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For the March-April 2005 issue of ArchitectureBoston, Jeff
Stein, AIA, interviewed architect and engineer Michelle Addington,
associate professor at the Harvard Graduate School of
Design. Below is the opening of that interview, "How
Things Work: Thinking Outside the Box Builds a Better Box."
Reprinted with permission of the Boston Society of Architects.
Jeff Stein: I often think that every building
in downtown Boston is already obsolete; it's hard to believe
otherwise when you consider rising energy costs. Do you think that
we're not making our buildings work hard enough to solve some of
these problems?
Michelle Addington: When we start thinking that
buildings should be performing, especially in terms of energy
issues, we start trying to force certain behaviors at the scale of
architecture. Although we've been pushing energy conservation in
buildings for the past 20 years, we have built everything larger
and larger, which means we've increased energy use enormously. I'm
interested in ways to decouple energy phenomena from the building,
to work directly on the phenomena rather than on the building.
Jeff Stein: Your work has been described as
re-conceptualizing the human thermal environment, but your focus is
actually much wider than buildings.
Michelle Addington: It's about really getting
to the roots of how things work. Science has changed radically,
particularly in this area—fluid mechanics and heat transfer
were the last branches of classical physics to have a theoretical
structure that matched empirical phenomena, and that was really
only developed in the 1920s. We still tend to think of energy
systems in our buildings in terms of 19th-century ideas about
dilution and mixing.
To view the full article, download the file in the box at
right.
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