Build. Sci. Vol. 10, pp. 85-87. Pergamon Press 1975.
Printed in Great Britain
Manual of Tropical Housing and Building.
Part one: Climatic Design
O. H. K O E N I G S B E R G E R , T. G. I N G E R S O L L , A L A N M A Y H E W , S. V. S Z O K O L A Y
Longman Group, London (1974) 320 pp. £4.95 (hardback) and £2.95 (paperback).
A F T E R a sporadic start in the early nineteen-fifties,
books in English on the design of buildings in
relation to climate appeared at a rate which reached
an average of about one a year during the sixties
with a peak towards the end of the decade which
has subsequently declined. They are roughly of
three kinds: descriptive works which introduce
the subject in general terms and give examples
of buildings which show a response to climatic
forces; accounts of building research and theory
more or less orientated towards architects or other
designers; and books written specifically to provide
help to architects or planners during the design
process at the point at which help is needed. For
cultural and economic reasons most of the books
so far published have concentrated on conditions
and needs in hot climates; a bias which may change
as the cost of energy rises in cooler countries.
Of the descriptive works, probably the best
known is Climate and Architecture by J. E. ARONIN
(Reinhold, 1953) with its excellent bibliography.
Two valuable books originating with research
workers are J. F. VAN STRAATEN'S Thermal Per-
formanceofBuildings(Elsevier, 1967) and B. GIVONI'S
Man, Climate and A rchiteeture (Elsevier, 1969, which,
despite its broad title, also concentrates on hot-
country thermal problems). These are books for
research workers, engineers and building scientists,
and for architects with a strong motivation to
improve their knowledge and understanding of the
field. They are analytical and evaluative in approach
and their primary intent is, in a broad sense,
educational. Except for the last two chapters in
Givoni's book, on principles of design, they are not
design manuals and they are not structured so as to
match into a design process by recognising either
the types of decision the practising designer needs
to make, or the speed at which he has to make them.
There are, in fact, very few books on climatic
design aimed at use in the design office by the
working architect or planner. A work which is
already a classic and which sometimes comes near
to this is VICTOR OLGYAY'S Design with Climate
(Princeton U.P., 1963). The book's origins in
reports of practical design studies by its author
give it immediate relevance and a seductive
85
intensity. It contains many original and useful
ideas, but the difficulty of generalising or even,
in some cases, of reproducing the processes which
are illustrated, can sometimes lead to impotence
on the part of an architect or planner who tries to
use it. A comprehensive collection of information is
contained in the bilingual (German and English)
Tropenbau: Building in the Tropics by G. LIPPSMEIER
(Callway Verlag, Munich, 1969). Principles are not
treated in any detail and, although the book makes a
most useful addition to any tropical designer's
library, it is organised around the traditional
approach to the provision of information for
climatic design which is either prescriptive or
evaluative: the latter implying a process by which
buildings are first described and then evaluated on a
predictive basis, the final specification logically
being arrived at by a process of iteration.
A major step forward in methodology was made
in the publication Climate and House Design:
Design of Low Cost Housing and Community
Facilities Vol. 1 (U.N. Department of Economic
and Social Affairs, New York 1971). This was
written for the United Nations by OtTO KOENIGS-
BERGER, CARL MAHONEY a n d MARTIN EVANS (then
of the Department of Development and Tropical
Studies of the Architectural Association, London)
and was the first presentation of an approach,
incorporating the "Mahoney Tables", which allows
an input of climatic data and an output of specifi-
cations of the required characteristics of built
form in order to achieve satisfactory performance
in the input climate. This generative approach, by
inverting the form/performance relationship, breaks
the iterative cycle of the more traditional propose-
form/evaluate process.
There has been a major gap in the literature in
that there has been no book for use by practitioners
as a manual during the design process which, by
moving rapidly from principles to practice, can also
be used educationally both in pre- and mid-career.
This gap is filled very well by the present work.
The Manual of Tropical Housing and Building
(Part 1: Climatic Design) by OTTO H. KOENIGS-
BERGER, T. G. INGERSOLL, ALAN MAYHEW a n d
S. V. SZOKOLAY, has been a long time in reaching
86 Book Reviews
its present published form. It was begun in 1952
by Otto Koenigsberger as a nucleus for a course at
the Architectural Association which was taken
each year by over twenty architects, planners and
builders from a large number of different countries.
After ten years of change and development through
daily use in teaching, the text was brought up to
date by T. E. Ingersoll. The third version was
written by Alan Mayhew with the special intention
of making it as effective as possible in the teaching/
learning process, and the final drafting and tech-
nical updating were carried out by S. V. Szokolay.
The book is divided into 10 sections, the first
four dealing with thermal problems: the given
conditions of climate, the desirable conditions of
thermal comfort, the principles of thermal design
and the means of thermal control. Sections five
and six deal with light and lighting, and noise and
noise control, each starting with a section on
principles. Section seven discusses applications in
providing shelter in hot-dry, warm-humid, com-
posite and tropical upland climates. The eighth
section, "design aids," gives the processes described
in the U.N. publication which was mentioned
above in a more concise form and this is followed
by a useful bibliography and 36 pages of data,
design tools and design aids, in Appendices. These
include sunpath diagrams for latitudes ranging
from the equator to 40 ° North or South and a
transparent plastic shadow-angle overlay is in-
cluded with the book.
An Introduction to Soil Mechanics and
Foundations
(Second Edition)
C. R. SCOTT
Applied Science, London (1974), 361 pp., £5.00.
THIS book is intended to serve as a general text-
book on soil mechanics for undergraduate students
of civil engineering. In this respect it has many
competitors, but bears favourable comparison with
the best of these. When the First Edition appeared
in 1969 the fact that S.I. units were used throughout
gave it a temporary advantage for teaching pur-
poses in Britain. This special position has since been
lost but the more fundamental merits of the book
remain.
The writing is clear and concise, and the many
graphs and tables are excellent. There are some
in-text reproductions of photographs which, no
doubt for reasons of economy, are reproduced
in a form which is only adequate, but otherwise
the publishers have made a splendid job of design
and production. Although the book deals with
technical matters, the treatment given does not
assume more than an elementary knowledge of
mathematics and physics, or of building con-
struction. On the whole it seems to be at the right
level for its intended users, and the author's hope
that it will be useful not only to students and
practitioners--which it undoubtedly will--but also
to clients, is fully justified. The book is open to
criticism on this point. Some readers may wish that
a deeper analytical treatment were given of a
number of matters but this would have made the
book much longer and in most cases more mathe-
matical treatments are already available in special-
ised works. There are also places where the reader
might hope for additional help in decision-making
or for more detailed recommendations, but the
subject is one which still requires much more
research, particularly into ways of organising
knowledge in relation to the decision-making
process. There seems little to stop the book going
through many editions, and new material will
doubtless be added as it becomes available in a
suitable form.
C. B. WILSON
The contents cover the basic engineering pro-
perties of soils such as permeability, compres-
sibility and shear strength and the classical approach
to problems of estimating settlement, bearing
capacity of foundations, earth pressure on retaining
walls and stability of slopes. Other topics include
sgil classification, site investigation, electro-
chemical properties of clay minerals, and piled
foundations. This new edition differs little from the
first edition, but brief descriptions of some geo-