Ecodesign: A Manual for Ecological Design [Hardcover]

Saving the environment from continued devastation by our built environment is the single most important issue for our tomorrow, feeding into our post–millennial fears that this third millennium will indeed be our last.

Ken Yeang reconstructs and revisions how and why our current design approach and perception of architecture must radically change if we are to ensure a sustainable future. He argues forcefully that this can only be achieved by adopting the environmentalist’s view that, aesthetics apart, regards our environment simply as an assembly of materials (mostly transported over long distances), that are transciently concentrated on to a single locality and used for living, working and leisure whose footprints affect that locality’s ecology and whose eventual disposal has to be accommodated somewhere in the biosphere.

This manual offers clear instructions to designers on how to design, build and use a green sustainable architecture. The aim is to produce and maintain ecosystem–like structures and systems whose content and outputs not only integrate benignly with the natural environment, but whose built form and systems function with sensitivity to the locality’s ecology as well in relation to global biospheric processes, and contribute positively to biodiversity (as opposed to reducing it). The goal is structures and systems that are low consumers of non–renewable resources, built with materials that have low ecological consequences and are designed to facilitate disassembly, continuous reuse and recycling a (a cyclic process that mimics the way ecosystems recycle materials), and that at the end of their useful lives can be reintegrated seamlessly back into the natural environment. Each of these aspects (and other attendant ones) is examined in detail with regards to how they influence design and planning.

Ecodesign provides designers with a comprehensive set of strategies for approaching ecological design and planning combined with in–depth analysis and research material not found elsewhere.

Saving the environment from continued devastation by our built environment is the single most important issue for our tomorrow, feeding into our post–millennial fears that this third millennium will indeed be our last.

Ken Yeang reconstructs and revisions how and why our current design approach and perception of architecture must radically change if we are to ensure a sustainable future. He argues forcefully that this can only be achieved by adopting the environmentalist’s view that, aesthetics apart, regards our environment simply as an assembly of materials (mostly transported over long distances), that are transciently concentrated on to a single locality and used for living, working and leisure whose footprints affect that locality’s ecology and whose eventual disposal has to be accommodated somewhere in the biosphere.

The manual offers clear instructions to designers on how to design, build and use a green sustainable architecture. The aim is to produce and maintain ecosystem–like structures and systems whose content and outputs not only integrate benignly with the natural environment, but whose built form and systems function with sensitivity to the locality’s ecology as well in relation to global biospheric processes, and contribute positively to biodiversity (as opposed to reducing it). The goal is structures and systems that are low consumers of non–renewable resources, built with materials that have low ecological consequences and are designed to facilitate disassembly, continuous reuse and recycling a (a cyclic process that mimics the way ecosystems recycle materials), and that at the end of their useful lives can be reintegrated seamlessly back into the natural environment. Each of these aspects (and other attendant ones) is examined in detail with regards to how they influence design and planning.

The manual provides designers with a comprehensive set of Strategies for approaching ecological design and planning combined with in–depth analysis and research material not found elsewhere. The book is not intended solely for design professionals but should also be of considerable interest and use to all those whose work impinges in one way or an other on the natural environment.

The book consolidates and advances the theoretical and technical work of Ken Yeang in a text illustrated with over 300 diagrams, drawings and design examples.

Ken Yeang is an architect–planner, and one of the foremost ecodesigners, theoreticians and thinkers in the field of green design. After having studied architecture at the Architectural Association in London, his work on the green agenda started in the 70s with his doctoral dissertation for the University of Cambridge on ecological design and planning. Yeang is the author of several books on ecological design, including the Skyscraper, Bioclimatically Considered: A Design Primer (1996) published by Wiley–Academy, and The green Skyscraper: the basis for Designing Sustainable Intensive Buildings (1999) published by Prestel (Germany). He is the distinguished Plym Professor at the University of Illinois and Adjunct Professor at the University of Malaya and University of Hawaii (at Manoa) and recently received a D. Lit. (Hon) from the University of Sheffield. he is an Honorary FAIA and has served on the RIBA Council. A principal of Llewlleyn Davies Yeang (UK) and its sister firm, Hamzah & Yeang (Malaysia), Ken Yeang is well known for designing signature green high–performance buildings and master plans, and for his pursuit of an ecological aesthetic in his designs.