DRF Lunchtime Clinic - Prof Alan Short

We are privileged to host Prof Alan Short, President and Professorial Fellow at Clare Hall, University of Cambridge to give a talk at the DRF Lunchtime Clinic who. will be speaking on The Recovery of Natural Environments in Architecture .

Bio

Professor Alan Short read Architecture at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he was awarded a Senior Scholarship, winning a postgraduate Exchange Fellowship 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, assembled from across the University of Cambridge with colleagues from the Department of Applied Maths and Theoretical Physics, the BP Institute for Multiphase Fluid Flow, the Interdisciplinary Research Centre for Infectious Diseases, History of Art, Engineering and the Institute of Atmospheric Science with close collaborators in Imperial College, King’s College London, Loughborough and Reading. In China, he is a Ministry of Education Distinguished Professor, a Guest Professor at Zhejiang University and International Co-director of the National Centre for International Research in Low-carbon and Green Buildings based at Chongqing University. 

Professor Short has built important sustainable buildings, winning the Green Building of the Year Prize, the RIBA President’s Research Award and numerous other professional prizes. His last major work was the passive-downdraught-cooled UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies in Bloomsbury at the centre of the London Urban Heat Island. He was the 2014 George Collins Fellow of the US Society of Architectural Historians and 2013-14 Geddes Fellow at the University of Edinburgh. His research group produced a film of its Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council-funded work on the adaptation potential of the NHS acute hospital estate, ‘Robust Hospitals in a Changing Climate’ which won the 2013 tv/e Global Sustainability Film Award. He was appointed to administer and monitor the National Health Service Energy Efficiency Fund 2013-15 with the Professor of Sustainable Engineering, reporting to the Under Secretary of State for Health and subsequently to write guidance on energy efficiency for the NHS. 

He was the Principal 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 2019 tv/e Global Sustainability Film Award. Rather surprisingly, it won the prize over Sir David Attenborough’s film on whales. It also won Best Short Documentary at the Vegas Film Awards 2020.  

Professor Short also leads the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council project Excising Infection in Surgical Environments (ExISE), focused on the design of operating theatres. 

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Professor Short worked with the BP Professor and the Head of the Vet School on ‘Making Emergency Hospitals Safer’, and sat on the SAGE-EMG group advising DCMS on the reopening of theatres. A report on UK infrastructure’s resilience to infection, co-authored by Professor Short, was published by the National Engineering Policy Centre (NEPC). The risk of airborne cross-infection is now taken much more seriously. 

The Higher Doctorate, the Doctor of Letters degree, Litt.D. was conferred on Professor Short by the Deputy Vice-Chancellor in April 2023. 

Professor Short has been President of Clare Hall, Cambridge, since 2020. 

Select awards 

• Winner of the first ‘High Architecture, Low Energy Award’ 1995 

• Green Building of the Year 1995 

• The Society of College, National and University Librarians (SCONUL) ‘Best Academic Library Award’ 1998-2003 and ‘Commendation’ 2008 

• CIBSE’ Project of the Year’ in 2003 & 2004 

• CIBSE Environmental Initiative of the Year 2006; 

• BDA’ Building of the Year 2001′ and ‘Best Public Building 2006’ 

• RIBA Awards in 1995, 2000, 2003 and 2006. 

Abstract

The Recovery of Natural Environments in Architecture 

‘We scorn all that is cheap….This air we breathe is so common, we care not for it; nothing pleaseth but what is dear.’1  Robert Burton (1621)  

We have become accustomed to being in wholly artificial environments in glassy public buildings, regardless of the climate outside. The 'air we breathe' is mechanically cooled, dehumidified, rehumidified, reheated and blown at us by millions of fans at colossal cost in electrical energy. This bizarre practice has a distasteful provenance, the no doubt well-intended response of early Modernists to suppress warmer environments to spare the climate-oppressed, unquestionably absorbing their contemporary climate determinists’ damning diagnoses of all climates except the Cool Temperate. Leading determinist Ellen Semple wrote in 1911, 

‘Where man has remained in the Tropics, with few exceptions he has suffered arrested development. His nursery has kept him a child…. without the respite conferred by a bracing winter season....’  

The unestablished Yale academic Ellsworth Huntington (1876-1947), exact contemporary of Willis Carrier, the 'inventor' of air conditioning, popularized climate determinism in the United States through Yale University Press in words and maps which chime uncomfortably with those of German National Socialist geographers of the 1930s. Air conditioning could cocoon transplanted colonials in their familiar Cool Temperate environment and limit their moral degradation. It might also recover some progressive future for compliant local elites. Startlingly aggressive and overtly racist advertising for domestic and work-place air-conditioning promoted these views in the interwar and immediately post-war periods.  

After 1945, respectable academics simply avoided discussion of the possibility of difference based on climate, certainly in formulating public policy advice. Perhaps the universal availability of air-conditioning had, in their minds, negated the issue. Were there other consequences for Western architecture? Did a ‘clean aesthetic’ wrapping a ‘clean atmosphere’ suppress other promising emerging architectural propositions? 3 Hygiene and deodourised cleanliness became associated with transparency, the all glass building, a phenomenon with an extraordinarily complex provenance, perhaps, as Banham suggested, deriving from obsessions with cleanliness. In this reading the all-glass building becomes a vessel of water, a translucent sac, completely sealed from the contamination and danger of the city beyond. It has no resilience at all in any climate and can only be sustained by air conditioning. There may be a more literal provenance for the universal practice of building icy crystalline towers for the commanders of industry and commerce, constantly replenishing the air they breathe: Nietzsche’s presentation of the freezing air of the icy mountaintop as the ideal environment for the exclusively male figure in complete control of his destiny in Thus Spake Zarathustra became a driver of early business management education: 

‘The hour in which I frost and freeze, which asketh and asketh and asketh: ‘Who hath sufficient courage for it? Who is to be master of the world?”

Why have modern Western societies and their architects contracted out the responsibility for delivering ‘good’ air in their interior spaces to a specialised component of the construction industry, the world of mechanical and electrical engineers and subcontractors. It is devoted to the technology of making artificial environments and it justifies this position by thorough ‘denunciation’ of pre-modern practices as ‘unsafe’, ‘uncomfortable’ and ‘primitive’, a classic historicist Whiggish position. Architects have been complicit in this. But design can remove the need for this artificial world.  But a highly developed art and science of making natural environments in public buildings using their architectural configuration had developed though the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, advancing through the design of hospitals in particular, dispelling miasmas and riding the acceptance of germ theory, the irony being that the actions one might rationally take to dispel a ‘miasma’ will also dilute and vent away airborne bacteria. It has all been forgotten in the way that the availability of cheap antibiotics devalued the practice of deep cleanliness in hospitals with awful consequences. 

The behaviours and attitudes of the supply side are atrophied in a persistent social practice, a dull and repetitive way of building in discrete packages including the internal environment. Its historical intent and roots are long forgotten but stuck in the psyche of an indifferent commissioning class. This is maintained by networks of risk-shedding consultants, bound by intensely defensive contractual agreements and served by an aggressive industry driven by an immense vested interest in maintaining the status quo. But if my colleagues' modelling of the changing climate is only half right, who will want to own a glass tower anywhere in thirty years which is wholly dependent on a huge energy-consuming life support machine. They will be a complete liability.