This book brings together some of the finest academics in the field to address important questions around the way in which people experience their physical environments, including temperature, light, air-quality, acoustics and so forth. It is of importance not only to the comfort people feel indoors, but also the success of any building as an environment for its stated purpose. The way in which comfort is produced and perceived has a profound effect on the energy use of a building and its resilience to the increasing dangers posed by extreme weather events, and power outages caused by climate change. Research on thermal comfort is particularly important not only for the health and well-being of occupants but because energy used for temperature control is responsible for a large part of the total energy budget of the built environment.
In recent years there has been an increasing focus on the vulnerabilities of the thermal comfort system; how and why are buildings failing to provide safe and agreeable thermal environments at an affordable price? Achieving comfort in buildings is a complex subject that involves physics, behaviour, physiology, energy conservation, climate change, and of course architecture and urban design. Bringing together the related disciplines in one volume lays strong, multi-disciplinary foundations for new research and design directions for resilient 21st century architecture. This book heralds workable solutions and emerging directions for key fields in building the resilience of households, organisations and populations in a heating world.
Fergus Nicol is an award winning leader in the field of adaptive thermal comfort, having started as a physicist at the Building Research Establishment in the 1960s. He moved on to work with the UK Medical Research Council, and into teaching, before leaving both to start the radical book shop Bookmarks. Returning to research in 1992, he is now an Emeritus Professor in a number of universities, and a top cited scholar across his many publications. He led influential pan-European and Pakistan studies on comfort and he leads the NCEUB, Network for Comfort and Energy use in Buildings. He co-founded and ran the Windsor Conferences on comfort and is internationally respected for his support of fellow researchers and students.
Hom Bahadur Rijal is an award winning researcher, author and Professor at Tokyo City University, Japan, specialising in adaptive thermal comfort and occupant behaviour within buildings having published over 80 journal papers, 12 book chapters and co-edited books. Growing up in a remote village in Nepal where he remains a valued social activist, he studied higher education in Japan and worked in England. He is currently embarked on a Japan-wide project to establish the adaptive thermal comfort limits for major cities across Japan. In 2005 he received the Encouragement Prize for a distinguished article from the Architectural Institute of Japan.
Susan Roaf is Emeritus Professor of Architectural Engineering at Heriot Watt University. Raised in Malaysia and the Australian bush, and educated in Britain, she has lived and worked as an architect, anthropologist and archaeologist in Iran, Iraq, Pakistan, California and Antarctica, experiences that colour her unique understanding of buildings and comfort in different climates and cultures and inspired her work on adapting buildings and cities to a heating world. She pioneered UK building integrated solar technologies and eco-design, and with Nicol and Humphreys has promoted adaptive thermal comfort globally. Her expertise in ancient technologies informed some of her 23 books and other publications, all aimed at understanding building performance in the past, present and future.
