“Form follows forces,” reiterates architect, educator, and Environa Studio founder Tone Wheeler, as he reminisces about the evolution of ‘architectural science’ and the people who made it happen.

The story begins in 1954 when Professor Henry Cowan established a laboratory at the University of Sydney to do tests on buildings, which grew into the Department of Architectural Science. Two teachers at the university who particularly had an impact on Wheeler were Steve King and Dr Jack Greenland. Both were students there – King was studying for the Diploma in Building Science while Greenland was doing his Ph.D. King was teaching architecture students when Wheeler first started there in the early 1970s.

“The thing about Steve was that he had actually got an architecture degree and he really was a very good designer and a very good architectural draughtsman as well as wanting to understand the science of it. So, the thing that Steve brought to it when we were students was this sense that it was relevant. All this arcane thing about the mathematics and the physics was actually applicable to how you design buildings and there was a rigour to it,” recalls Wheeler.

Greenland, who also taught Wheeler at the same time, had the same approach, though not the same background. “He'd done a master’s in building science and before that a science degree, but he was absolutely committed to trying to make architecture and science work together; that there were scientific principles that could be passed on to students so that they could understand the three elements – heat, light and sound,” says Wheeler.

“He was interested in thermal comfort, he was interested in natural light, daylight and artificial light, he was interested in acoustics and that was the title of his lectures and he talked about how buildings, the interiors of buildings had to be comfortable for people to be in. It had to be well-lit, it had to have the right acoustics to it, and those principles I think were inculcated into a whole generation of architects who were what you might call late modernists, who were inheritors of the dictum of ‘form follows function’.

“But it was more what I would now call ‘form follows forces’, in the sense that it's the forces of physics that dictated the nature of some of those spaces, particularly in regard to acoustics when you are looking at big halls, theatres or cinemas. You are looking at the notion of how the framing of those spaces would contribute to either good acoustics or poor acoustics and the shaping of it.”

Wheeler cites the example of the Sydney Opera House designed by Jørn Utzon, where the outside structural form is independent of the internal acoustic form. “That was the building that sat there on the promontory in Sydney while the University of Sydney's course in architectural science was being developed; it was kind of like the big mothership sitting on the promontory that you had to understand in terms of structure, acoustics, lighting, and so on,” says Wheeler.

Steve King went on to teach at the Canberra College of Advanced Education (CCAE), which later became Canberra University, where he joined a small group of staff. “Everybody taught design studio and brought in whatever their techniques were. Don Dunbar, who taught history, was looking at historical precedents for how you do design. Dave Harmon, who was an architectural scientist, was looking for ways of developing buildings that responded to the basic physics of it and then the more sophisticated versions of that were done by Steve King.”

Wheeler observes that this is an interesting way of teaching design. This method is no longer practiced in any of the architecture schools – it didn’t last at CCAE either beyond the first 15 years – because it requires dedicated and committed staff. However, King made this the basis of the school, as a result of which the students gained an education that had a very wide philosophy. For 16 years, together with David Harmon, he forged a pedagogy of integrating architectural science seamlessly into the design studio.

While King moved to Canberra, Jack Greenland was invited by the New South Wales Institute of Technology (now University of Technology Sydney - UTS) to set up the department of architectural science. His lectures were brilliant, recalls Wheeler. “I heard some of the talks he gave and they were always putting allegories and simple ideas that would explain very complex notions or complex equations or complex issues in structures or particularly in heat, light, and sound.”

These lectures later found their way into Greenland’s book Foundations of Architectural Science - heat, light, sound, which was filled with illustrations and had photos of an extraordinarily wide range of buildings around the world, but particularly in Asia and Papua New Guinea, to illustrate how these principles came into buildings. Wheeler had also contributed several designs to the book, putting in whole page descriptions and pictures of houses for hot-humid, hot-arid, temperate and cold climates.

The book was adopted as a textbook for UTS as well as quite a large number of schools, and had several reprints, though it’s now no longer available in print. Sadly, Greenland’s book was replaced by Steven Szokolay’s book, released in 2004 called An Introduction to Architectural Science, which returned to the mathematical algorithm approach.

“The thing that Jack Greenland did was to explain very complex ideas of the qualities of the internal spaces of the buildings through diagrams, through basic principles. They are comprehensible to architects to help them make better buildings. I know that attention at the moment is to external form-making – if you go to glamour websites, you'll see hundreds of pictures of the outside of buildings and very, very few of the inside. But the whole reason for architecture is actually the inside of the buildings, which is where architectural science happens,” Wheeler observes.

“So in a sense, I am making a lament for the passing of not only Steve King and Jack Greenland and the book, Foundations of Architectural Science, but also the whole practice of it now.”

This was a golden era when architectural science was an important subject at all universities, says Wheeler. “There was Bal Saini and Steven Szokolay in Queensland; there was John Ballinger at University of New South Wales; and Deborah White, who had worked with the Coldicutts at the University of Melbourne. And there was a certain sense in which the principles of good architectural science became the principles of sustainability, and those early architectural scientists became advocates of sustainability.”

That doesn't happen so much anymore, he notes. Architecture schools offer a sophisticated analysis of the external forms of buildings without the rigour in terms of what's going on, on the inside and sustainability is kind of like a bolt-on exercise rather than the fundamentals of heat, light and sound.

Two other textbooks were Victor Olgyay’s Design with Climate and Ian McHarg’s Design with Nature. Both titles were written around the idea that you design in accordance with the climate, and you design in accordance with nature, the landscape and the area around, Wheeler explains.

“In other words, you took the external forces around the building and looked at how those forces, the sun, the wind, the landscape, the topography, the topology and so on would influence what the building would be like and how it would react and how the interiors of the building would relate to the outside. It’s a way of following that dictum ‘form follows forces’ in the sense of how do you shade buildings to keep the sun out in passive means rather than running air conditioning.”

Olgyay’s book has whole pages on positioning a building on a site, so it has the least amount of impact. McHarg’s book explains how to take the worst part of a site and build on that – something that has come to be known as ‘McHargian analysis’.

“So, you don't build in the view. You don't build on the top of the hill. You don't build in the best part of the site. You build where you can be sheltered away from the wind, you build in a way that is not interfering with the water courses and the way the water runs,” Wheeler explains.

Shifting the discussion on architectural science to the Indigenous in Australia, Wheeler observes that very little attention has been paid to architectural developments of our aborigines. Paul Memmott’s book Gunyah Goondie + Wurley: The Aboriginal Architecture of Australia, which referred to different kinds of Indigenous structures, was published more than 10 years ago by the University of Queensland Press (said to be the most expensive book they've ever produced).

“It's an extraordinary read because Paul Memmott spent a life looking at aboriginal designs, investigating them and looking at how they worked with the country that they were on, what was the landscape, what was the climate, what was the aspects they had and the materials in hand.”

In Memmott’s analysis, the materials were used to create three different things: a big shade structure that provided protection from the overhead heat in the sun; a windbreak often made by interwoven brush that provided protection against the wind; and thermal comfort, which could range from a cave to a tight interwoven arrangement of branches and bark.

However, an important takeaway from the book is the fact that the Indigenous work with country, climate, and materials to create only what is necessary. “Nothing more than was needed, only what was necessary in order to make a sculptural piece as we would see it but was in fact entirely, elegantly, the forces driving a form,” says Wheeler.

Wheeler encourages everybody to get a copy of the book because there is a resurgence in respect and understanding for the way in which the Indigenous understood country. He believes every architect needs to read the book, not because of its history but because it teaches us about architectural science. “It's the very basics of heat, light and sound that you do when you're just doing what is needed, no more, and the way in which that translates into contemporary or Indigenous work.”

“It's a really important part of architecture that when we make our spaces, we make them as good passive spaces that we don't ask for energy for heating or cooling. We don't ask for energy for lighting, we don't ask for us to have to magnify voices and acoustics and so on. You can do it all passively if you can.”

 

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