Preface

As I wrote in the preface to the first edition, this book was originally triggered by a range of questions I had been asked over the years. They were questions about information, representation, digitization and management. The more I quoted standard answers from standard literature, the more restless I became because I perceived a lack of coherence in my answers. There seemed to be too many holes and grey areas, and, rather more worryingly, too few connections between the various parts of the underlying body of knowledge.

This led to a number of other, more fundamental questions I had to ask myself before attempting to answer the ones I was being asked. I tried to peel off one by one the multiple layers of the phenomena that intrigued me, without losing sight of the whole. Thankfully, I was able to find enough enlightenment in literature. There have been quite a few clever people who attacked the same questions before me and managed to come up with convincing answers. My own contribution lies primarily in the interpretation of their theories and the connections I suggest between them and with the domain of buildings.

Note that in contrast to earlier publications of mine, I talk about buildings rather than architecture. The reason for doing so is that buildings and built environments have a larger scope than architecture, as suggested by the relation between the Dutch terms ‘bouwkunde’ and ‘architectuur’: the latter is a specialization within the former. It is unfortunate that both are translated into English as ‘architecture’ (the less said about terms like ‘building science’ the better).

This second edition was motivated by a few new questions that emerged after I started using the textbook in my course. One thing a teacher quickly learns is that working with a textbook is like opening a can of worms: practically every subject the textbook touches upon calls for more attention, for further explanations and for space in the book. Resisting this call is not always possible but, at the same time, expanding the scope of a textbook can be exhausting to its authors and confusing to its readers. So, it has to be kept within a pragmatic size, determined by the authors’ expertise and the length of the courses it serves. Within these constraints, the textbook must be allowed to grow organically towards a fuller picture of its subjects and their context.

I am grateful to the people who formulated the theories discussed in this book. I have learned a lot from them. More directly, I was assisted by a number of people who deserve my profound thanks: Saskia Roselaar for her thorough proofreading of the first edition; Monique de Bont for the meticulous copyright control and Jacqueline Michielen-van de Riet and Michiel de Jong for managing the production process of both editions. Polyxeni Mantzou, Paul Chan and Thanos Economou reviewed the first edition. I am indebted to them all for their time and constructive criticism.

I am also thankful to the students who took my course for their many insightful questions and remarks. The first edition was used in 2019 in the Information Management course of the MBE master track at the Faculty of Architecture & the Built Environment (Faculteit Bouwkunde, in Dutch), Delft University of Technology, and then in 2020 and 2021 in the online versions of the course under COVID-19 lockdown. I hope we will not have to continue teaching online in 2022, even though the textbook was of great help when this was the only option. Given the educational limitations of online lectures and workshops, I was greatly consoled by the thought that students had the opportunity to use the textbook in order to cover what we might have missed in our live sessions.

A.K.

Delft, 01.02.2022