This thesis, as its title suggests, is primarily concerned with the potentials and the limitations of applying, from a design point of view, a structuralist paradigm to the study of climate and built environment interaction. It begins with examining a number of theoretical and methodological questions which pertain to architecture in general and to architectural climatology in particular and proposes a strategy organized within the epistemological context of structuralism as an alternative way of dealing with architectural climatological problems within the general process of production of the built environment. The work is presented in four interrelated parts. Part I explains the need of approaching the climate-built environment interaction through the dialectics between its physical and its semantic dimensional, an approach which has boon called here "ecoclimatic". Part II examines systematically the conceptual structure underlying ecoclimatic phenomena and develops a taxonomic framework for these phenomena within the broader context of architectural empirical research. Part III presents a brief review of the main research trends of architectural climatology and attempts to evaluate them with reference to the conceptual framework of the "ecoclimatic approach" developed in the previous parts. The discussion is also extended to certain areas of ecoclimatic research which suggest both the necessity and the possibility of establishing more comprehensive conceptual bases for architectural climatological research and design. Part IV is concerned with the development of a structuralist methodological framework for the study of ecoclimatic phenomena. It examines the applicability of different structuralist strategies to deal with the climatological problems of the built environment and, in a general sense, with broader architectural problems in terms of both research and design. The discussion is supplemented by two papers produced collectively by the author and his colleaques A. Awadalla and Dr. T. Kotsiopoulos. These papers, published in 1976 and 1977, are included here in their original form as Appentix I and Appentix II respectively. Finally Part IV is followed by a Postscript where the general conclusions of the thesis are summarised and certain orientations for further research are proposed. These results suggest that the present microclimatic approach to the climatic research and design of the built environment, though useful in certain levels, is on the whole inadequate to provide a comprehensive conceptual and methodological base for architectural climatology. It is suggested that this inadequacy cannot be effectively overcome simply by an increase of research activity within the present mioroclimatic framework of research, but only through careful considerations of the semantic dimension of the climatic problems of the built environment. The ecoclimatic approach has been developed on the basis of these considerations and it is proposed here as a comprehensive conceptual and methodological framework for architectural climatological research and design. The conclusions reached in this thesis are theoretical in nature and they intend to provide some additional research and design tools for the study of the climatic problems of the built environment rather than to give answers to these problems in the form of final statements.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:657300 |
| Date | January 1978 |
| Creators | Maravelias, T. G. |
| Publisher | University of Edinburgh |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Source | http://hdl.handle.net/1842/18406 |
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