Susan Roaf is a visiting Professor at the Open University and Arizona State University as well as an Oxford city councillor. In 2005, she became Professor of Architectural Engineering at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh.
She was born in Malaysia and completed a degree from Manchester University. Her doctoral thesis was on the windcatchers of Yazd in Iran from Oxford Brookes University where she taught from 1989 to 2005 both in professional studies, technology and design. She has practiced for a number of years on the design of housing, schools, hospitals and town planning.Heriot Watt School of the Built Environment
In 1995 Susan Roaf built the Oxford Ecohouse, a house in Oxford designed to maximise energy efficiency. It is equipped with the first photovoltaic cell roof installed in Britain.
A six bedroom family home, it produces only 130 kg CO2/annum per metre square, in contrast to comparable UK houses that produce 5000 kg CO2/annum m2. It has 4 kW peak of photovoltaic output, 5m2 of solar hot water panels and additional heating from a passive solar sun space.
It was designed using low energy construction techniques, high thermal mass and a wood burning stove to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by over 95%.
The house has featured in a number of architecture books and is used as a research source in sustainable design.
Read more about Susan Roaf: Books
Famous quotes containing the word susan:
“We are told that men protect us; that they are generous, even chivalric in their protection. Gentlemen, if your protectors were women, and they took all your property and your children, and paid you half as much for your work, though as well or better done than your own, would you think much of the chivalry which permitted you to sit in street-cars and picked up your pocket- handkerchief?”
—Mary B. Clay, U.S. suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4, ch. 3, by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902)