Our Ideals

THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT AND CLIMATE CHANGE UNIT
Built Environment & Climate Change Unit: is the research unit. We believe that climate change and the built environment are related in that the environment is affected by climate change. We care for the environment because it is meant to be inhabited by humans and every other creation including flora and fauna, and also sea creatures.
While we are mindful by researching into how to mitigate carbon emissions from factories we design, we are as well mindful of the behavior of buildings under the emerging challenges for the benefit of its occupants. In mass housing, we are also mindful of even animals and birds within the estate, the result of which would make human habitation convenient and comfortable. Our research work does not stop with buildings alone. We are looking into the effect of carbon emissions from machines of all sorts including vehicles and their effects on human habitation. A part of the unit is attempting to consider the effect on general human welfare even of carbon emissions from aircraft. We believe that architecture has gone beyond the normal design, construction, and supervision of buildings. We are searching for a new normal for it because the effect of climate change has impacted human habitation immensely.

Addressing Climate Change Through Architectural Morphology
The use of tools and the adoption of caves as constructed shelter have evolved into complex areas of industry and advancement for humanity. The ability to engineer ways around problems has been humanity’s great strength, but despite the scientific advancement and technological conquest, humans and the built environment are still governed and greatly controlled by the power of the earth. In an irony twist, it is the very technological advancement that has solved many of our problems and has now come back to cause many global problems such as the global warming and climate change. Of all industry professionals in the world, the construction industry; especially architects are hit with the highest responsibility of sourcing for a solution through devising means to mitigate the effects of this climate change. Climate change is a reoccurring situation faced from generations and it is undeniably a challenge to the built environment. Architectural morphology has been described as the evolution of buildings, including the evolution of design concepts from conception to final construction. Clearly, buildings and their construction methods and materials have evolved with time and have formed part of the anthropological climate change causes. Buildings form and function affects the productivity of the buildings, at the same time, the productivity of a building is directly proportional to the building achieving its potential in the built environment. The aim of this research paper is to investigate the harnessing of natural occurrence in the environment into creating a building form to blend with its natural environment.

This investigation will include Bayesian analysis, for the probabilistic analysis and multi objective optimization as the decision method. Building form has evolved as humans have evolved through age and time. The best way to peacefully combat effects of climate change in the built environment, is through designing and building climate change resilient buildings not just with sustainable materials but with forms that articulate nature, and that is to empower the built environment from the natural power of the earth. Site analysis as a preliminary is mostly carried out to investigate the soil type and topography for building foundation, site weather for building fabric and prevailing winds for determining the type and sizes of opening to put in the eventual building. It is also about carrying out site analysis to integrate into creating a building form and shape to blend with the environment.

In an effort to research into the built environment and climate change, in particular the effect of buildings, we have sent our staff who heads the unit to embark on an intensive relevant study. She took part as lead in presenting a paper at the International Building Performance Simulation Association IBPSA conference in Rome in September 2019. Below is the paper as presented.
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The paper is also linked here: http://www.ibpsa.org/proceedings/BS2019/BS2019_210914.pdf