Fergus Nicol

Adaptive comfort in an unpredictable world

The current global economic crisis which started in 2008 has changed the world for many people. The cost of living has gone up, and for many the standard of living is going down with a corresponding increase in fuel poverty. Even for larger companies the cost of energy is beginning to feature in boardroom discussions. How can comfortable working and living conditions be maintained for the majority in such a world, especially with the added uncertainty of climate change?

Counting the costs of comfort

The recent Synthesis Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) Fifth Report on Climate Change states clearly that the warming of the climate system is unequivocal and, since the 1950s, many of the observed changes are unprecedented over periods from decades to millennia (IPCC, 2014). It highlights that the atmosphere and oceans have warmed, the amounts of snow and ice have diminished, and the sea level has risen. It gives clear evidence of the often devastating impacts caused by anthropogenic climate change on the natural and human systems on all continents and across the oceans.

The wicked problem of designing for comfort in a rapidly changing world

In December 1931, the front cover of ‘The Aerologist’, the journal of the US air-conditioning industry, showed clearly the Comfort Crossroads reached in America in the heady days before the Great Depression of the 1930s. The naturally ventilated Empire State Building, started in 1929, had just opened and construction there was on the threshold of new technology – air-conditioning – that would revolutionize American buildings over the coming century (Cooper 1998). The crossroad sign shows the old way, with building occupants poisoned by the foul air of the cities around them and debilitated by carbon dioxide generated by soaring populations in the megalopolis. The air quality in New York was obviously unacceptable then, and it was to be decades before the noxious factories abandoned the worker-rich city centres in the wake of the automobile driven suburban revolution. Air-conditioning, with its filters and fans did play a winning hand, with those who could afford it, against the New York Health Board who were then urging its citizens to open windows and use cleaner air from high levels in the city. Many New Yorkers were chronically poor later in the 1930s, as they were around the world in the decade of the worst global economic crash of the 20th century. It is not surprising that 80 years later, in the thrall of the worst economic crash for decades, the world is at a new crossroads facing a similar dilemma on how best to provide comfort in buildings in a significantly more complex world. The Seventh Windsor Conference 2012 on Thermal Comfort and Energy use in Buildings (www.nceub.org) was called The Changing Context of Comfort in an Unpredictable World and was held from 12 to 15 April at Cumberland Lodge in the grounds of Windsor Castle. There were six themed sessions on: The complexity of comfort; Schools and non-domestic buildings; Domestic buildings; Over-heating and climate change; Comfort in hot climates and Comfort models and outdoor comfort. There were six fascinating workshops too on: Ways forwards for comfort standards; How to design comfortable buildings; New ways of looking at comfort and productivity; Comfort and behaviours; the challenges of Modelling real building performance and occupant comfort and how to use Mixed Mode ventilation successfully in hot climates. All subjects which generated not a little heat and light themselves. The palpable sense of the importance of this whole event was set by the first after-dinner speaker, Professor Shin-Ichi Tanabe of Waseda University in Tokyo. He held the audience spell bound when describing the problems of energy availability and the provision of comfort in Japan following the impacts of the earthquake on the Fukushima nuclear generation plant in 2011. His paper has been developed and is included in this issue. It should be required reading for all building designers. It gives a flavour of what we all may experience in our own working lives in a more chaotic future. Two other key-note talks helped to put the deliberations of the conference in context. Andy Ford, then President of CIBSE outlined some of the problems for building professionals in the reality of today’s construction industry in trying to design for comfort while delivering value to building clients as money becomes tighter in the economically challenged global market place. It is all very easy saying that we need mixed-mode buildings that also have air-conditioning – but who is going to pay for them? The need for reality checking the theories has never been stronger. Professor Wouter van Marken Lichtenbelt of the Maastricht University Medical Centre in the Netherlands gave a fascinating keynote address on developments in Thermal Physiology and his paper in ASR 56.1 outlines some of the key issues that physiologists can help us with. We need to know the fundamental physiological thresholds around our behaviours, dictating when we shiver, sweat, suffer heat stroke or hypothermia and when we die of heat or cold. In between these physical limits, of course, lies the challenge of how to design comfortable buildings and keep occupants healthy and comfortable too. We have tried over the past years to steer readers of our Special ASR Issues on a journey that will help them join in our fairly complex discussions on ways forward for building design. ASR 54.1 in 2010 was called Transforming Markets in the Built Environment: Adapting to Climate Change and did include a paper outlining the background history to the development of the discipline of thermal comfort research. Other papers in the issue showed how vital the subject is to our ability to adapt to future climates. It also showed how challenging the issues of human perception, preference and behaviour are to design for and to influence. ASR 55.1 in 2011 on Innovative approaches to the natural ventilation of buildings: the imperative for change was also an important step on the road to ‘Open Windowton’ and ‘Health Way.’ The significance of the issues in that volume are shown by the fact that its introductory paper outlining the imperatives for natural ventilation is regularly in the top one or two cited papers in this journal.

Running buildings on natural energy: design thinking for a different future

Twenty-five years ago in 1992 the Thermal Comfort Unit at Oxford Brookes was born from a simple desire to change the world, to intervene in the seemingly mad drift towards the universal air-conditioning of commercial buildings and to help shift the designers back towards a saner world in which buildings were run for as much of the year as possible using clean, free, sustainable, renewable energy, back to a world of largely naturally ventilated buildings. Sue Roaf, Fergus Nicol and Michael Humphreys worked with a team who over the years systematically not only provided the theoretical underpinnings for such a move through their work on thermal comfort in different climates but also sought to show through demonstrations and publications that way forward (Humphreys, Nicol, and Roaf 2015). Back then there was palpable hostility encounteredwhen givingpapers promoting the importanceof usingnatural energy to power buildings (e.g. Roaf 1993).Wenaively did not recognize that this simple idea threatened the profitability of the Heating, Ventilation and Air-Conditioning (HVAC) engineer’s business model: Services engineers are still paid largely according to how much mechanical plant and infrastructure they put into a building. It might appear now that we did badly in the battle of the opposing building conditioning approaches as 25 years later even houses are now forced by rating systems, regulations and fashion into using machines to ventilate them, even in temperate climates on green field sites. Extraordinary. Why would anyone fix shut the windows in their homes and pay to run a machine that gives them worse air quality than if they simply opened thewindow? This at a timewhen the spending power of our incomes is reducing for most of us and energy bills continue to soar almost regardless of market trading prices for energy? Where are the architects in this debate? How could they have let this happen? Where is the Architectural Sense and Science in it all? The transfer of duties between architects and engineers began long ago in themid-nineteenth century America, in a processwell describedbyFitch inhiswonderful bookson thehistory of American architecture (Fitch 1966, 1977). By the twentieth century the gradual but whole-scale absorption of the responsibility for the environmental performance of buildings by the HVAC engineer appeared complete to the extent that some architecture schools today do not even teach basic building science, concentrating on history, theory, philosophy, graphic design and computer modelling. The power grab of the role of the environmental designer by service engineers from the grip

Estimating overheating in European dwellings

ABSTRACT In recent years, the urgent need to adapt our lifestyles and buildings to deal with a more extreme and a warming climate has become clear, not least through the increasing overheating of buildings. This is reflected in the rising concerns about the discomfort and heat stress to building occupants caused by the increasing indoor temperatures. European standard BS15251 and Chartered Institution of Building Services Engineers (CIBSE) guidance note TM52 are documents that address the issue. Both include a methodology predicting the probability of overheating in buildings. Despite this, many modern buildings overheat. This paper looks at the criteria from CIBSE TM52 and discusses their applicability to a single UK dwelling archetype. This was modelled and then located in a range of European cities to understand the causes of overheating and the means of reducing it. Results highlight some problems in practice using simulations tools to evaluate overheating and the fundamental assumptions on which they are based. Energy performance and thermal comfort of dwellings were assessed using morphed climates for each location for 2020, 2050 and 2080.

Designing for comfort at high temperatures

It would be foolish to ignore the potentially disastrous impacts of designing buildings that overheat in a warming world. We know that hot buildings not only can make people uncomfortable, unhappy and unproductive but they can also kill people. During the extreme heatwave summer of 2003 over 70,000 people across Europe died, many of them elderly and many in their own homes. Robine et al. (2008) who compiled these 2003 figures pointed out that global warming now constitutes an emerging transnational health threat, particularly for ageing populations, that needs addressing at many levels (Roaf, Crichton, and Nicol 2009). Climate predictions indicate that by 2050 the extreme summer of 2003 may occur every second year and by 2070 it may be classified as a cool summer (Nakicenovic and Swart 2010). Maivel, Kurnitski and Kalamees, in their paper, present the results of a field survey in Estonian apartment buildings and demonstrate that even in northern European latitudes buildings, and noticeably more often modern ones, are overheating already. They propose that even in Nordic countries, the recommended passive measures to tackle overheating may need to be supplemented with active cooling systems to meet the minimum requirements for summer thermal comfort defined by regulations. The question thus arises as to whether the regulations are ‘Fit for Purpose’ in a warming world. The fact that ‘modern’ design trends and construction techniques have led to a greater tendency for nontraditional buildings to overheat has been known for at least 50 years. In the UK in the 1960s, a study by Loudon and Danter (1965) at the Building Research Establishment showed that post-World War II architecture was changing rapidly as lighter weight buildings with more glass replaced the traditional modes of construction. In pre-war offices the window areas averaged around 20% of the floor area and 85% of surveyed occupants wanted more sunshine in their offices, and only 9% were concerned that it should not be too hot. By 1961 this survey in 21 postwar offices shows that as many as 40% of the occupants