Nothing is in isolation..
We need to be monitoring what is actually going into buildings, compared to what we think should be going in.This means that contractors need to get on board as well.
Ultimately, we’ll have to collate the data together as an industry, but benchmarks will help us learn, and guide us at the design stage..Creating a sustainable future — alignment of standards and guidance.One of the key challenges we need to address in our quest for a sustainable future, is to align the various forms of guidance and advice coming into the industry from different sources.
There are currently a number of different institutions involved, all representing different parties within the built environment.While it’s positive they all have the same net zero goal, they offer different guidance.
RIBA represents architecture and CIBSE represents engineers.
Then there’s the London Energy Transformation Initiative (LETI) and networks like Architects Declare and Architects Climate Action Network (ACAN).This knowledge and understanding lends itself to a repeatable solution that can comprise c.80% of the asset.. We call this a ‘Reference Design’: a highly optimised, site agnostic ‘core design’ for a portfolio client.
Typically, a Reference Design will contain a number of repeated elements at varying scales (from key equipment to whole assets) that can be configured in a number of different ways (with more or less flexibility in how these are arranged depending on the asset type).. For some assets, the Reference Design can become the fixed design.The house blocks we designed for the.
Ministry of Justice prisons rollout.are a good example; highly standardised, they are identical on every site, only the number and orientation changes and is dictated by the prison population and aspect/prospect of the site.
(Editor: Heavyweight Makeup)