Performance-Orientated Design Precursors and Potentials

Abstract

Performance-oriented design is not without precedent. In the past, architecture responded with great sophistication and beauty to the need to preserve local resources and provide diverse and suitable conditions for human habitation. In the current context of escalating environmental and ecological changes, learning from precedents and developing their potential is becoming increasingly important. However, many architects refuse to look back in fear of returning to an imagined medieval condition, preferring instead to invest in the technologies that lie at the core of the environmental change and spatial and social division, which we may no longer be able to afford. In response to these circumstances, Michael Hensel examines the potential of past approaches to passive environmental modulation as a reworked spatial paradigm for design that interrelates material, spatial and environmental dynamics with dynamic patterns of habitation. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.