welcome!