Abstract
In the first half of the 19th-century building services were the subject of extensive experimental inquiries. In addition to technical trails these inquiries also covered research into human factors, such as the perception of indoor climates and air quality. This chapter investigates how studies into the nature of thermal comfort, undertaken under the direction of the physician David Boswell Reid, had informed the design of the environmental control system in the debating chamber of the UK Houses of Commons. The studies included experiments with test chambers, undertaken in Reid’s Laboratory between 1834 and 1836, and empirical observations inside the two temporary debating chambers for the Houses of Commons (1836–51) and Houses of Lords (1838–47). The debating chambers enabled Reid to test and refine his concepts under real-life conditions, involving politicians directly in the process of evaluating and improving the indoor climate.
Highlights
Schoenefeldt, Henrik (2019) The Houses of Parliament and Reid's Inquiries into User Perception
This paper provides a brief overview of the role of user perception in the development of Reid ventilation system for the Palace of Westminster
Empirical approaches The working methods that were deployed in the development of the Houses of Parliament's ventilation system built on scientific working methods that Reid had developed in the early 1830s to study thermal comfort and air quality
Summary
The working methods that were deployed in the development of the Houses of Parliament's ventilation system built on scientific working methods that Reid had developed in the early 1830s to study thermal comfort and air quality. 7 During warm weather the rate would need increasing to 40 to 60 cubic feet per minute if a comfortable range of temperatures was to be maintained without the use of artificial cooling,[8] but he observed that the ventilation rate could only be raised to a certain level, before strong internal air currents, rather than high air temperatures, became the main cause of thermal discomfort.[9] Inside his private laboratory in Edinburgh Reid constructed various experimental rooms to test different ways of introducing and extracting air in sealed rooms.[10]. Aiming to experimentally determine the conditions at which people felt comfortable, participants were placed inside these rooms and tasked with reporting on their experience of the state of the atmosphere and the physical sensation produced by air currents of varying velocities, degree of diffusion and temperature These experiments were not dissimilar to the climate chamber studies undertaken by the Willis Carrier in the 1940s.13. These experiments were not dissimilar to the climate chamber studies undertaken by the Willis Carrier in the 1940s.13 Through a system of supply and discharge ducts ‘air could be made to enter and be withdrawn in any required proportion.'[14] These ventilation principles and the working methodology that Reid has used to test them, provided the foundations for the inquiries that Reid had undertaken in Westminster between 1835 and 1852
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