Rough Guide to Sustainability: 3rd Edition

This comprehensively updated, restructured and expanded new edition of the no-nonsense student and practice primer, equips the contemporary architect to deal with the profession's most important challenge: designing buildings for sustainability.

Written by Brian Edwards, Professor of Sustainable Architecture at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, School of Architecture, this book sets out the environmental, professional and governmental context underlying sustainable principles, as well as outlining the science, measures and design solutions that designers need to adopt to meet twenty-first century definitions of responsible architecture. The third edition includes updated design advice on building types, a useful history of green architecture education and new material prepared in anticipation of fresh international agreements at the Copenhagen Conference on Global Warming in 2009.

Stunningly redesigned and extensively illustrated throughout, this guide will appeal to design and built environment students and professionals, and anyone keen to cut through to the facts about sustainability.

Rough Guide to Sustainability is published in association with Earthscan.

About the Author

Brian Edwards

Dr Brian Edwards is Associate Professor of Sustainable Architecture at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, School of Architecture in Copenhagen. He is an internationally recognised expert on sustainable architecture and a highly respected author of many books, six of which have been specifically on green issues. Brian has held numerous positions of responsibility within the field of architecture, including that of sustainability advisor to the Royal Institute of British Architects, 2000-2002.

Featured Reviews

Review by Geoff Wilkinson, Vice Chair, CIOB Building Standard Faculty, and Building Regulations Columnist for Architects Journal

In this book Brian Edwards tries to achieve the impossible by pulling together all of the complex strands of sustainability into one easy to read volume.

Brian is Associate professor of Sustainable Architecture at the Royal Danish Academy so it is not surprising that this is an excellently researched publication. Having read the first (2001) edition I was expecting to see some minor updates and amendment, but was shocked at just how different this version is. In just 9 years the sustainability agenda has moved so far that this edition is almost completely rewritten and is substantially larger.

The arrangement of the chapters has been changed, and those studying the subject will find it a much better fit to the curriculum. Students are likely to find the author's 4 self-contained essays on topics such as aesthetics of green design particularly useful. Equally those in practice can easily dip in and out of the sections as and when they need to know more about a particular subject area. The book has also been updated to include best practice exemplas from the likes of Ken Yeang, BIG, Eco-systema and BDP architects.

I found the authors self assessment toolkit a very useful tool for those new to the subject, and a lot more user friendly at concept stage than the various guides produced by LEED. BREEAM etc, in fact I would recommend buying this edition for the toolkit alone!