The big problem with Building Science is that we call it Building Science.

The academic study of buildings and their inhabitants is a young discipline; possibly even younger than Computer Science. The earliest articles in Building and Environment appear to date from 1966; Building Research & Information, from 1973. Like Computer Science, we have no single word for our field and are stuck with a compound. Most people seem content with Building Science, or perhaps Building Physics. The former has even been enshrined in a Wikipedia article.

But I dislike “Building Science”. I think it neither conveys the breadth of our field (ranging from the study of individual households to the optimal planning of cities) nor its depth. I find it to be both too vague and not specific enough.

But what, then, shall we call the study and science of buildings? Chemists study chemistry; biologists study biology; geologists study geology; is there an -ology that would describe our field?

I asked that question on English Language & Usage (one of my favorite Stack Exchange sites, by the way). My question didn’t quite get the attention I hoped for. I was expecting someone would come up with a nice-sounding greek root to which we could affix -ology and have a proper term, but the best we could come up with is the following:

• Oikosology, from Oikos, “house, dwelling place, habitation”
• Weikology, from the Indo-European root weik (house)

I admit I am less than enthusiastic about them. I have to confess that another reason why I started this inquiry was that, just as there’s such a thing as Computational Chemistry and Computational Biology, I wanted a two-word phrase that would mean the application of computing techniques to the study and science of buildings. But I doubt we will be seeing the Journal of Computational Oikosology anytime soon…

If you have any better proposals, feel free to post them in the comments.