He became a full-time academic in 1986, leading a community technical aid centre linking the problem of fuel poverty to passive solar solutions via the EU-funded Easthall Demonstration Project in the early 1990s. He initiated the Mackintosh Environmental Architecture Research Unit (MEARU) in 1993, and is author of The New Eco-Architecture (2002), Solar Architecture in Cool Climates (2005) and Sensing a Historic Low-CO2 Future (2011) – a holistic overview of indoor air quality (Chapter 8, Intech.org; free online book).