The nature of buildings

The nature of buildings

There are many forces that help to determine why individual buildings come to be the way they are and they affect a variety of aspects of any one building: materials, shape,  color, size, form, style (or lack of it), choice of engineering systems, structural system, and more. Function or purpose explains much about the nature of many buildings and availability of resources (particularly money and materials) is often the primary determining factor.

 Many specific parts of a building’s nature are, however, determined by less obvious influences: a desire to build in an environmentally responsible manner, or a client’s wish to say something about image or status, perhaps by constructing a building larger or taller than that of a competitor. Much emphasis is now placed on building ‘intelligence’ and on streamlining construction to allow for faster completion. Integrated design, with multidisciplinary teams working closely together, is producing buildings quite unlike any before, with building fabric and services functioning together to minimize energy use and improve the health and productivity of the occupants.