Energy efficiency refurbishments - principles, details, examples
Clemens Richarz and Christina Schulz, Edition Detail Green Books £46

Publisher Detail is committing to helping architects through the maze of sustainable refurbishment, and while its intention is stated at the outset, how well it does this is debatable. This could partly be due to how the information is presented – the book comes over as extremely dense – pages are packed with information, text and images and can seem impenetrable. Greater editing of the text to convey ideas more directly would have helped, as would larger graphs and tables, and there’s a bias to German DIN standards and directives which may baffle UK readers. The book’s refurbishment theme made me think there would be more photographs of projects before and after upgrading but there aren’t; images are used sparingly. Illustrated projects with supporting case studies might have helped contextualise refurbishment and allow architects, and perhaps their clients, to see the benefits of the works. Undoubtedly a detailed and technical approach to the subject, I’ve seen other books convey its principles more effectively.