Philip Steadman

Types, Numbers, and Floor Areas of Nondomestic Premises in England and Wales, Classified by Activity:

Estimates are given of the numbers and floor areas of all nondomestic premises in England and Wales, as of 1993/94. These are based on a wide range of data sources, of which the most important are commercial rating (property taxation) data collected by the Valuation Office of the Inland Revenue. Information has also been collated from a large number of publications and databases produced by commercial firms, central and local government departments, and professional and trade organisations. A new hierarchical classification of activities is employed, called here the primary classification. This has been developed out of a series of existing schemes by which the original data are themselves classified.

Inferences about built form, construction, and fabric in the nondomestic building stock of England and Wales

Methods are described for making inferences as regards the geometrical and physical characteristics of all nondomestic buildings in England and Wales. Estimates are made of the floor areas in built forms with framed and load-bearing structures, respectively, and of the typical numbers of floors in built forms of different types. Calculations are made of the total areas of exposed walls, roof surfaces, and glazing, and of the breakdown of the wall and roof areas by material. The results are being used by the Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions to gain a better understanding of the patterns of energy use associated with nondomestic buildings. The “inference model” described here has been installed at the Building Research Establishment, where it forms one component of the National Non-Domestic Energy and Emissions Model (N-DEEM), whose purpose is to monitor the use of fossil fuels, estimate the emission of greenhouse gases, and evaluate fuel conservation measures (Pout, 2000). The paper is concluded with a discussion of possible refinements and tests of the inference methodology, and potential future extensions.

Studies in the Morphology of the English Building Stock

During the last six years the authors have been working in the Centre for Configurational Studies on a series of research projects whose overall aim is to increase knowledge of the composition and morphology of the English building stock. Earlier work was devoted to domestic buildings—houses and apartments—whereas more recent research is concerned with nondomestic building types, focusing particularly on offices and shops. Two large surveys are described of domestic and nondomestic buildings made in Cambridge and Swindon, respectively. This empirical work has been accompanied by the development of a theoretical morphology or science of architectural form which attempts to explain why certain plans and built forms occur in practice and not others. It is only on the basis of such a theory, the authors argue, that any scientific generalisations can be built about the relationships of form to performance. A central feature of the approach to morphological classification taken here is the separation of shape or configurational properties from dimensional or metric properties.

The history and science of the artificial

Abstract This is the concluding chapter from a new book, The Evolution of Designs; Biological Analogy in Architecture and the Applied Arts, recently published by Cambridge University Press©. The book reviews the history of analogies made between the design of artefacts and the ‘design’ of organisms, since the beginnings of biology as a scientific subject around 1800. The analogies are shown to be conducive to a functionalist fallacy — the idea that the utilitarian functions of artefacts serve to define their forms in a deterministic way — and conducive to a historicist fallacy — that the ‘evolution’ of artefacts follows some necessary historical sequence of development, which is not under the control of men. The book ends by asking ‘What remains that is useful and true, in biological analogies with design?’

A database of the non-domestic building stock of Britain☆

Abstract This paper describes a research programme sponsored by the British Department of Environment whose goal is to build a database of the non-domestic building stock of England and Wales. This database will contain information about all buildings, other than houses and flats, throughout the country. Two principal sources of data are being used: property taxation records, and a series of specially-conducted surveys in four English towns. The database will serve as a basis for monitoring patterns of energy use in the stock, and for making and testing policy for energy conservation and the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. The work poses special problems to do with the representation of buildings in geographical information systems, and the classification of building types in terms of function, built form, construction and energy use. The work may also have some implications for the formalisation of architectural knowledge and its organisation in databases to support architectural design.