ارزیابی زیست محیطی Environmental Evaluation

INTRODUCTION IN 1966, in the first edition of his outline history of architectural science [I], Cowan proclaimed by the title of chapter 5 that “Environmental design replaces structure as the principal problem of architectural science”. Today, more than 20 years later, environmental design is still a problem. While building structures, on the whole, can be designed predictably, the environment within buildings, it seems to be common experience, cannot. Despite enormous amounts of research that have been undertaken into many aspects of building environment, and the store of knowledge that has accumulated, design of the environment too often appears to be a matter of chance. Users of today’s new buildings are just as liable as were users of earlier buildings to be uncomfortable. They,may be too hot or too cold and still experience draughts; they are often troubled by noises they would rather not hear; auditoria may not provide the distribution and quality of sound their users expect ; new kinds of space planning and function seem, inevitably, to lead to unsatisfactory visual environments–as recent widespread use of visual display units in offices has so frequently illustrated [2]. The number of possible examples of environmental problems is endless. Considering its nature, this uncertainty of the outcome of environmental design should perhaps be expected, for building environment is a subject of many branches that interact in diverse ways. Indeed, every branch of the subject is extraordinarily complex, involving as it does the performance of physical phenomena (light, heat, sound, etc.), the physiological and subjective experience of these phenomena by individuals and groups in varieties of settings, where expectations and standards vary with place and time and wide differences of experience are attributable to different individuals. Additionally, further variations in individuals’ and groups’ tolerance of environmental conditions depend on such factors as their economic responsibility for the operation and maintenance of those environments. Another truism that should be accepted as readily as Cowan’s is that, in environmental design, the need for new research is less than the need for finding ways to implement the research that already exists. Though much is known from research about the nature and design of (for example) the thermal, visual and aural environments, too many buildings, in their design, exhibit ignorance of this knowledge. This suggests a need for investigation of the successful implementation of environmental research. There are several reasons for this failure to use the results of research in the processes of environmental design. They include the innate complexity and vast scope of the subject; the many participants engaged in the design process for even one moderately-sized building; the range of attributes required of designers of environments and the sometimes totally different ways in which the educations of different design professions are pursued. Most critical, perhaps, is the very nature of the design process itself. The task that designers of environments undertake is this: they identify (or, more often, have identified for them) a new requirement for shelter and the human, organizational, functional, economic, etc. needs set by that problem. A physical solution is posited and given form. Spatial arrangement, structure, content, surfaces, materials, services, etc. are defined (and eventually communicated to those who will undertake the construction) by analogies of word and line and dimension. Separately and collectively, environmental designers are involved in the widely different activities and mindsets of analysis, creation, integration, evaluation and communication. If designers are to use research results, then to this list of duties must be added the tasks of knowledge- and technology-transfer : from the technical and precise and qualified writings of scientists to decisions and directions–also technical but sometimes more ambiguous and differently qualified–that will have meaning in the world of construction, of whose workers only a fraction have much understanding of the world of building research. Various attempts have been made to ensure greater success for the design of building environments in today’s complex technical world. One field of activity that has grown over the last quarter-century has been the systematic evaluation (or criticism, analysis or appraisal) of the performance of completed buildings. Recently the name “post-occupancy evaluation” (“POE”) has been used for this activity, though “post-occupancy evaluations, as they have evolved to date, focus primarily on the impacts of designs on (building) users” [3] and thus, strictly, may deal only with a part, though an important part, of the total problem of building performance. Evaluations of building performance have at least three major purposes [4] : (1) to learn from existing buildings and their users how buildings actually perform and are used (rather than how they are thought to perform and be used) so to provide knowledge for use in the formulation of user-requirements (i.e. “designbriefs” or “design programs”) for proposed new buildings ; (2) to evaluate the possible consequences of design alternatives, enabling choice of the most appropriate ; (3) to check, in a completed building, whether and to what extent the conditions predicted to result from design action did in fact occur. Among the earlier attempts to evaluate environmental performance in buildings was the work on assessment of “the agreeable luminous environment” carried out in the early 1960s by a working committee of the International Commission on Illumination (CIE) [5]. Much of the CIE’s work on the evaluation of lighting installations was carried out by people knowledgeable in lighting who made judgements with the aid of prepared questionnaires. Use of that technique became more widespread and has continued.* A different technique, the checklist, allied to a very simple scoring device, was developed in the late 1960s and used in a number of contexts, but originally to appraise the total environment in schools [7, 8]. Although, from the earliest days, a main intention of evaluation activity was to make the design processes of future buildings better informed, there were inevitable difficulties in translating knowledge gained from evaluations of single buildings to the generalizations needed for effective design in different circumstances. However, it was widely recognised that a useful outcome of such activity was the educational experience gained by the individuals and groups who did the work [9, 10]. One product of this interest, in the 1960s, was the establishment at Strathclyde University in Scotland of the Building Performance Research Unit, publication of that unit’s text [11] and, indirectly, much other material. From the late 1970s as “‘POE” in North America and elsewhere, building evaluation has assumed a wider interest and become a more widely practised basis for passing judgement upon the successes and demerits of completed buildings. A bibliography of “POE”, published in 1983 (and restricted to sources published since 1970) [12] listed some 200 references, which are by no means all that had appeared. Indeed, rather curiously, one of il~ omissions was of an earlier bibliography in the same series [13]. One useful contribution to this subject that, despite the increasing literature, seems to have evolved little in the last quarter of a century is from Australia’s Experimental Building Station [14]. This document brings together a variety of material from different sources that can help provide structures for organising the search for and assembly of information and judgements oblained from building evaluations. Despite the widespread intention that building evaluation should enlighten and improve the design process, it seems clear that no ready method is known by which the results of an evaluation of one building may be applied directly to the design of others. Generally, the evaluation methodologies that have been described do not attempt to do more than provide specific knowledge of the performance of particular aspects of particular buildings. A few have attempted statistical treatments [15] but there have rarely been large enough samples, nor has there been sufficient agreement on an evaluation structure related to the design process, for this to be worthwhile. Published reports on evaluations of buildings have been expected to increase the fund of general knowledge and awareness of reader-designers as to the common consequences to be expected from design activities. They have not been expected to provide direct guidance on what might be done and what should not be done in response to particular design assignments.