HUMAN FACTORS: SUSTAINABILITY AND HABITABILITY

Demis Roussos Bhargava

Master of Architecture (Design stream), UNSW Student ID 3108479

WORKBOOK # 05: Bioclimatic

design
Being a ridiculously long entry into the journal (but only because this is my favourite part of the movie)

“All that you fashion, all that you make

All that you build, all that you break
All that you measure, all that you feel
All this you can leave behind…” 1

Which pretty much sums up what I feel is

(or should be) the rallying cry of the
architectural profession (come to think of
it, of all of us). What I build or do as an
architect or a human being (which is not to
say that the two have to be mutually
exclusive!) is what I can and will leave
behind. It’s as simple as that.
Photographs from The Virtual Dimension: Ground Zero

Always assuming, of course, that some idiot doesn’t take to it with a wrecking ball or a nuclear bomb.

1
Lyrics from ‘Walk on’ by U2
On a seemingly irrelevant note, I just bought a second hand Ford Festiva to help me commute to my
new job, which is a good one at an architectural office (andIthankGodandhopeitworksout). Which kind
of goes against my professed love of nature – I plead guilty to a momentary lapse of reason. But I had
no choice! (said the defendant in the dock). Using public transport to be sustainable would involve
something like 3 hours of commuting a day, which leaves me less time to concentrate on studying
about sustainability and habitability. There seems to be a paradox here, but I’m not exactly sure what it
is. Oh well. I’m basically making free associations of words and ideas here – hopefully it will lead me
back to the topic in hand. The mind and God move in mysterious ways.

Okay, here goes. Before going into the research and observation part of this journal (dealing with the
actual content of the lecture), I just want to elaborate on some ideas I have about architecture. Not
immediately in terms of the technical aspects of bioclimatic architecture per se, but ideas about the
‘nature’ of architecture. Basically, I think it (architecture) is about melding dualities – old and new, built
and natural, order and chaos, and so on. There are many of these dualities, but I like to think of all
these in terms of ‘the 5’, my cool contribution to architectural jargon:

Life + building – the science and art of biology and architecture(al morphologies and anatomy)
i.e. the “natural” and the “built”
Music + machine – the beauty, rhythms and discordances of our cultural and technological constructs
These 4 combine differently (possible iterations include music + building and life + machine as well),
bound by

The Tower – a metaphorical construct binding multiple realities and possibilities together
i.e. what I build using the first 4 is always influenced by the knowledge that it belongs to a larger (and/
or smaller) universe, and that a small contribution today might reverberate (who knows?) across
centuries. I know it sounds ridiculous (multiple universes, alternate realities and ha! the possibility of
magic), but as a personal construct it helps me focus and drive my designs, so why abandon it?

So maybe bioclimatic architecture doesn’t just mean planting trees on roofs (though I’m all for it) or
having mechanical blinds like the Red Centre, but a symbiosis of man, architecture, society and
machine… a unity that justifies my buying a car (don’t ask me how – my guilt-wracked conscience is
making me rationalize like crazy).

Q. ?
A. If you must buy a car, you better make up for it elsewhere.

Time Magazine Cover

‘WELCOME TO THE MACHINE (… WHAT DID YOU DREAM?)’ 2
Man is an animal. He builds, rationalizing that he exists
outside nature. This is not so. His buildings and
settlements plug into the flows of the natural cycle. They
are also mechanistic systems, coded like organisms, or
programs. As in all systems, entropy is inevitable. Snafu
results, deviations from “normal” behaviour in the laws of
the City Machine, incompatible with natural and social
systems. Proposal: Code “built machines” to seed in-
between urban spaces to catalyse change – action and
reaction. We can reverse Entropy.

I have a confession to make: I love Architecture. So much so that I first toyed with the idea of titling
this section ‘A Call to Arms’ – a Manifesto aimed at overthrowing the evil perpetrators of Bad
Architecture. After some serious consideration – and I mean serious – I finally jettisoned that particular
idea. It’s too easy to think of life as a war between good and evil (or bad) and all that jazz; it isn’t. And
it’s pretentious. I’m no revolutionary; I don’t know the answers… well, not all of them. What I do know
is that “good” architecture is a tad short in supply. Which begs the question, what is good architecture,
and how does one go about it? Well, first we need to recognize that Architecture with a capital A is
(much) more than just a problem-solving exercise (no surprise there). A lot of baggage comes with it –
mostly trivial garbage and some genuinely valuable stuff. Good Architecture (I’m not talking great here,
good will do just fine) is about throwing the garbage overboard and keeping the good stuff. Why? To
reverse entropy, that insidious measure of disorder which we tacitly accept in our lives. This isn’t a
Manifesto, but it does state dreams to make Built – what Architecture has been, is, and what it may be.

THE NATURE OF ARCHITECTURE: BUILDINGS

‘Lost in thought and lost in time, while the seeds of life and the seeds of change were planted’ 3
‘In the days when we were swinging from the trees, I was a monkey, stealing honey from a swarm of bees’ 4

Clipart Library

The beginning is as good a place to start as any. 4.5 billion years ago (give or take a few paltry million),
the earth was born: molecules held together in dynamic stasis in the vast reaches of space. A billion
years later the first self-replicating cell was born (aka life), the result of solar radiation and electrical
energy acting on the chemical soup that was the primordial ocean. With the advent of multicellular
organisms, evolution was up and running; new species born, fuelled by mutations in the genetic profile,
others dropping out of the race for survival. Good DNA was passed on, bad DNA left by the wayside.
Through the relentless forces of natural selection – Darwin’s “survival of the fittest” – life supposedly
evolved to adapt to changing environments. Environments change in part because of life itself. The
advent of photosynthetic plants increased atmospheric oxygen levels, paving the way for animal life;
Life and the physical environment constantly interact. Every 26 million years or so waves of mass
extinction wipe the slate clean, allowing new species to progress up the food chain. Once physical
evolution reached its present plateau, social r-evolutions followed. (Pollution, and nuclear bombs are
just some nifty by-products of these revolutions. But I digress.)

2
Lyrics from ‘Welcome to the machine’ by Pink Floyd
3
Lyrics from ‘Coming back to life’ by Pink Floyd
4
Lyrics from ‘Wild honey’ by U2
 Now, a mere 35,000 years after some early primates decided to
get clever and stood up to look out over the tall grass, we stand
at the centre of a vast empire, exerting an illusory control over
the forces of nature that we see as outside of the human realm.
However, animals we remain, survivors (not necessarily the
zenith) of all those years of evolution: taxonomic classification
Homo sapiens, Order of the British Apeish Empire. Like all
animals Man seeks to shelter his frail body from an unforgiving
nature, enclosing his physical self in (at first) existing refuges
such as caves, decorating the walls with paintings of his self
and/ in nature. Later came his built constructs… what we now
know as Architecture – Loos’s “primitive hut”, Corbusier’s
“machine for living in”, and Venturi’s “decorated shed” (and they
were all good). I think “Architecture” can be summed up by:-

4 DESCRIBERS
1. Intent: The Vitruvian triad of firmness, commodity and delight (in plainspeak, structure,
function and beauty respectively) represent the design goals of the Architect.
2. Summative: Major form, construction system, surface treatment and fenestration are
the scalar parts that make up the whole he builds to attain these goals.
3. Interfaces: Delimiting surfaces interface “inside” and “outside” of the built whole to discharge
the intent - the roof (delimits) the sky, walls the landscape, and the floor the ground.
4. Meaning: The building evokes responses that are either psychosomatic (physical reactions to
its qualities of motion, weight and substance) or memory-triggered (to formal or iconographic signs
representing individual or collective experience).

Why meaning? The primary function (commodity) of a

shelter is shelter, obviously. Shelter is a universal need
of animals, followed by territorialization and
personalization (high-rise curtain walled buildings are the
Capitalist equivalent of animals marking territory). Man
is a social animal (like ants), gregarious by nature. So
(like ants) he clusters his buildings into settlements
where each person undertakes (or is assigned) a role
that contributes to the communal good – ideally speaking of course. Unlike ants (presumptuously
speaking), those splendidly conscientious denizens of the insect world, Man has the gift of
consciousness (cynics in our ranks might prefer the word ‘curse’, more fools them). He abstracts and
assigns meanings to his physical constructs over and above their base functions. This ascribing of
“meaning” to inanimate objects is a seemingly unique human idiosyncrasy. They could be culture-
specific (of collective consciousness) or person-specific (of individual consciousness). The Taj Mahal
is a tomb – it fulfills the collective Islamic rite of burial, but it is also a “symbol” of love (a personal
meaning that has attained collective symbolism). Man allocates the esoteric qualities that cover the
gamut of human emotions to his buildings: love, hate, anger, and faith (to name a few), all find a place
in architecture. Signs, elements of the built skin that transmit and receive information to observers,
represent these meanings – functional, territorial and emotive. Meaning is critical to Man.
THE NATURE OF ARCHITECTURE: CITIES
‘And the earth becomes my throne…” 5
Further, man sees himself and his constructs as removed from nature, ‘separated from the body of
earth and wrapped in a shell of articulated space, made symbolic and meaningful’. 6 The building (and
collections thereof) and its delimiting surfaces become signifiers of the perceived duality of built and
natural landscapes. Man is the dispassionate observer, nature the subject of his observation. And if the
observer can make a quick buck at the expense of the hapless subject (he rules), what of it? Our
mismanaged reality stems from this basic fact: we see Nature as the outsider. Untrue. Heisenberg’s
uncertainty principle proved Objectivity is not feasible – what you see is what you change. It is
impossible to know the exact position and velocity of a particle simultaneously; sticking instruments
into the mix affects the readings, so one is always Participating and never Observing. Chaos theory says
a seemingly insignificant action snowballs over time with unanticipated consequences, and then of
course there are the synapse-exploding theories of quantum mechanics, inversion of causality and
effect, multiple universes, and non-linear passage of time. Of course, these are only theories: what the
scientific jargon points to, in a nutshell, is that we are very much a part of nature. Buildings shelter us
from elemental nature – the weather and our more ravenous cohorts – but they are integral elements
of the micro and macro environments. Settlements plug into the natural matrix, forces flowing
inextricably between them. The cynics were right – the city is a jungle, people and (other) animals
moving within and without it. Rain falls, runs off into rivers or soaks into the ground. Trees grow,
photosynthesize and die, as they do in the rain forest. Fluids (air + water) and buildings interact.

Which leads up to what?

WHY NOT BUILD LIVING MACHINES THEN?

5
Lyrics from ‘Wherever I may roam’ by Metallica
6
Web article: A City Machine – Anand Bhatt (www.ab-a.net)
Bio House from Sanjay Prakash

‘I had once fleshed out a scenario of a bio-technological future of a regenerative architecture…

started with the requirement of building components to respond to varying weather conditions
outside and the varying requirements and moods of the persons inside the space… I postulated that
there would exist, hopefully within my lifetime, a wonder tissue that would allow living building
components to be made… I thought it would be more likely that this building material would
probably be organic (chemicals and living tissue). Today I feel that it may not even be a material
at all, but a set of processes to culture and grow a group of such materials and organisms in a
controlled fashion…There could be, for instance, a living window which would respond to the time
of day, the amount of sunlight, the mood and requirement of the inhabitant, the nature or state of
health of the window itself, to create variable degrees of shade, light, air exchange, security,
colour and so on.’ (Prakash, 1994)

I don’t know if we’ve come up with a wonder tissue yet, but we’re getting there. The spheres of
Architecture and Society mirror each other like a veritable two-faced Janus. With computers,
technology, bionics, knowledge revolutions taking over our lives, Architecture needs to hold knowledge
within itself. Not to “overcome” it, as Peter Eisenman would have it, but to represent it (now) and
nature (as always). Representing through iconography is evanescent at best, self-indulgent at worst. If
we generate buildings by these systems perhaps we can satisfactorily re-present them. This is what I
see bioclimatic architecture as – the theory and practice of Architecture sifted through to arrive at a
system (or maybe process is a better term) to design “Living Machines”, standalone or grouped seeds
plugged into the City Machine matrix to crystallize antientropy (whew!). Sort of like the Bio-House
proposed by Sanjay Prakash in the hedonistic days of his youth. “A home (that) would not be a house
but an environment – creating device which you carried along, like the smart bicycle that is the full time
home-cum-office of wanderer Steven Roberts in the United States.” (Prakash, 1994).

I know some day you'll have a beautiful life, I know you'll be a sun in somebody else's sky
But why ... Why... Why... Can't it be... Can't it be mine... 7

7
Lyrics from ‘Black’ by Pearl Jam
Any building, BioHouse (Bauhaus?) or otherwise design depends on the design program of course. It
also depends on the site, the climate and the users – human and otherwise. If and when I design a
house in Sydney, I would do well to remember that Down Under the sun stubbornly refuses to travel in
the southern half of the compass (as it would in India), and that precious water literally goes down the
drain clockwise instead of the more civilized anticlockwise (or is it the other way round? I’ll have to
confirm this at home later). Different problems call for different solutions. But Architecture, to reiterate,
isn’t just a problem solving exercise. If we design buildings as reactions to existing situations and apply
a little make-up to it, we aren’t really moving ‘forward’ are we? More importantly, where’s the fun?

So Architecture as it exists is described by 4 describers. Generating a new architecture (ambitious youth

speaking there) for the knowledge revolution in an age of increasing ecological awareness requires 4
generators. As of now I think I know what they are, but I have a long way to go before actually figuring
out how to apply it in a remotely practical manner. Ah well, que sera sera.

Coming back to Steven Roberts:

Way back in 1983, I was doing what most struggling young
freelancers do: taking on a succession of projects,
destroying old passions by turning them into businesses, and
trying to make enough money to stay afloat. My lifestyle had
become suburban, and as I clattered around my boring acre in
an itchy haze of midwestern pollen and lawnmower smoke I
wondered what had gone wrong. "Freelancing" was an illusion;
I was chained to my desk and deep in debt like everyone else.
Stuck. Worse, change, evolution, and growth had begun to
sound like vague counterculture concepts instead of the basic
objectives of daily living. Where had all my passions gone?
One afternoon I listed them: writing, adventure, computer
design, ham radio, bicycling, romance, learning, networking,
publishing... each of these things had at one time or another
kept me up all night in a delicious frenzy of fun and giddy
intellectual growth. Yet my reality had become one of performing decreasingly interesting tasks
for the sole purpose of paying bills, supporting a lifestyle I didn't like in a house I didn't
like in a city I didn't like. I had forgotten how to play. Could it still be possible to construct
a lifestyle entirely of passions, or was losing the spark a sadly inevitable part of growing up
(definitely not!)? Combining the passions in my list and abandoning all "rational thought," the
obvious solution was to simply equip a recumbent bicycle with ham radio and computer gear,
establish a virtual home in the nascent online networks, and travel full-time while writing and
consulting for a living. Text and images on this page from www.microship.com

From these humble beginnings, Steven Roberts now owns a multi-billion corporation that sells bicycles
to governments. Well, actually he’s just graduated to building a
solar-powered kayak (?!) version of the Winnebako that he goes
on adventures in, and I have no idea (and don’t care) what his
financial situation is. The point is he enjoys what he does, and
he’s doing ‘his bit’ for the planet at the same time by taking
telemetric readings of pollution indicators on his voyages. Moral
of the story? I don’t know. Maybe just that one man’s
eccentricity is another’s insanity.
THE LIVING MACHINE - ‘BIOLOGICAL, SPIRITUAL ELECTRICAL DIGITAL, SID’ 8

What Architecture can be. These are “generators”, embodying the describers in principle yet going beyond them in
many ways. Genes coded to Blur, the building an open-ended (but embodying certain Axioms) result of a Process.
(+) 4 GENERATORS: -
5. Natural and knowledge systems (it’s all) in the Genes:
a) Music – aka cultural data; music, literature, cinema. And since Architecture
is frozen music, might we translate lyrical syntax and musical structures into
built harmony? Would you prefer a Louis Armstrong home to a Judas Priest
one, Mr. X?
b) Machine – as exemplified by pilot and craft, a symbiotic artifact, the building
a serviced and servicing responsive machine: air intakes and exhausts,
turbines, FBW, Head-Up Displays (HUDs)…
c) Life – the science of biology; in particular origin and evolution, genes as
codes generating physical form(s), bodily functions, inter-species
correspondence, cellular and major systems…
d) Building – the Theory and Practice of Architecture (naturally); the thought
behind buildings and the actual processes of production.
e) Tower

6. Blur(ring) the boundaries between

a) Nature and Man
b) Subject and Object
c) Outside and Inside
d) Form and Function
e) Structure and Ornament
f) Man and Machine
……………………………?

7. Axioms
a) A complete lack of style: No preconceived notions about the “correct” elements to use,
constrained by stylistic dogma. Each building is a unique solution, subjectively speaking.
b) Appropriate materiality: From stone and brick masonry to aluminum cladding, steel and glass,
what the building looks like is defined by what it is, and what we want it to do to its environment.
Of course, if Mr. X’s intentions for the environment aren’t exactly honourable then I wash my
hands off of him – assuming I haven’t been able to drum some sense into him, in which case it’s
Nobody’s Fault But Mine.
c) Form, movement and space: The architectural experience enhanced by superimposing variables
of sunlight, chiaroscuro, water, seasons and vegetation on the interplay of built form and surface.
d) Sustainability: An appraisal of projected and actual performance vis-à-vis embodied energy,
environmental impact, and health and safety.
e) Responsiveness: A critical regionalist feedback loop, whatever that may turn out to be, and (this
is recent) – skin-based receptors mediating built/ environment.

8
Song: Singular indestructible droid – Papa Roach
 f) Efficiency is a constant for Machines.
Technical efficiency: Functions are accommodated, personal comfort (of humans and machines)
achieved with optimal expenditure of energy currency.
Aesthetic efficiency: It is an object people can respond to and appreciate – simplicity is timeless.
Eco(logical) efficiency: At the local level it is designed to respond, as the Architect and Client see
fit, to “context” (that old bugbear!) – a Machine in/ of India is not a Machine in/ of New York.
The process, however, is a different ball game. It will evolve (hopefully for the better!) with the garbage thrown
overboard and the good stuff refined. God is in the Details. As of Now, Process Iteration 1.

8. Process Iteration 1

CODE
Each Building starts as a logical reaction to the design parameters or
“genes” coding it: the existing built and natural environment, and
movement patterns through and around the site. These generate a
template for the body.
Image source: The author

BODY
The codes generate a distinct base that evolves and reacts to the
influences of design program and user groups. These progressively
refine the solution, functions organizing into self-similar topologies.
Response to climate also comes into play. Next: integrate life support
systems to ensure efficient functioning.
Image source: TIME Magazine – The age of discovery

LIFE SUPPORT
Structure and service systems make their presence felt. They form an
organized inner complexity that works efficiently. This is similar to
fractal branching networks of the human body (such as the respiratory
system) that then interface as sense organs on the simply beautiful
external skin. There is beauty in truth.
Image source: TIME Magazine – The age of discovery

SKIN
The complex innards extrapolate as a simple (and therefore encoded
“beautiful” to the subjective observer) face, ‘composed from a fractal
geometry based on rotated squares and powers of 2.’ 9 These are
‘compactly encodable using simple feature detectors similar to those
observed in mammalian brains’ 10. Sensory organs (information
receptors) react to use pattern and microclimate. The tripartite schema
transmits and receives information to and from the niche.
Image source: Jürgen Schmidhuber

NICHE
Decisions made through the Built Life cycle, from conception to
decomposition, have a cumulative effect. The following are measures
of adaptability to its “Region”, or ecological niche.
i) Macroenvironmental impact: on the larger ecosystem
ii) Embodied energy: of materials and products (processing,
transportation, construction, maintenance and operation)
iii) Microenvironmental impact: of materials and products on health
iv) Equity: sharing of knowledge and wealth across the board
v) Economic viability
Image source: The author, with Ashok B. Lall

9
Web article: Facial Beauty and Fractal Geometry by Jürgen Schmidhuber
10
Web article: Facial Beauty and Fractal Geometry by Jürgen Schmidhuber