Beyond Environmental Comfort highlights some of the key ideas that form the foundation of the field of environmental comfort and, at the same time, gives voice to some of the concerns and considerations on the limitations of the field as it stands today. Bringing together a range of foremost thinkers in their respective fields - Michel Cabanac, Derek Clements-Croome, Nick Baker, Harold Marshall, Juhani Pallasmaa, Dean Hawkes, and Constance Classen - this book argues for a deeper appreciation of how environmental comfort may be understood in terms of our relationship with the environment rather than as independent qualities. For the first time these diverse views are brought together by Editor Boon Lay Ong to present insights into a world beyond what is normally covered in academic research. In the process, an attempt is made to define the field for the future. This book shows that it is by understanding just how environmental design needs to go beyond mere comfort and deal with well-being that we can meaningfully design our future.

The built environment affects our physical, mental and social well-being. Here renowned professionals from practice and academia explore the evidence from basic research as well as case studies to test this belief. They show that many elements in the built environment contribute to establishing a milieu which helps people to be healthier and have the energy to concentrate while being free to be creative. The health and well-being agenda pervades society in many different ways but we spend much of our lives in buildings, so they have an important role to play within this total picture. This demands us to embrace change and think beyond the conventional wisdom while retaining our respect for it. Creating the Productive Workplace shows how we need to balance the needs of people and the ever-increasing enabling technologies but also to take advantage of the healing powers of Nature and let them be part of environmental design. This book aims to lead to more human-centred ways of designing the built environment with deeper meaning and achieve healthier and more creative, as well as more productive places to work.

This book gathers 14 original contributions published in an IJERPH Special Issue that deal with the perception of environmental sounds and how such sounds are likely to affect human quality of life and well-being and the experience of a place. The research focus over the years has been gradually shifting from treating sound simply as “noise” and something that cities should get rid of to a potential “resource” to promote and support community life in public spaces. Three main topics or “needs” to be addressed by researchers and practitioners emerged from this Special Issue: (1) the need to re-think “quietness” in cities as something that goes beyond the mere “pursuit of silence”, (2) the need to integrate additional contextual factors in the characterization and management of urban acoustic environments for public health, and (3) the need to consider the acoustic quality of indoor spaces as opposed to an outdoor-only perspective. The contributions collected in this book will hopefully trigger new questions and inform the agenda of future researchers and practitioners in the environmental acoustics domain.

Proceedings of an International Conference held at Paris, France, December 4-8, 1989

This volume features the projects entered for the 1995 Aga Khan Award for Architecture. An introductory chapter discusses the award and explores spirituality in buildings and contemporary society. The book includes descriptions of the winning designs in Yemen, Tunisia, Pakistan, Senegal and India. Contributors include Charles Jencks, Peter Eisenman and Frank Gehry.

Beyond Environmental Crisis addresses the most pressing challenge facing humanity at the end of the 20th Century: Can the peoples of the Earth get together with enough creativity, commitment and skill to avert the twin threats of nuclear holocaust and environmental destruction? This book employs comparative, creative philosophical inquiry to analyze and offer alternatives to the modern Western worldview which was the foundation of the Western technological revolution. It describes an emerging alternative ecophilosophy that is inclusive enough to serve as a cross-cultural ground for synthesis of new visions of technological and social practices that promote ecological harmony, wisdom, and democratic values. It exemplifies appropriate philosophizing as an art that creatively uses shifting paradigms as a transformative discipline leading to the creation of new practices of appropriate design, for diverse lifestyles which promote preservation of the Earth's wild places, while sustaining its ecological communities. Comparative, creative, ecophilosophical inquiry facilitates participatory activity, which becomes an applied philosophy of life that is a way to ecosophy (wisdom and harmony based on ecocentric values). The way to ecosophy leads beyond environmental crises. To illustrate this transformation two philosophies are described, along with their ideals of progress, persons, community and Nature: The technocratic representing the dominant industrial paradigm, the planetary person (pernetarian) representing an ecosophic alternative.

"Presents some of the most creative works from architects around the world that never came to fruition"--OCLC

Beyond the Comfort Zone tells the hows and whys of four extreme sports in which participants often risk debilitating injury or sudden death. Beyond the Comfort Zone is a nonfiction adventure narrative in which the unflinching character of Bruce Genereaux is repeatedly tested in friendship, disaster, near death and love. His strengths and weaknesses persist through his adventures in four extreme sports that become Bruce's armature for character development. In each sport he progresses from beginner to master of style and technique in places we all recoginze, such as Tuckerman's Ravine, Yosemite and Chile's Patagonia. Each time life choiecs must be made, and his character remains unrelenting.