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Healthy Buildings: A Design Primer for a Living Environment by Bill
Holdsworth and Anthony F. Sealey, Longman, pp 148, £45

This book is about building design, energy use, radiation hazards and
air quality. It promotes energy-efficient buildings, low-energy ‘natural’
products and traditional or innovative ways of combating cold, heat and
noise. But, while sympathetic to the authors’ aims, I am astonished at the
poor writing, poor editing and naive science that Healthy Buildings offers.

Anthony Sealey is an architect and a Fellow of the Royal Meteorological
Society, and has taught science. Bill Holdsworth claims no building services
or other engineering qualification but set up a ‘consulting group whose
prime base was building services and energy engineering’. They refer frequently
to their ‘design system’, Echoes (Environmentally Controlled Human Operational
Enclosed/External Space), that appears primarily to be a set of vague or
obscure guidelines such as this, which appears under the puzzling heading
‘Lines of sight for healthy living buildings’: ‘The building spot must be
geologically undisturbed . . . ascertain that there is no disturbance of
cosmic and terrestrial influence on the human life form (DNA) . . . take
care of harmonic measures, properties and forms’.

The authors dwell on current building concerns such as ‘sick building
syndrome’ (buildings associated with higher than normal absenteeism and
sickness rates, complaints about air quality, headaches, eye problems, dry
mouth and blocked nose), legionnaires’ disease and radon. They also make
great play of more contentious issues such as the effects of electromagnetic
radiation. They state that ‘electromagnetic rays have a wavelength of the
order of 1 cm . . . Natural rays occur in underground watercourses, geological
faults, mineral veins, oil and gas reserves, geomatic (sic) zones, and growing
zones (sic). Artificial rays are now occurring from . . . the mind (meditation,
music, sound, the DNA structure).’ Where two underground streams cross,
there is a ‘geopathic disturbance’ and the ‘geomagnetic flux’ drops from
’65 000 nT’ to ’53 000 nT’ (unit not defined). This is known as Yin, and
is a ‘discharge field’. Yang occurs on geological fault lines.

Examples of poor science and half-baked ideas abound. For example, part
of a design for a football stadium with a car park suggests to the authors
that ‘car exhausts could be collected and converted to provide fuel for
adapted gas-turbine engines’. An energy consumption of ‘126 (KW/m ²)/²â±ð²¹°ù’
(confusion between energy and power) is quoted for one building while for
another it is 111 (KW/m ²)/hour’ – try to visualise this!

On a more positive note, the authors do include many interesting examples
of building design, both traditional and innovative. In Poland and Germany,
underground ‘thermolabyrinths’, through which air is drawn for summer cooling
and winter heating, are incorporated into house design. The case studies
would have benefited from more detail and analysis. The authors demonstrate
the need for architects to consider comfort, health and amenity from the
outset of a project; when the design subsequently requires extensive changes,
this can only be a palliative measure.

The authors call for more holistic thinking in building; it is a pity
they do not do justice to their cause.

Nick Spencer-Chapman is a civil engineer and senior lecturer at Oxford
Polytechnic.