THE SILENT HISTORY OF VERNACULAR: EMERGENT PROPERTIES AS BACKGROUND FOR STUDYING TECHNOLOGICAL EVOLUTION IN THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
- Publication Type:
- Article
- Issue Date:
- 2007-10-05T02:23:32Z
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All complex systems, which includes buildings and the built environment, possess emergent
properties. Complex systems are systems that are composed of numerous interacting parts.
Emergent properties are high-level behaviours that arise spontaneously as a result of the structural
organisation of, and the interactions between, the individual parts and properties of the system.
Thermal performance is an emergent property of buildings and of the built environment. It is the
result of the way in which the physical components of a built environment and their thermal
properties interact.
Understanding the emergent thermal properties of the built environment is important because there
has been an empirically verifiable long term trend in the way classes of buildings have altered over
time. Vernacular buildings that have persisted for long spans of time possessed technologies that
‘managed’ the emergent thermal properties, and their inherent thermal contradictions, whether their
builders or occupants have been aware of this or not: they are silent technologies. Classes of
buildings that did not possess these silent technologies have, over time, fallen out of use and have
not reappeared. As buildings have become ever more complex, these silent technologies have
become ever more sophisticated overall in their ‘management’ of the emergent thermal properties.
This has allowed the overall level of thermal choices and control available to building occupants to
increase over time, regardless of their contradictory natures.
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