Architecture & Built Environment
Buildings judged over their whole life.
10 topics · 19 curated works
No prior grounding assumed.
Reducing Urban Heat Islands: Compendium of Strategies — Urban Heat Island Basics
United States Environmental Protection Agency · 2008
Explains why cities run hotter than their surroundings and sets out the building- and site-level interventions — reflective and vegetated surfaces,…
+1 more at this level
Assumes you know the vocabulary.
Daylighting in Schools: An Investigation into the Relationship Between Daylighting and Human Performance
Heschong Mahone Group · 1999
Finds, across 21,000 students in three school districts, that pupils in classrooms with more daylight progressed significantly faster on standardised…
+7 more at this level
Primary sources and full treatments.
Design with Climate: Bioclimatic Approach to Architectural Regionalism
Victor Olgyay · 1963
Argues a building's form should be derived from a systematic balance of local climate data, human comfort and available technology, giving architects…
+8 more at this level
12 of 19 works
United States Environmental Protection Agency
Explains why cities run hotter than their surroundings and sets out the building- and site-level interventions — reflective and vegetated surfaces, urban tree cover, cooler paving — that measurably lower those temperatures.
Michael Murphy (TED)
Argues that hospital design is a medical variable — airflow, corridor layout and daylight change infection rates — and that building locally makes construction itself part of the intervention.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Heschong Mahone Group
Finds, across 21,000 students in three school districts, that pupils in classrooms with more daylight progressed significantly faster on standardised maths and reading tests, turning daylighting from an aesthetic preference into a measurable design outcome.
Jürgen Schnieders & Andreas Hermelink
Reports measured heating energy use and resident satisfaction across more than 100 Passive House dwellings in five European countries, showing the standard's very low heating demand holds up in occupied buildings and not only in design calculations.
21 pagesWorld Health Organization
Well-designed natural airflow through wards and waiting rooms can cut airborne infection risk as effectively as costly mechanical ventilation, so hospital design in low-resource settings should be engineered around wind and stack effect rather than assumed to need imported climate control.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Tony H. F. Wong & Rebekah R. Brown
Sets out water sensitive urban design as a staged transition from a drained city, through a waterway-protecting and a water cycle city, to a fully water sensitive city, arguing urban water infrastructure should be planned around the whole water cycle rather than stormwater removal alone.
10 pagesPacific Northwest National Laboratory
Argues that deep energy retrofits of existing office buildings pay back fastest when envelope, lighting and HVAC upgrades are bundled and sequenced together rather than pursued as separate, uncoordinated projects.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Alastair Robinson & Stephen Selkowitz
Argues daylighting should be treated as an integrated design problem solved with glazing, geometry and shading together from the earliest sketches, not an afterthought corrected later with blinds and electric lights.
link checked 17 Sept 2026United Nations Environment Programme & International Energy Agency
Buildings account for over a third of global energy demand and emissions, and the sector is falling further behind the efficiency and decarbonisation trajectory the Paris Agreement requires rather than catching up to it.
41 pageslink checked 17 Sept 2026World Green Building Council
Argues the building sector must cut the carbon locked into materials and construction now, not only operational energy over decades, because embodied emissions are fixed at completion while efficiency savings pay back too late for near-term climate targets.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Victor Olgyay
Argues a building's form should be derived from a systematic balance of local climate data, human comfort and available technology, giving architects graphable design tools for passive heating and cooling before the phrase 'passive design' existed.
Baruch Givoni
Revises Olgyay's bioclimatic chart against updated thermal-comfort research and field data from hot climates, giving designers corrected boundaries for when passive strategies alone can keep a building comfortable without mechanical cooling.
13 pages