Elemental

These are my links for January 23rd through January 26th:

• Not the last straw: Homes made from straw bales make a comeback | MNN – Mother Nature Network – Volunteer labour makes costing straw bale difficult: "Though the materials used for straw bale buildings – straw & plaster – are typically inexpensive, the special knowledge required to design & build these structures usually means that labor costs can be anywhere between 10 percent and 20 percent higher than for traditional buildings, though some of that cost is made back through energy efficiency.
  “The construction of these buildings takes a person who’s done tons of training to really understand exactly how to get the material to behave,” says Moore. “It just ends up costing the consumer too much money for the benefit it produces.”
  In addition, straw bales can create extra hassle in terms of coordinating their delivery from local farmers, having a big enough job site to store all the bales and keeping them dry during construction.
  One way that people help keep labor costs down is to throw “bale raising” parties where friends & family members help stack bales and plaster walls."
• Forget Sustainability, It’ s Time to Talk Resilience – "There's a new concept infiltrating the climate change conversation, and it has the potential to change the conversation altogether. It’s time to give sustainability a rest and start talking about resilience, Rob Hopkins writes in Resurgence.
  “The term ‘resilience’ is appearing more frequently in discussions about environmental concerns, and it has a strong claim to actually being a more successful concept than that of sustainability. Sustainability and its oxymoronic offspring sustainable development are commonly held to be a sufficient response to the scale of the climate challenge we face: to reduce the inputs at one end of the globalised economic growth model (energy, resources, and so on) while reducing the outputs at the other end (pollution, carbon emissions, etc.). However, responses to climate change that do not also address the imminent, or quite possibly already passed, peak in world oil production do not adequately address the nature of the challenge we face.”"
• House 2.0: The Denby Dale Passive House – "Because of all this, the house down the end of Geoff and Kate’s garden has assumed a significance they cannot have dreamt of when they first contacted Bill Butcher. It’s not just a low energy house, it’s a Passive House. And it’s not just a Passive house, it’s an assault craft landing on the beach that is the Code for Sustainable Homes. By 2016, when in theory the Code should kick in fully and all new homes should be “zero carbon”, you would not be allowed to build this house. For a start, it is going to have a gas boiler — not permitted under Code Level 6. And it will have nothing in the way of home-generated electricity (although the Feed-In-Tariff coming on stream later this year may cause Geoff and Kate to reconsider)."
• Archinect : Views : Victory Gardens, or the Impact of the Financial Crisis on Architecture – Gloomy, but worth reading the whole article: "The hard part is going to be for architects to understand just how this is healthy for the profession. First, architects have hardly raised their productivity since the integration of digital design tools into their work. Sure, designs have gotten much more complex, but more isn’t always more. Many firms have wound up wasting labor on gimmicky designs produced by an army of interns. Now those firms are going to finally begin using technology the way it was meant to be. Watch as fifty-person firms shrink to five or ten core employees. Instead of talking about the cool things that digital technology can make, architects are going to talk about how fast and efficient digital technology makes them.
  That will be a huge paradigm-shift and will lead to more interesting work along the way."
• Sustainability: Carbon reduction – Building – Everything you need to know about CRC: "So is the financial liability placed on organisations by the CRC significant enough to demonstrate a convincing business case for improving energy performance in existing buildings? Not quite. However, the business case becomes more compelling when energy savings are taken into account as shown in the table below.
  Early investment in more energy efficient systems can reap significant savings in terms of reduced energy costs. The example shows the initial investment paid back in less than four years. If early action is difficult due to the current economic climate, then appropriate investment in time for the capped phase (2013) will also significantly reduce CRC liability and generate substantial energy savings. "

admin News AECB, BIM, CRC, future, passivhaus, recession, resilience, rob_hopkins, straw-bale, Sustainability, TT

These are my links for June 16th through June 21st:

• The young generation with a new vision to build Britain | Art and design | The Observer – Fairly fluffy piece in the Observer on the new generation of iconoclast architects, more devoted to context, collaboration and sustainability than iconic buildings which celebrate individualism. Good quote from Patrick though: "Patrick Lynch is actively hostile to what he sees as the inevitable decline of modernism into what he calls the "idiot avant garde, which means that all your work ultimately looks the same, whatever the climate". He claims that younger architects are disenchanted with "the idea that technological progress equals artistic progress equals moral progress equals virtue, which leads to the kind of thinking that it's OK to go and build for a completely unpalatable regime and f**k up the planet for money, because you're working in your signature style and it's an expression of individual creativity"."
• BSRIA feature on new BREEAM In-Use measuring a building’s actual sustainability – Good overview from BSRIA: "With BREEAM In-Use the bulk of the work is carried out by the client in the form of an online self-assessment tool.
  If an organisation wants a formal certificate it can hire a BREEAM assessor who would assess the inputs into the online tool and certify the rating.
  the certificates have a limited validity. The certificates expire after three years for single asset assessments, and after just one year for portfolios and Part 3-only assessments.
  the development of BREEAM In-Use was driven by the need to assess a building within a few hours.
  BREEAM In-Use is also relatively cheap at just £100 per asset (a building).
  The plus points for the BREEAM In-Use scheme is that it links into other rating tools, which buildings are required to have anyway, such as Energy Performance Certificates and Display Energy Certificates. BREEAM In-Use is also advertised as being useful to gaining and maintaining ISO 14001 accreditation."
• New Planning Policy for Wales – Although Wales are only looking for 'Very Good' score in BREEAM, the energy still needs to be 'Excellent' (and I presume needs a PCR?): "Applications received on or after 1st September 2009 for non-residential development which will either have a floorspace of 1,000sqm or more, or will be carried out on a site having an area of one hectare or more, to meet the Building Research Establishment Environmental Assessment Method (BREEAM) ‘Very Good’ standard and achieve the mandatory credits for ‘Excellent’ under issue Ene 1 – Reduction of CO2 emissions."
• CARBON REDUCTION COMMITMENT GUIDE LAUNCHED: British Property Federation – Confirms my iitial thoughts on CRC: "Hermes, which runs the BT pension fund, has undertaken a modelling exercise3 across its directly managed 103 properties. It found that during the first three-year period of CRC – where the price of carbon is fixed – it may be cheaper for the landlord to simply write-off the cost of carbon allowances rather than incur the administrative and legal costs of engaging with tenants, in effect taking away any incentive for tenants to reduce carbon. Although this situation is likely to change in year four when the price of carbon is no longer capped, it does mean that the scheme could fail to reduce as much CO2 emissions as it would with the benefit of tenant engagement. The government might then fail to achieve its ambitious carbon reduction targets by 2020."
• Architecture is most exclusive profession – Building Design – I initially toyed with ideas of doing architecture when at school. I didn't have A level Art (clashed with Physics) so ended up in engineering (probably much better suited to me). No pangs of regret when I see stats like this: "documents released by the Cabinet Office’s panel for Fair Access to the Professions show it costs more to qualify as an architect — over £60,000 — than any other profession. The panel also found newly qualified architects earned just over £20,000 a year, one of the lowest starting salaries in the professions."

admin News Architecture, BPF, BREEAM, BSRIA, CRC, In_Use, starchitect, wales