This title, from a well-regarded and established expert, explores the changing relationship between the poetic intentions and technical means of environmental design in architecture. Working thematically and chronologically from the eighteenth century to the present day, these essays reach beyond the narrow conventional view of the purely technical to encompass the poetics of architecture, redefining the historiography of environmental design.

Through an assessment of the works of several leading figures throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Hawkes deftly shows the growth of environmental awareness and adds a consideration of the qualitative dimension of the environment to the existing, primarily technological, narratives. Essays on earlier buildings highlight the response of pioneering architects to the ¿new¿ technologies of mechanical services and their influence on the form of buildings, while the late twentieth-century design is explored in particular depth to illustrate individual strands of the environmental diversity of modern practice.