A bridge too far?

ENERGY-EFFICIENT ARCHITECTURE: BASICS FOR PLANNING AND CONSTRUCTION

By Roberto Gonzalo and Karl J. Habermann. Basel: Birkhauser. 2006. [euro]79.90

It comes as no surprise that one of the authors of this attractively produced book was editor-in-chief of DETAIL magazine. Clearly laid out and generously illustrated, it also features some well-designed buildings, mostly from Austria, Germany and Switzerland. The scope of the book ranges from urban layout to built detail. Principles and strategies of urban design are explored, then illustrated with examples. The same is then done for building design, and finally for detail design. The aim of the book is 'to build a bridge between the available knowledge and expertise of the specialists in building sciences and technologies on the one hand and the great majority of those working in the sector on the other' (authors' words).

All very sensible and methodical, but somehow the book fails to deliver what it promises, and I wonder who it is aimed at. There are useful drawn details and the comparative U-values and heating energy consumption values for each scheme are revealing (the two British schemes fall far behind the rest), but a lot of what is written is obvious to the point of sounding trite. For example, is it really necessary to state 'The position of the sun changes over the course of the seasons and the day' or 'Daylight intensity diminishes rapidly as the distance from the window increases'?

There are other more useful and cheaper (this one is [pounds sterling]60) books which deal with the same subject.