Philip Steadman

• Doctor of Science
• University College London

Within the UK, domestic buildings account for 16% of total national emissions. Considerable improvements to the performance of the existing building stock will be necessary in the context of the UK’s commitment to emissions reductions, and for this to be achieved successfully and efficiently will require an improved understanding of the current per...

This paper describes the development of a detailed plan to get the social housing stock of the Borough of Islington in London, UK, to net zero carbon emissions. This stock is very diverse in form, age and construction, and includes houses, flats and maisonettes. A total of 4500 buildings containing some 33,300 dwellings were modelled using the 3DSt...

This paper examines the potential for PV to improve the performance of primary schools in London. Disaggregate data including energy use is compared with modelled PV generation, showing that electricity demand could theoretically be met in 59% of the schools investigated. The impact of several key factors is then considered, including architectural...

This research compares domestic metered energy data, for both gas and electricity consumption, against characteristics drawn from a building stock model of Greater London, UK. The energy analyses are limited to houses (single-building, single household) with one standard electricity meter and one mains gas meter as the principal subset. This provid...

The density of the domestic building stock of London is explored, moving from the scale of individual house and blocks of flats, through larger geographical units, to complete boroughs. The description of the stock is highly detailed and is made using the 3DStock method, which derives building geometry from digital maps and LiDAR (laser measurement...

The London Building Stock Model, commissioned by the Greater London Authority (GLA) contains detailed data on every separate domestic and non-domestic building in Greater London. It includes threedimensional information about buildings including their heights, volumes, wall areas, floor areas and the distribution of activities between different flo...

A brief history is provided of models of energy use in the UK building stock, with the focus on the non-domestic sector. This history leads to an account of the development, since 2009, of the 3DStock method for modelling complete building stocks, both domestic and non-domestic. The paper explains how 3DStock models are built and the data sources u...

From the early sixteenth century, stage sets in the Italian theatre were constructed in accelerated perspective. The stage and scenery were shallow, but the sets give illusions of much deeper spaces—typically piazzas and receding streets surrounded by buildings. The best-known example is Sebastiano Serlio’s temporary theatre of 1539 described in hi...

This paper presents a building-level analysis of almost 600,000 houses in London,using EPC data alongside 3DStock, a new highly detailed urban model.Focussing on the building envelope (specifically roofs, walls and glazing), the paper examines the current condition of the stock, as well as the opportunities for improving energy efficiency as define...

3DStock is a spatially structured, complete building stock model that covers large areas of England and Wales and represents the stock in great detail. The individual building data can be aggregated to a wider geographical scale for generalised analysis. Here, the model is used to explore the relationship between built form, energy use and urban de...

The relationship between energy use and height is examined for a sample of 611 office buildings in England and Wales using actual annual metered consumption of electricity and fossil fuels. The buildings are of different ages; they have different construction characteristics and methods of heating and ventilation; and they include both public and c...

Work on energy use in buildings – in university research, professional practice and government – has tended to draw a broad distinction between ‘the domestic stock’ and ‘the non-domestic stock’. A further tendency has been to focus attention on types of non-domestic buildings devoted to single uses (e.g. offices, shops or hospitals). This paper rep...

Density of urban form may be achieved under a variety of morphological designs that do not rely on tallness alone. Tall buildings have implications on the broader urban environment and infrastructure that lower buildings would not have, e.g. wind effects, sight-lines, or over-shading. They may also have an impact on energy use for reasons of buildi...

Density of urban form may be achieved under a variety of morphological designs that do not rely on tallness alone. Tall buildings have implications on the broader urban environment and infrastructure that lower buildings would not have, e.g. wind effects, sight-lines, or over-shading. They may also have an impact on energy use for reasons of buildi...

This research provides a historical analysis of morphological changes in housing in Tehran, as they have been constrained at each successive period in the city’s growth. The research aims to understand this evolution by investigating the relationship between housing typology and urban morphology. A GIS analysis is made of plots, buildings, and bloc...

The large eddy simulation (LES) model ‘PALM’ was further developed for the computation of irregular turbulent vertical transports within real urban environments counting buoyancy-driven flows. The model was implemented with calculated initial boundary conditions for three-dimensional highresolution heterogeneous sensible heat fluxes from buildings,...

This article describes the development of a new three-dimensional model of the British building stock, called ?3DStock?. The model differs from other 3D urban and stock models, in that it represents explicitly and in detail the spatial relationships between ?premises? and ?buildings?. It also represents the pattern of activities on different floors...

The English government estimates that approximately 22 TWh of energy can be saved from English dwellings by 2020 from a range of fabric and heating energy efficiency retrofits. Yet the rate of retrofit uptake has been less than is needed to meet government targets and the retrofits impact on energy demand has been less than predicted. Two questions...

Supporting the development of a strong evidence base on which to improve the energy performance of buildings requires having access to research from different ‘levels’ of data. This includes high-level studies to carefully constructed representative samples, exploratory and investigative studies. As sensors and data collection becomes more widely a...

The paper brings analytical and typological models to the study of the coevolution of urban form and built form in Tehran. It follows the transformation of housing at both urban and architectural scales. At the urban scale, residential areas in Tehran have evolved from small irregular blocks to larger regular grids. At the architectural scale, resi...

An ‘architectural doughnut’ is a building with a plan consisting of two concentric circles. Two types are distinguished: the ‘ring doughnut’ where the central circle is a courtyard, and the ‘jam doughnut’ where some important central space (the ‘jam’) is surrounded by a ring of smaller spaces (the ‘dough’). The main emphasis is on the second type....

The effects of buildings-in-use on local conditions within urban environments are significant. One key mechanism relates to the generation of additional mechanical and thermal turbulence. In recent years, high-resolution urban Large Eddy Simulation (LES) modelling has been implemented due to the progress of high performance computing. LES can so fa...

Benchmarking plays an important role in improving energy efficiency of non-domestic buildings. A review of energy benchmarks that underpin the UK’s Display Energy Certificate (DEC) scheme have prompted necessities to explore the benefits and limitations of using various methods to derive energy benchmarks. The existing methods were reviewed and gro...

Five decades after Ivan Sutherland first launched ‘SketchPad’, computer-aided design has entered the engineering mainstream. That strand in architectural computing which pursues the potential of generative design systems has, however, followed an entirely different course. Here Philip Steadman, Emeritus Professor of Urban and Built Form Studies at...

The study of urban morphology is both a research arena in its own right, and a key dimension of the urban design canon. Its study can provide valuable insights into city growth processes, as well as into the contemporary design process and the larger processes of city planning. Using Leslie Martin and Lionel March's (1972) three generic built forms...

The model discussed here is an urban-CFD model that takes into account all modes of heat transfer within and above the urban canopy at a high resolution. It is based on a dynamic coupling between an urban indoor-outdoor energy balance model and the k-epsilon (turbulence) model. The effect of complex urban geometry and terrain is taken into account...

The `Spacemate' diagram of Berghauser Pont and Haupt [2004 Spacemate: The Spatial Logic of Urban Density (Delft University Press, Delft); 2005 Nordisk Arkitekturforskning 4 55-68] relates together three geometrical properties of buildings: density expressed as a floor space index (FSI), ground coverage, and number of storeys. The authors measured t...

Little detailed evidence has previously been available regarding the uptake rate or prevalence of energy efficiency interventions among specific household groups. This study uses the Home Energy Efficiency Database (HEED) to investigate both the combination of measures that have been installed, and in which dwellings, according to key neighbourhood...

The geometrical forms of buildings have important effects on their use of energy. These relationships are explored at the scale of the entire non-domestic building stock of London. A three-dimensional digital model of the city is used to make a series of geometrical measures: building volume, exposed surface area (walls plus roof) and plan depth. T...

Little detailed evidence has previously been available regarding the uptake rate or prevalence of energy efficiency interventions among specific household groups. This study uses the Home Energy Efficiency Database (HEED) to investigate both the combination of measures that have been installed, and in which dwellings, according to key neighbourhood...

The method behind the UK Display Energy Certificate (DEC) improves the comparability of benchmarking by accounting for variations in weather and occupancy. To improve the comparability further, the incorporation of other features that are intrinsic to buildings (e.g. built form and building services) deserve exploration. This study investigates the...

The UK Government has unveiled an ambitious retrofit programme that seeks significant improvement to the energy efficiency of the housing stock. High quality data on the energy efficiency of buildings and their related energy demand is critical to supporting and targeting investment in energy efficiency. Using existing home improvement programmes o...

Carbon emissions from the school stock account for approximately 14% of emissions from the UK's public sector. Energy performance benchmarks play an important role in the built environment which encourage building operators to achieve higher energy efficiency. The robustness of benchmarks and the methodology in CIBSE TM46 which underpins the DEC sc...

This paper addresses the challenges posed by the framing of planning law, as it affects the built forms of cities. These are challenges faced by many cities worldwide, especially those undergoing rapid change. The paper explores the role of planning controls and building regulations in shaping the built form of one of the world’s fastest growing ci...

We currently have an incomplete understanding of how weather varies across London and how the city's microclimate will intensify levels of heat, cold and air pollution in the future. There is a need to target priority areas of the city and to promote design guidance on climate change mitigation strategies. As a result of improvements in the accurac...

Credit for devising the Panoptical 'inspection principle' for prison design is attributed, perhaps now irrevocably, to Jeremy Bentham. However Jeremy always insisted that the original conception came from his younger brother Samuel – 'After all, I have been obliged to go a-begging to my brother, and borrow an idea of his'. 1 Samuel was to have been...

The urban heat island (UHI) is a well-known effect of urbanisation and is particularly important in world megacities. Overheating in such cities is expected to be exacerbated in the future as a result of further urban growth and climate change. Demonstrating and quantifying the impact of individual design interventions on the UHI is currently diffi...

The UK government has ambitious goals to reduce national carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions and has targeted the new and existing built stock with measures to improve building performance and provide more local and centralized renewable energy. New dwellings are proposed to be 'net-zero carbon' by 2016, which includes proposals to offset CO2 by integra...

A method is proposed for plotting the plans of a large variety of rectangular built forms across a two-dimensional ‘morphospace’ of possibilities. The plans are enumerated by means of a technique of binary coding, such that similar shapes are grouped within distinct areas of this morphospace. Some applications to a geometrical history of building t...

The relationship between the volume of a building and its wall area follows an allometric rule that implies that building shape distorts to capture as much surface area, hence natural light, as possible as it increases in size. For a sample of house plans, Bon in 1973 established that the relationship between wall area W and volume V scaled as W V0...

This study addresses the anthropogenic heat emissions from buildings in London, i.e. the total energy delivered to buildings, all of which will ultimately end up as heat energy. The study was undertaken in an attempt to understand the significance of these emissions with regards to the impact on the local climate in London. In order to place the em...

Economic growth with less use of primary energy and lower carbon emissions can be achieved through existing and new technical solutions and by behavioural change. These solutions secure growth with lower carbon emissions and reduce our dependence on oil and gas, thereby improving security of energy supply. The implication of the Energy White Paper...

It is well established that urbanisation has a significant effect on the local climate. The climate of an urban area will differ from that of a nearby rural area. Modifications to the relevant properties of the urban environment will amplify or reduce these differences. This paper briefly summarises the literature and reports on the impact of these...

The Drive-in, the Supermarket, and the Transformation of Commercial Space in Los Angeles, 1914–1941 by LongstrethRichardThe MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1999256 pp., 164 mono illus. ISBN 0-262-12214-6, price £39.95 (hb) ISBN 0-262-62142-8, price £23.50 (pb) - Volume 4 Issue 4 - Philip Steadman

Many aggregate distributions of urban activities such as city sizes reveal scaling but hardly any work exists on the properties of spatial distributions within individual cities, notwithstanding considerable knowledge about their fractal structure. We redress this here by examining scaling relationships in a world city using data on the geometric p...

A follow-up study was undertaken of 15 ‘low-energy’ dwellings in Milton Keynes, UK, that were originally monitored for temperature and energy consumption from 1989 to 1991. These measurements were repeated in 2005–2006, with the results compared with the baseline using standardised daily external conditions of 5 °C. The 2005–2006 study found mean t...

Mixed Reality Architecture (MRA) supports distributed teams in their everyday work activities by linking multiple physical spaces across a shared three-dimensional virtual world. User configurable audio-visual connections give the inhabitants of MRA full control over whom they want to be in contact with and when they make themselves available, as w...

The constraints of packing rooms together, and the flexibility of dimensioning allowed by rectangular arrangements, explain the predominance of the right angle in architectural plans.

The Carbon Reduction in Buildings project has undertaken a pilot longitudinal survey based on a study of 160 ‘low-energy’ homes in 1989 in Milton Keynes Energy Park. In that study, a sub-sample of 29 dwellings was monitored on an hourly basis for internal temperature for the living room and main bedroom over 2 years. The follow up study has been in...

Ranko Bon's Master's thesis at Harvard was devoted to the phenomenon of allometry in the forms of buildings. The concept of allometry comes from biology, and refers to changes in the forms of organisms as they alter in size. For example the ratio of volume to surface exposed to the air (including the lungs) is of great functional importance to anim...

The Carbon Reduction in Buildings project has undertaken a pilot longitudinal survey based on a study of 160 ‘low-energy’ homes in 1989 in Milton Keynes Energy Park. In that study, a sub-sample of 29 dwellings was monitored on an hourly basis for internal temperature for the living room and main bedroom over 2 years. The follow up study has been in...

This paper describes an interim but detailed activity based model of energy use in non-domestic premises in England and Wales for the year 2004. Floorspace data from the Valuation Office Agency and numerous other sources were combined to produce a floorspace model. Energy data summarised from a database of detailed energy surveys in some 740 non-...

Developing policy for the reduction of the carbon emissions due to buildings requires models for energy usage that incorporate social, behavioural, and environmental factors in addition to the physical properties and technical specifications of the buildings. Marked parallels exist with some of the more intractable public health issues, such as ris...

Developing policy for the reduction of the carbon emissions due to buildings requires models for energy usage that incorporate social, behavioural, and environmental factors in addition to the physical properties and technical specifications of the buildings. Marked parallels exist with some of the more intractable public health issues, such as ris...

Critics of the proposal that the Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer used the camera obscura extensively in making his pictures of domestic scenes have argued that this cannot be the case, since his compositions are not 'photographic snapshots' but are very finely judged and balanced; his subject matter draws on the traditional motifs of Dutch genre pai...

The Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) to which every research-active UK university department has to submit every five years has fundamental resourcing implications for teaching and research – and thus, in the case of architecture, for the profession itself. Within the RAE, Architecture has always sat uneasily in a Built Environment ‘unit of asses...

Estimates are given of the numbers and floor areas of all nondomestic premises in England and Wales, as of 1993/94. These are based on a wide range of data sources, of which the most important are commercial rating (property taxation) data collected by the Valuation Office of the Inland Revenue. Information has also been collated from a large numbe...

Methods are described for making inferences as regards the geometrical and physical characteristics of all nondomestic buildings in England and Wales. Estimates are made of the floor areas in built forms with framed and load-bearing structures, respectively, and of the typical numbers of floors in built forms of different types. Calculations are ma...

City Center to Regional Mall Architecture, the Automobile, and Retailing in Los Angeles, 1920–1950 by LongstrethRichard The MIT press, Cambridge MA, 1997, paperback 1998 504 pp., 255 mono illus. ISBN 0-262-12200-6 (hb), 0-262-62125-8 (pb) Price £46.00 (hb); £23.50 (pb) - Volume 4 Issue 3 - Philip Steadman

This paper gives details of this NDBS project, which is 'mapping' the entire non-domestic building stock of England and Wales -- some 2 million premises. The project draws on detailed surveys of thousands of buildings and data from numerous other sources. The result of this research is a database from which it is possible to draw inferences from t...

In this paper we describe the selection of four English urban areas in which the nondomestic building stocks might collectively be considered characteristic of the national stock. A brief history is provided of urban development in each of the four areas. The scope and methodology of comprehensive surveys of nondomestic buildings in the four survey...

The origins, purpose, and scope of the Non-Domestic Building Stock (NDBS) database of England and Wales are described. Nondomestic buildings are defined and sources of the data used in the database are identified. The structure of the database, and the role of the classification of nondomestic buildings, are described and discussed.

The Smallworld GIS has been customised to create a means of representing the three-dimensional forms of buildings. To do this, buildings are broken down into 'floor polygons', among whose attributes are floor level and storey height. Data for nondomestic buildings at 3350 addresses in four English towns have been entered into Smallworld, and measur...

A classification of built forms is presented. It is based on a study of buildings surveyed at 3350 addresses in four English towns and has been designed for use in the national Non-Domestic Building Stock (NDBS) database developed for the Department of Environment, Transport and the Regions. As the prime use of the database is in energy analysis, t...

Lutyens's proportional systems: an analysis analyzed - Volume 3 Issue 4 - Philip Steadman

A number of speculations are offered about the classification of building types and built forms, in the context of a project to build a database of the nondomestic building stock of England and Wales. This database will be used by the Department of the Environment to help assess national policy on greenhouse gas emissions and energy conservation. T...

This paper describes a research programme sponsored by the British Department of Environment whose goal is to build a database of the non-domestic building stock of England and Wales. This database will contain information about all buildings, other than houses and flats, throughout the country. Two principal sources of data are being used: propert...