Philip Steadman

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 have continued at UCL, which he joined in 1999. He is one of the founders of the Building Stock Laboratory in the UCL Energy Institute, which works on modelling energy use in the building stock of Britain, and associated emissions. The Lab has developed the London Building Stock Model and the London Solar Opportunity Map for the Greater London Authority, and has advised a number of London Boroughs on getting their housing stocks to net zero. The Lab is working presently on the National Buildings Database for the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero, which will cover all buildings in England, Wales and Scotland, and will be a major instrument for national policy-making on energy in buildings.

He has published three books on geometry and architecture: The Geometry of Environment (with Lionel March, 1971), Architectural Morphology (1983) and Building Types and Built Forms (2014). 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. A collection of papers, Why Are Most Buildings Rectangular? appeared in 2017. He has also written books on energy and the built environment, American cities, the effects of nuclear attack on Britain. In recent years he has turned to art history. His study of the painting technique of Johannes Vermeer (Vermeer’s Camera) appeared in 2001.. In 2021 he published a book about Renaissance entertainments: Renaissance Fun: The Machines Behind the Scenes. His book on Canaletto's use of the camera obscura (Canaletto's Camera), a sequel of a kind to the Vermeer book, appears in 2025.