The inspiration for this book came from numerous buildings, books and people. Two books that have remained with us since our student days — Rasmussen’s Experiencing Architecture and Heschong’s Thermal Delight in Architecture — conveyed to us a sense of enjoyment of architecture that went beyond the spatial and stylistic. This was reinforced by the Cambridge Masters course in Environmental Design in Architecture, which we both attended, founded and coordinated at that time by Nick Baker and Dean Hawkes. If there is an axiom that came out of that education then it could read as ‘Building science is at the service of architecture, and architecture at the service of people’.