Articles:

Systems that simply don’t work.

What will happen year on year, and at the end of a building’s life?.Embodied carbon in sustainable building design.

One of the core issues we’re trying to tackle with sustainable design revolves around carbon.We know a lot about operational carbon and how buildings operate.Data helps us to close the performance gap and make sure buildings perform as well as, or even better than, they do in the design stage.

As we’re able to drive better and better performance through energy efficient equipment and passive design techniques, we can actually start reducing our operational carbon right from the early design stages.This decrease in operational carbon will continue over time with things like the decarbonisation of the electricity grid.

However, the result is that embodied carbon in buildings, due to material usage and the amount of carbon which is integral to the building itself, becomes a larger proportion of the overall carbon emitted from the building across its lifespan.

As such, embodied carbon is increasingly playing a much bigger role in our day-to-day focus on sustainability as architects and designers..Exploring the use of low carbon concrete columns instead of steel ones.. Façade: Opportunities to improve the embodied carbon of facades, including finding alternatives to unitised and curtain walling systems, and their materiality.. Cladding: Elongating a material or components’ lifespan may increase the day one carbon but over the lifetime of the building the whole life carbon can be minimised, where replacement cycles are reduced.. Aluminium procurement: Minimising transport miles is important for materials.

However, the country of origin is also important for materials and components which are heavily manufactured, such as curtain walling.Sometimes the additional transport miles might offset the manufacturing emissions in counties with greener energy grids.. Substructure: Omitting basements should be the starting point of projects.. Raised floor: Reuse existing materials, both from demolition on site but also local existing buildings which are undergoing renovation or demolition.

The industry needs to develop a material database to assist with this, but the more demand the quicker it will happen.. MEP: The LETI benchmarks are underestimated for high end offices.To meet the LETI benchmarks this means every other element in the building needs to perform better to offset the impact of MEP.