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"Dernie, David"
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Stone architecture
In recent years contemporary architects have become obsessed with a variety of materials, and above all stone. This book explores the special role of this material in a timely reassessment of the ideas which underpin today's renaissance of stone architecture.
Book
Elevating Mallarmé’s Shipwreck
This paper discusses collage as a means to explore spatial ideas. It concerns the practice of drawing-as-research, the spatiality of drawing and the nature of paper. It questions the homogeneity of digital tools in contemporary practice. It is introduced with a discussion of architectural representation and space with a historical trajectory. It questions an understanding of space-as-geometry and discusses the potential role of non-perspectival drawings and non-digital drawing in current practice. The collage studies focus on the late nineteenth century. Working in the tradition of the collage novel, and with original engravings from the popular French newspaper Le Grande Illustré (1904), the collages work with the thematic structure and spatiality of Stéphane Mallarmé’s revolutionary poem Un Coup de Dés written a few years earlier. In this paper, the spatial and thematic content of Mallarmé’s poem are visualized for the first time. The conclusions of this study concern the role of non-digital drawings in the profession, and the potential of creative “paper technologies” to engage the material imagination at the early stages of a design process. It opens new ground as a study of the spatiality of text, the relationship between dramaturgy and architecture and on the nature of topological drawings.
Journal Article
Victor Horta : the architect of art nouveau
In the decade following the success of his design for the Hمotel Tassel in Brussels in 1893, Victor Horta, the creator of Art Nouveau architecture, produced more than forty buildings--and a movement. Prepared in close collaboration with the Horta Museum, Brussels, 'Victor Horta: The Architect of Art Nouveau' discusses the many influences on Horta's designs and his legacy. The richly ornamental style of Art Nouveau, characterized by fluid lines based on natural forms, expressed a desire to abandon the historical styles of the nineteenth century and to develop a language that was beautifully crafted and thoroughly contemporary, laying the foundations for the development of modernism in architecture and interior design.
Book
Building Envelope Over-Cladding: Impact on Energy Balance and Microclimate
A considerable part of recent EU policies is currently addressed at developing effective measures to support the transition towards a low carbon society according to the principles and goals of Roadmap to 2050. In this general framework the links between the development of low-emission strategies and climate-resilient approaches to buildings play a key role. As most part of the existing building stock was built before the 1980s, retrofit and renovation actions are widely investigated. Despite progress in this field, relatively little attention has been given to the connections between the achievable energy savings and the energy investment needed to pursue the renovation process and to how technological choices can impact on the energy balance according to a multi-criteria perspective. The paper will explore how different technologies and design solutions to building envelopes cladding contribute to the reduction of the heat gains in urban environments and how appropriate adaptive strategies can further mitigate against accelerated greenhouse emissions. It will discuss the relationship between individual building performance and consequent effect on external environment. The effects of technological and material choices are evaluated for some design scenarios and conditions in order to develop an indicative impact mode.
Journal Article
The Symbolist interior and crystal imagination
Transparency, translucency and surface reflectance are material qualities that underpin modernist aesthetics. The lightness and transparency of buildings remain manifestly contemporary and the walls of our cities continue to open up, as the default material of choice is glass. From London to Los Angeles, from the Shard to the Crystal Mall, the potency and immateriality of the crystal image is a liberation of the modern imagination. This paper concerns the crystal imagination as represented in the architectural interiors and poetry of Belgian symbolism. During the last decade of the nineteenth century, aesthetic theory and output in Brussels was, remarkably, more developed than that of other European capitals. For the Symbolist artists, coloured and patterned glass, mirrors and rare stones were deeply fascinating as they were at once transparent (see-through) and also contained an interior mysteriously closed to the world outside. As a reflection on the dominance of the visible in contemporary architecture, this paper explores the dual aspects of the crystal image – as both open and closed - and the notion of interior as it matures in the work of the architect Victor Horta. Here, a highly subjective taste for the artificial is combined with themes that surround the crystal and which continue into the materialism of modernist movement through German expressionism. Bruno Taut's Cologne Werkbund Exhibition Glashaus (1914) embodied Scheerbart's crystal visions, and went on to inspire the activist movement that was to deliver such dreams into political action. The paper comments on the development of Taut's ideas in modernism, and the correlation of glass and crystal to the singular experience of vision. It suggests that the crystal imagination of the late nineteenth century, and the potential for those crystal metaphors to disclose worlds not available to sight, still may provide rich inspiration for tomorrow's architectural visions.
Journal Article
Solid, slender, salvaged or phoney? Contemporary stone masonry at a crossroads
Imaginative developments in stone masonry in ontemporary architecture stimulate reflections on the continued meaning and use of this most ancient of materials.
Journal Article
Measurement report: Exploring the variations in ambient BTEX in urban Europe and their environmental health implications
BTEX (benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene, and m-xylene,p-xylene, and o-xylene) are significant urban air pollutants. This study examines BTEX variability across 7 European countries using data from 22 monitoring sites in different urban settings (urban background, traffic, industry, and suburban background). Results indicate that the relative abundance of BTEX in urban areas follows the order toluene > benzene > m,p-xylene > o-xylene > ethylbenzene, with median mixing ratios of 266 ± 152, 163 ± 74, 129 ± 88, 53 ± 35, and 45 ± 27 ppt during the years 2017–2022, respectively. Seasonal trends show benzene had similar median concentrations across urban background, traffic, and industrial sites, indicating mixed sources. Toluene levels were highest in traffic and industrial areas, highlighting road traffic and industrial emissions. Ethylbenzene and xylenes showed equivalent levels in traffic and industrial areas but were lower in urban backgrounds. Peak BTEX levels occurred during morning and evening rush hours, linked to traffic, heating, and atmospheric stagnation. B/T ratios ranged from 0.29 ± 0.11 to 1.35 ± 0.95, and X/E ratios ranged from 1.75 ± 0.91 to 3.68 ± 0.30, indicating primary pollution from local traffic, followed by solvents, coatings, and biomass burning. Lifetime cancer risk from BTEX exposure was below the definite risk threshold (10−4) but above the permissible risk level (10−6), suggesting moderate risk from benzene and ethylbenzene, particularly in traffic and industrial areas. Additionally, the health index of BTEX at monitoring sites was generally lower than the threshold limit value, suggesting a low non-carcinogenic risk overall. This study offers essential insights into BTEX pollution in urban European environments.
Journal Article
An increasing role for solvent emissions and implications for future measurements of volatile organic compounds
Volatile organic compounds (VOCs) are a broad class of air pollutants which act as precursors to tropospheric ozone and secondary organic aerosols. Total UK emissions of anthropogenic VOCs peaked in 1990 at 2,840 kt yr −1 and then declined to approximately 810 kt yr −1 in 2017 with large reductions in road transport and fugitive fuel emissions. The atmospheric concentrations of many non-methane hydrocarbons (NMHC) in the UK have been observed to fall over this period in broadly similar proportions. The relative contribution to emissions from solvents and industrial processes is estimated to have increased from approximately 35% in 1990 to approximately 63% in 2017. In 1992, UK national monitoring quantified 19 of the 20 most abundant individual anthropogenic VOCs emitted (all were NMHCs), but by 2017 monitoring captured only 13 of the top 20 emitted VOCs. Ethanol is now estimated to be the most important VOC emitted by mass (in 2017 approx. 136 kt yr −1 and approx. 16.8% of total emissions) followed by n -butane (52.4 kt yr −1 ) and methanol (33.2 kt yr −1 ). Alcohols have grown in significance representing approximately 10% of emissions in 1990 rising to approximately 30% in 2017. The increased role of solvent emissions should now be reflected in European monitoring strategies to verify total VOC emission reduction obligations in the National Emissions Ceiling Directive. Adding ethanol, methanol, formaldehyde, acetone, 2-butanone and 2-propanol to the existing NMHC measurements would provide full coverage of the 20 most significant VOCs emitted on an annual mass basis. This article is part of a discussion meeting issue ‘Air quality, past present and future’.
Journal Article