Introduction

With the publication, in 1969, of The Architecture of the Well-tempered Environment ¹ Reyner Banham restored the environmental function of buildings to its rightful position as a fundamental concern of architectural theory and practice. It is curious that, as the technologies of environmental control evolved through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this historic function of all buildings was progressively relegated to a secondary place in the discourse. In the schools of architecture it was found as a branch of building science, relying for its substance upon the achievements of the building scientists in quantifying the environmental problem – be it of heat, light or sound – and in practice it had effectively been handed over to the emerging profession of mechanical and electrical consultants.