Emerging research agendas in architecture:
Environmental Research
Workshop Report

Raymond J. Cole, PhD,
University of British Columbia (Lead)
Mir M. Ali, PhD,
University of Illinois Urbana Champaign
Gordon E. Mills, FAIA,
Durrant Group Inc.
James Determan Jr., AIA,
Cochran Stephenson & Donkervoet Inc.

Raymond J. Cole:
Future building-related environmental research will invariably be influenced by three key factors.

• First, it would be necessary to cast "environmental" research integral to other current architectural research domains. Indeed, future research to address "environmental" issues will invariably be more holistic in its framing and execution, and will be more directly related to practice. That is, boundaries will become increasingly blurred.
  
  
• Second, the rate of change in public and political awareness of climate change and environmental degradation will translate into a demand for significant improvements in building performance to be made in shorter time-frames. Research will have to address this urgency and address significant leaps in performance rather than incremental change.
  
  
• Thirdly, the environmental agenda cannot be isolated from a host of other pressing/emerging societal concerns—security, healthcare, aging populations, information and communications technologies as well as climate change and environmental degradation—and it will be necessary to understand the ways that they collectively influence building design and their consequence for building environmental research. Architecture research should build on its inherent strengths of synthesis/system-thinking of the discipline it serves.

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