Profile

Biography

Philip Steadman studied Architecture at Cambridge from 1960 to 1965, and after graduating joined the newly formed Centre for Land Use and Built Form Studies at Cambridge (later the Martin Centre). He worked on university planning, and on people’s use of time in towns. In 1972 he was a visiting research fellow at Princeton University. In 1977 he went to the Open University to join a research group brought together by Lionel March, the Centre for Configurational Studies. He was the Director of this group until 1998. He worked first at the OU on mathematical methods for representing and enumerating small rectangular plans. This led on to studies of the British housing stock, and to studies of non-domestic building types. He has been particularly interested in the relationship of energy use both to the forms of buildings, and to land use patterns and transport networks in cities. From the early ‘90s he worked for the UK government, with a large team, to build a model of energy use in the entire non-domestic building stock of England and Wales, whose purpose was to test policies for cutting CO2 emissions. He has also carried out, with colleagues, a series of studies of fuel use in buildings and in transport in cities using integrated land-use and transport simulation models. Both these programmes of work continue at UCL, which he joined in 1999.

He has published two books on geometry and architecture: The Geometry of Environment (with Lionel March, 1971), and Architectural Morphology (1983). His study of The Evolution of Designs: Biological Analogy in Architecture and the Applied Arts came out in 1979 and was republished in an updated edition in 2008. He has also written books on energy and the built environment, American  cities, the effects of nuclear attack on Britain, and the painting technique of  Johannes Vermeer (Vermeer’s Camera, 2001). He is presently working on a book about building types, considered from both historical and geometrical points of view, with the provisional title Building Types and Built Forms.

Research Summary

Philip Steadman is Emeritus Professor of Urban and Built Form Studies in the Bartlett and a Research Fellow in the UCL Energy Institute. He works on the use of fuels in the national non-domestic building stock, and on the relationship of patterns of land uses and transport networks to the use of
energy at the urban scale.  He was a partner in the PROPOLIS project (2000-2004), funded by the European Commission, whose purpose was to compare seven European cities in terms of their sustainability. 

He worked during the 1990s with a team of up to 15 people, on the development of a database and model of energy use in the non-domestic building stock of Britain, for the British Government. This National Non-Domestic Building Stock database uses property taxation data and other sources, and covers some 1.7 million properties in England and Wales. The work continued in the four-year multi-university Carbon Reduction in Buildings (CaRB) project, funded by EPSRC and the Carbon Trust; and in the EPSRC-funded project ‘Energy and Building Data Frameworks’, completed in 2010. Professor Steadman also took part in the three-year interdisciplinary LUCID study of the urban heat island in London and its likely medical effects, which started in 2007. In addition he works on a series of issues to do with the representation of building geometry, and is currently writing a book on Built Forms and Building Types.

Research outputs

1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9

Research activities