A部分

The Recovery of Natural Environments in Architecture by Professor Alan Short is the culmination of 30 years of research and award-winning green building design by Short and colleagues in Architecture, Engineering, Applied Maths and Earth Sciences at the University of Cambridge.

‘The crisis in building design is already here,’ said Short. ‘Policy makers think you can solve energy and building problems with gadgets. You can’t. As global temperatures continue to rise, we are going to continue to squander more and more energy on keeping our buildings mechanically cool until we have run out of capacity.’

《建筑中的自然环境恢复》是由Alan Short教授撰写的，结合了剑桥大学建筑、工程、应用数学和地球科学领域的研究成果，包括30年的研究和屡获殊荣的绿色建筑设计。

Short表示：“建筑设计的危机已经到来。政策制定者认为可以通过小工具来解决能源和建筑问题，但事实并非如此。随着全球气温继续上升，我们将继续浪费越来越多的源来保持建筑物的机械冷却，直到我们的能力耗尽。”

B部分

Short is calling for a sweeping reinvention of how skyscrapers and major public buildings are designed – to end the reliance on sealed buildings which exist solely via the life support’ system of vast air conditioning units.

Instead, he shows it is entirely possible to accommodate natural ventilation and cooling in large buildings by looking into the past, before the widespread introduction of air conditioning systems, which were ‘relentlessly and aggressively marketed’ by their inventors.

Short呼吁彻底改变摩天大楼和重要公共建筑的设计方式，摒弃完全依赖庞大空调系统的密封建筑。

相反，他展示了在大型建筑物中实现自然通风和冷却是完全可能的，方法是回顾过去，在空调系统广泛引入之前，空调系统是由其发明者“无情和有力地推销”的。

C部分

Short points out that to make most contemporary buildings habitable, they have to be sealed and air conditioned. The energy use and carbon emissions this generates is spectacular and largely unnecessary. Buildings in the West account for 40-50% of electricity usage, generating substantial carbon emissions, and the rest of the world is catching up at a frightening rate. Short regards glass, steel and air-conditioned skyscrapers as symbols of status, rather than practical ways of meeting our requirements.

D部分

Short’s book highlights a developing and sophisticated art and science of ventilating buildings through the 19th and earlier-20th centuries, including the design of ingeniously ventilated hospitals. Of particular interest were those built to the designs of John Shaw Billings, including the first Johns Hopkins Hospital in the US city of Baltimore (1873-1889).

‘We spent three years digitally modelling Billings’ final designs,’ says Short. ‘We put pathogens* in the airstreams, modelled for someone with tuberculosis (TB) coughing in the wards and we found the ventilation systems in the room would have kept other patients safe from harm.

Short的书强调了19世纪和20世纪早期建筑通风的发展和复杂技术，包括设计巧妙的通风医院。特别值得关注的是根据John Shaw Billings的设计建造的医院，包括美国巴尔的摩约翰霍普金斯医院（1873-1889）。

Short说：“我们花了三年时间对Billings的最终设计进行数字建模。我们在气流中放入了病原体*，模拟了肺结核患者在病房咳嗽，我们发现房间内的通风系统能够保护其他患者免受伤害。”

E部分

‘We discovered that 19th-century hospital wards could generate up to 24 air changes an hour – that’s similar to the performance of a modern-day, computer-controlled operating theatre. We believe you could build wards based on these principles now.

Single rooms are not appropriate for all patients. Communal wards appropriate for certain patients – older people with dementia, for example – would work just as well in today’s hospitals, at a fraction of the energy cost.’

Professor Short contends the mindset and skill-sets behind these designs have been completely lost, lamenting the disappearance of expertly designed theatres, opera houses, and other buildings where up to half the volume of the building was given over to ensuring everyone got fresh air.
 

“我们发现19世纪的医院病房可以每小时产生多达24次的空气更换，这与现代计算机控制的手术室的性能相似。我们相信现在可以基于这些原则建造病房。”

“单人病房并不适合所有患者。适用于特定患者的共享病房，例如老年人患有痴呆症，可以在今天的医院中同样有效，能源成本仅为一小部分。”

Short教授认为，这些设计背后的思维方式和技能已经完全丧失，对那些致力于确保每个人都能呼吸新鲜空气的建筑物，如剧院、歌剧院等的消失感到遗憾。

F部分

Much of the ingenuity present in 19th-century hospital and building design was driven by a panicked public clamouring for buildings that could protect against what was thought to be the lethal threat of miasmas – toxic air that spread disease. Miasmas were feared as the principal agents of disease and epidemics for centuries, and were used to explain the spread of infection from the Middle Ages right through to the cholera outbreaks in London and Paris during the 1850s. Foul air, rather than germs, was believed to be the main driver of ‘hospital fever’, leading to disease and frequent death. The prosperous steered clear of hospitals.

While miasma theory has been long since disproved, Short has for the last 30 years advocated a return to some of the building design principles produced in its wake.

19世纪的医院和建筑设计中的许多巧妙之处是由公众的恐慌驱使的，他们迫切需要能够抵抗被认为是致命的“瘴气”的建筑物，瘴气是传播疾病的有毒空气。数个世纪以来，瘴气被视为疾病和流行病的主要因素，并被用来解释从中世纪到19世纪50年代伦敦和巴黎的霍乱爆发的感染传播。人们相信，恶臭空气而不是细菌是“医院热”的主要原因，导致疾病和频繁死亡。富人们远离医院。

尽管瘴气理论早已被证明是错误的，但Short在过去30年中一直主张回归在其之后产生的一些建筑设计原则。

G部分

Today, huge amounts of a building’s space and construction cost are given over to air conditioning. ‘But I have designed and built a series of buildings over the past three decades which have tried to reinvent some of these ideas and then measure what happens.

‘To go forward into our new low-energy, low-carbon future, we would be well advised to look back at design before our high-energy, high-carbon present appeared. What is surprising is what a rich legacy we have abandoned.’

如今，建筑物的大部分空间和建造成本都用于空调。“但是过去三十年来，我设计和建造了一系列建筑物，试图重新创造一些这些想法，并测量结果。”

“为了迈向我们新的低能耗、低碳未来，我们最好回顾一下在高能耗、高碳现状出现之前的设计。令人惊讶的是，我们抛弃了如此丰富的遗产。”

H部分

Successful examples of Short’s approach include the Queen’s Building at De Montfort University in Leicester. Containing as many as 2,000 staff and students, the entire building is naturally ventilated, passively cooled and naturally lit, including the two largest auditoria, each seating more than 150 people. The award-winning building uses a fraction of the electricity of comparable buildings in the UK.

Short contends that glass skyscrapers in London and around the world will become a liability over the next 20 or 30 years if climate modelling predictions and energy price rises come to pass as expected.

Short的这种方法的成功案例包括德蒙福特大学莱斯特市的女王大楼。这座建筑物容纳多达2,000名员工和学生，整个建筑物采用自然通风、被动冷却和自然照明，包括两个最大的礼堂，每个礼堂可容纳150多人。这座屡获殊荣的建筑物的用电量仅为英国其他类似建筑物的一小部分。

Short认为，伦敦和世界各地的玻璃摩天大楼在未来20或30年内，如果气候模型预测和能源价格上涨如预期那样发生，将成为一种负担。

I部分

He is convinced that sufficiently cooled skyscrapers using the natural environment can be produced in almost any climate. He and his team have worked on hybrid buildings in the harsh climates of Beijing and Chicago – built with natural ventilation assisted by back-up air conditioning – which, surprisingly perhaps, can be switched off more than half the time on milder days and during the spring and autumn.

Short looks at how we might reimagine the cities, offices and homes of the future. Maybe it’s time we changed our outlook.

他相信，在几乎任何气候条件下，都可以建造具有足够冷却效果的摩天大楼，利用自然环境。他和他的团队在北京和芝加哥这样恶劣气候的地区工作过，建造了使用自然通风辅备用空调的混合建筑。令人惊讶的是，在较温和的天气和春秋季节，这些建筑物可以关闭空调时间超过一半。

Short探讨了如何重新构想未来的城市、办公室和住宅。也许是时候改变我们的观念了。