15th January 2010
Article published in a special issue of Building Research & Information Journal on Carbon reduction in existing buildings

Steve has been involved in writing a paper for a special issue on Carbon reduction in existing buildings, in the journal Building Research & Information (Special Issue: Volume 38, Issue 1, 2010)

The paper is written with Phil Steaman and Mike Batty and addresses the relationship between the volume of a building and its wall area, with a view to the allometric rules that can be observed.

Here is the abstract for the paper:

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 (1973) established that the relationship between wall area and volume scaled as and Steadman (2006) demonstrated a similar relationship for his archetypal building. Empirical work in Cambridge and Swindon, UK also revealed a similar allometry as measured by the depth ratio based on which provides a direct measure of the way building shapes become distorted with increasing size. In this paper, we demonstrate positive allometry for building blocks taken from a large urban database (~3.2m blocks) for Greater London which is constructed from Ordnance Survey building footprint data augmented by remote sensing LIDAR height data. For the domestic and then non-domestic stock, we categorise the blocks into 8 bands and then examine the depth ratios in 6 inner London boroughs including the City which is the financial quarter. We demonstrate in two ways – first from the depth ratio and second from fitting allometric relationships to the band data – that the allometric coefficients converge to values of around 0.77, thus confirming the magnitude of Bon’s (1973) relationship, implying that positive allometry is not only a feature of small samples of houses and archetypal buildings but is more generally the case for real building databases at the very largest urban scales.

		Carbon Reduction in Buildings cover