Understanding UK construction professional services exports: definitions and characteristics

Services are very important to the UK balance of trade; a surplus has been recorded for trade in services every year since 1966. Construction professional services exports (CPS), which cover architecture, engineering and surveying (AES), have also increased, contributing over £3bn to the UK trade balance in 2007. The changing environment of construction professional services exports complicates the validity of the characteristics and definitions of services as described in the research literature and official export statistics. Through semi-structured interviews undertaken with large consulting engineers and a round-table discussion with industry and government representatives, the research found that the impact of globalisation and the changes in the construction business environment, such as increasing foreign ownership and changing forms of procurement, are not fully reflected in the official statistics. There have also been rapid changes in technology, procurement and methods of delivery which have impacted exporting AES firms and a more appropriate set of characteristics is needed to better reflect the project-specific and knowledge-intensive nature of AES firms.

Integration of chaos theory and mathematical models in building simulation: Part II: Conceptual frameworks

Current mathematical models in building research have been limited in most studies to linear dynamics systems. A literature review of past studies investigating chaos theory approaches in building simulation models suggests that as a basis chaos model is valid and can handle the increasing complexity of building systems that have dynamic interactions among all the distributed and hierarchical systems on the one hand, and the environment and occupants on the other. The review also identifies the paucity of literature and the need for a suitable methodology of linking chaos theory to mathematical models in building design and management studies. This study is broadly divided into two parts and presented in two companion papers. Part (I), published in the previous issue, reviews the current state of the chaos theory models as a starting point for establishing theories that can be effectively applied to building simulation models. Part (II) develop conceptual frameworks that approach current model methodologies from the theoretical perspective provided by chaos theory, with a focus on the key concepts and their potential to help to better understand the nonlinear dynamic nature of built environment systems. Case studies are also presented which demonstrate the potential usefulness of chaos theory driven models in a wide variety of leading areas of building research. This study distills the fundamental properties and the most relevant characteristics of chaos theory essential to (1) building simulation scientists and designers (2) initiating a dialogue between scientists and engineers, and (3) stimulating future research on a wide range of issues involved in designing and managing building environmental systems.

Built environment education, research and practice: integrating diverse interests to make an impact

The role of the academic in the built environment seems generally to be not well understood or articulated. While this problem is not unique to our field, there are plenty of examples in a wide range of academic disciplines where the academic role has been fully articulated. But built environment academics have tended not to look beyond their own literature and their own vocational context in trying to give meaning to their academic work. The purpose of this keynote presentation is to explore the context of academic work generally and the connections between education, research and practice in the built environment, specifically. By drawing on ideas from the sociology of the professions, the role of universities, and the fundamentals of social science research, a case is made that helps to explain the kind of problems that routinely obstruct academic progress in our field. This discussion reveals that while there are likely to be great weaknesses in much of what is published and taught in the built environment, it is not too great a stretch to provide a more robust understanding and a good basis for developing our field in a way that would enable us collectively to make a major contribution to theory-building, theory-testing and to make a good stab at tackling some of the problems facing society at large. There is no reason to disregard the fundamental academic disciplines that underpin our knowledge of the built environment. If we contextualise our work in these more fundamental disciplines, there is every reason to think that we can have a much greater impact that we have experienced to date.

The comfort, energy and health implications of London’s urban heat island

The urban heat island (UHI) is a well-known effect of urbanisation and is particularly important in world megacities. Overheating in such cities is expected to be exacerbated in the future as a result of further urban growth and climate change. Demonstrating and quantifying the impact of individual design interventions on the UHI is currently difficult using available software tools. The tools developed in the LUCID (‘The Development of a Local Urban Climate Model and its Application to the Intelligent Design of Cities’) research project will enable the related impacts to be better understood, quantified and addressed. This article summarises the relevant literature and reports on the ongoing work of the project.

'Thou glorious kingdome, thou chiefe of empires': Persia in seventeenth-century travel literature

Bringing together a range of little-considered materials, this article assesses the portrayal of Persia in seventeenth-century travel literature and drama. In particular it argues that such texts use their awareness of Islamic sectarian division to portray Persia as a good potential trading partner in preference to the Ottoman Empire. A close reading of John Day, William Rowley and George Wilkins’ The Travailes of the Three English Brothers (1607) demonstrates how the play develops a fantasy model of how relations between Persia and England might function. The potential unity between England and Persia, imagined in terms of both religion and trade, demonstrates how Persia figured as a model ‘other England’ in early modern literature.

Plutarch's 'Lives' and the critical reader

This paper analyses the kind of reader constructed in the Lives and the response expected of that reader. It begins by attempting a typology of moralising in the Lives. Plutarch does sometimes make general 'gnomic' statements about right and wrong, and occasionally passes explicit judgement on a subject's behaviour. In addition, the language with which Plutarch describes character is inherently moralistic; and even when he does not pass explicit judgment, Plutarch can rely on a common set of notions about what makes behaviour virtuous or vicious. However, the application of any moral lessons is left to the reader's own judgement. Furthermore, Plutarch's use of multiple focalisations means that the reader is sometimes presented with varying ways of looking at the same individual or the same historical situation. In addition, many incidents or anecdotes are marked by 'multivalence': that is, they resist reduction to a single moral message or lesson. In such cases, the reader is encouraged to exercise his or her own critical faculties. Indeed, the prologues which precede many pairs of Lives and the synkriseis which follow them sometimes explicitly invite the reader's participation in the work of judging. The syncritic structure of the Parallel Lives also invites the reader's participation, as do the varying perspectives provided by a corpus of overlapping Lives. In fact, the presence of a critical, engaged reader is presupposed by the agonistic nature of much of Greek literature, and of several texts in the Moralia which stage opposing viewpoints or arguments. Plutarch himself argues for such a reader in his How the young man should listen to poems.

Utopia and education in the seventeenth century: Bacon’s 'Salomon’s House' and its influence

New Worlds Reflected provides a significant contribution both to the history of utopian literature and travel, and to the wider cultural and intellectual history of the time, assembling original essays from scholars interested in representations of the globe and new and ideal worlds in the period from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, and in the imaginative reciprocal responsiveness of utopian and travel writing. Chapter 7 looks at the influence of Salomon’s House in Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis (1627) on later seventeenth-century educational utopias.