Elemental

These are my links for June 18th through June 21st:

• HAT Projects blog – Hana adds more to Charles' PQQ rant: "The big firms have clients – and particularly the weak public sector ones, who are bound by procurement guidelines – over the proverbial barrel. Not only is it then incredibly hard to promote less mainstream talent, but the big firms can then churn out standardised product that often doesn't really meet the brief, and their 'competitive' fees get boosted by the myriad services that weren't included in the original contract but that are actually essential, and chargeable by the hour. There is rarely an incentive for the consultancy to meet deadlines or budgets. That's not to say there aren't some good large firms, or good individuals within large firms, but the assumption that the service you get from a large firm is less risky than that you might get from a small one, is illogical."
• Net Benefits of Biomass Power Under Scrutiny – NYTimes.com – "Biomass proponents say it is a simple and proved renewable technology based on natural cycles. They acknowledge that burning wood and other organic matter releases carbon dioxide into the atmosphere just as coal does, but point out that trees and plants also absorb the gas. If done carefully, and without overharvesting, they say, the damage to the climate can be offset. But opponents say achieving that sort of balance is almost impossible, and carbon-absorbing forests will ultimately be destroyed to feed a voracious biomass industry fueled inappropriately by clean-energy subsidies. They also argue that, like any incinerating operation, biomass plants generate all sorts of other pollution, including particulate matter. State and federal regulators are now puzzling over these arguments."
• The Original Green By Steve Mouzon: A Must-Read If You Care About Sustainable Design : TreeHugger – "In the current world of green and sustainable design, so much weight is put on technology; the adding of solar power, high tech glass, qualifying for LEED. It is all about ADDING things. The lesson one learns from Mouzon, and from many heritage buildings, walkable communities and dense cities, is how well one can do with less, by taking stuff away, without any diminishment of comfort. Everyone is complaining lately about how much LEED costs and how poorly LEED buildings are performing, but they are complex things that have new and fancy equipment. But Mouzon points out old technologies are easy to maintain and adjust."
• Architect Frank Gehry talks LEED and the future of green building | Need to Know | PBS – More from Gehry on LEED. The role of government versus voluntary is discussed, but to no satisfactory conclusion. I'm sure he's wishing he never said anything to begin with. A throw away comment has caused a storm of attention on something he's obviously not that passionate one way or the other about.
• Unlocking the Potential of Empty Homes: Building Houses on Old Kent Road – "For years we’ve been told not to worry about the thousands of vacant flats and houses that are in regeneration schemes. “They’re all the process of development,” we were told. But they’re not now. The process and the development have both stopped. Somehow we have to find a way to turn these places back into homes."
• Fantastic Journal: A Short Post About Risk – "Vast amounts of time and effort go into answering these questions but it's a fruitless and largely pointless process. The PPQ limits the likelihood of any form of innovation as it is explicitly designed to stop practices getting jobs in areas where they aren't already working. They also disempower clients, removing from them any chance to exercise judgement or knowledge in selecting an architect. They denude any form of expertise and create a vast raft of bureaucracy and management bullsh*t in its place."
• A special report on water: For want of a drink | The Economist – Good high level article on global water supplies: "The problems caused by inexact terminology do not end here. Concepts like efficiency, productivity and saving attract woolly thinking. Chris Perry, an irrigation economist widely considered the high priest of water accounting, points out that “efficient” domestic systems involve virtually no escape of water through evaporation or irrecoverable seepage. “Efficient” irrigation, though, is often used to describe systems that result in 85% of the water disappearing in vapour. Similarly, water is not saved by merely using less of it for a purpose such as washing or irrigation; it is saved only if less is rendered irrecoverable."
• SOLUTIONS – Sustainability of Land Use and Transport in Outer Neighbourhoods – "The options represent generic Urban Patterns combined with appropriate transport policies. Currently outer-city areas (which includes suburbs, urban fringes, out-of-town developments and satellite settlements) have generally received less attention in spatial planning and urban design research. However, these areas are where most people live and where most new development is taking place. A unique feature of SOLUTIONS research is that it aims to understand the extent to which the sustainability of the design of cities at the Strategic Design scale and the Local Design (neighbourhood) scale are interdependent. This is achieved by carrying out the research within the frame work of strategic land use – transport computer models, and the development of equivalent 'Microsimulation' models at the local scale."
• ULI – Land Use and Driving – "Land Use and Driving summarizes the land use and climate change conclusions of three recent studies, Moving Cooler, Growing Cooler (both published by ULI) and Driving and the Built Environment, published by the Transportation Research Board at the National Academy of Sciences. On a national basis, the three studies show reductions in VMT and energy consumption of between 8 and 18 percent when compact development makes up 60 percent or more of all future development between now and 2050."

admin News biomass, cars, compact, development, driving, Gehry, LEED, PQQ, Procurement, regeneration, transport, urban, water

These are my links for March 26th through March 31st:

• My speech at The Economist (on innovation) « Scott Berkun – Replace innovation with sustainability – aha!: "Lastly, I need to talk about words. I’m a writer and a speaker, so words are my trade. But words are important, and possibly dangerous, for everyone. A fancy word I want to share is the word reification. Reification is the confusion between the word for something and the thing itself. The word innovation is not itself an innovation. Words are cheap. You can put the word innovation on the back of a box, or in an advertisement, or even in the name of your company, but that does not make it so. Words like radical, game-changing, breakthrough, and disruptive are similarly used to suggest something in lieu of actually being it. You can say innovative as many times as you want, but it won’t make you an innovator, nor make inventions, patents or profits magically appear in your hands."<br />
  The whole post is worth a read.
• The road to delivering zero carbon – Modern Building Services – Interesting: "The truth is that zero-carbon buildings are still some way out of our reach because of our traditional procurement process, which creates waste and inhibits innovation. Unless we reform it, clients will turn to a new breed of company to deliver what we cannot. These companies will be focused on project outcomes rather than technical solutions — and that is where ‘traditional’ M&E firms must focus. We know we can do the technical things, but clients don’t care how you do it — they just want a sustainable and affordable outcome."
• Legislating for zero carbon – Modern Building Services – "Trading-standards officers are also responsible for Energy Performance Certificates and Display Energy Certificates — also imposed as part of the EPBD. All buildings now require an EPC on construction, sale or rent, and all buildings accessed by the public with a useful floor area of over 1000 m2 must have a DEC prominently displayed.<br />
  Many buildings do comply with this legislation — not all — but there is great concern about the quality of the EPCs being produced as they are not being created by qualified engineers, and the main motivation seems to be to tick the relevant boxes as cheaply as possible."

admin News enforcement, EPC, innovation, Procurement

These are my links for December 10th through December 15th:

• Monbiot.com » One Shot Left – "… if we are to give ourselves a roughly even chance of preventing more than two degrees of warming, global emissions from energy must peak by 2015 and decline by between six and eight per cent per year from 2020 to 2040, leading to a complete decarbonisation of the global economy soon after 2050. Even this programme would work only if some optimistic assumptions about the response of the biosphere hold true. Delivering a high chance of preventing two degrees of warming would mean cutting global emissions by over 8% a year.
  Is this possible? Is this acceptable? The Tyndall paper points out that annual emission reductions greater than one per cent have “been associated only with economic recession or upheaval.” When the Soviet Union collapsed, they fell by some 5% a year. But you can answer these questions only by considering the alternatives. The trajectory both Barack Obama and Gordon Brown have proposed – an 80% cut by 2050 – means reducing emissions by an average of 2% a year. "
• Monbiot.com » At Last, A Date – Peak oil prediction by IEA within next 20 years: “Although global oil production in total is not expected to peak before 2030, production of conventional oil … is projected to level off towards the end of the projection period.”(10) These bland words reveal a major shift. Never before has one of the IEA’s energy outlooks forecast the peaking or plateauing of the world’s conventional oil production (which is what we mean when we talk about peak oil).
• Blog | Yudelson Associates | Green Building Consulting – The town of Santa Coloma de Gramenet, near Barcelona, Spain, installed 462 solar panels on top of mausoleums in the town cemetery, after an extensive public relations campaign with the kin of the deceased, proving once again that there is space for solar just about in any town.
• The Natural Edge Project – Australian Sustainability Think Tank – "The Natural Edge Project (TNEP) is an independent Sustainability Think-Tank based in Australia. TNEP operates as a partnership for education, research and policy development on innovation for sustainable development.
  TNEP's mission is to contribute to and succinctly communicate leading research, case studies, tools and strategies for achieving sustainable development across government, business and civil society.
  Driven by a team of early career Australians, the non-profit Project receives mentoring and support from a range of experts and leading organisations in Australia and internationally, through a generational exchange model. "
• A Mortgage Banker In Amish Country : NPR – "When you lend to the Amish, you're making a loan that you're going to keep. You can't sell that loan to some other investor.
  That's because Amish loans can't be securitized — they can't be turned into a mortgage-backed security or a collateralized debt obligation — like all of those subprime loans that have caused so much trouble.
  You can't do that for an odd legal reason. Homes that don't have electric power don't qualify for securitization. Neither do homes without traditional insurance. Amish homes are unmodernized, and the Amish use their own kind of insurance. "
• Real Advice Hurts | 43 Folders – Merlin is back on top form. "We can’t get good at something solely by reading about it. And we’ll never make giant leaps in any endeavor by treating it like a snack food that we munch on whenever we’re getting bored. You get good at something by doing it repeatedly. And by listening to specific criticism from people who are already good at what you do. And by a dedication to getting better, even when it’s inconvenient and may not involve a handy bulleted list."
• Reject environmentally harmful work, says engineer Mark Whitby – Building Design – Glass houses and all that. Who among us is completely beyond reproach when it comes to a squeaky clean portfolio of work? Mark Whitby calls for a boycott – do they work? Tricky topic and something I've mulled over to no conclusion (yet).
• Prince looks to past for the future – Building Design – What should low energy housing look like? Prince's Foundation says veracular rules and it's what the public want. Is this true? Do the public want this or do they simply buy what is available? Have they any choice given the business model for house building in the UK? Interesting questions…
• London heating standards in pipeline – Building – The Greater London Authority (GLA) will develop a technical standard for district and combined heat and power (CHP) in the capital as well as rules to ensure customers get a “fair deal” for heat.
• Obama’s Green Building Agenda – BusinessWeek – As the President-Elect prepares to take office, The U.S. Green Building Council has put together an agenda of sustainable policies he should pursue
• Carbon-calculating data site Amee scores seven-figure investment | Media | guardian.co.uk – Two of my online worlds colliding – venture capital and low carbon: "Amee – the Avoiding Mass Extinction Engine – has built up a loyal following since it launched in 2005, its strategy of developing a "Wikipedia for carbon data" approach hitting a very distinct need among government and big business alike.
  The site, which has grown from 2.5 staff at the start to 12 today, has scored seven-figure funding from O'Reilly Alphatech Ventures, Tag Venture, and Union Square Ventures, one of the investors behind Twitter."
• Mark Brinkley on Whatever Happened to MMC? – So why does MMC work so well in other countries and why has it had such difficulties in establishing itself in Britain? Could it be that it’s actually nothing to do with British builders being backward and everything to do with the boom-bust nature of our property markets. There is little point investing heavily in manufacturing plant if, every twenty years or so, you get wiped out by a bust. Twenty years just isn’t a long enough timespan to make it all worthwhile. The countries where MMC prospers tend to be ones with very low rates of speculative housebuilding and, conversely, very high levels of custom home building, what we would call selfbuild.

mel starrs News advice, amee, amish, BRE, carbon_footprint, CHP, clients, construction_industry, csh4, ethics, foundation, MMC, Mortgage, princes, Procurement, renewables, Software, US, USGBC

In what could herald the most radical shake-up for PFI in the past 15 years, RIBA have launched a position paper detailing its PFI procurement model – the Client Concept Design Model – and a number of firm recommendations following the Smart PFI principles:

The Client Concept Design Model seeks to address the problems the RIBA and its partners have identified in the PFI procurement and design process:

• Excessive cost and time necessary to bid for PFI
• Inadequate resourcing of the public sector client at the early stages of procurement – The Strategic and Outline Business Case stages – to allow adequate option appraisal – including site and location appraisal- and strategic brief development
• Untested and/or poorly tested project briefs prematurely put to the PFI market
• A lack of experience within the public sector clients, many of which were first time commissioners of buildings
• Insufficient direct contact between the client and the design team during the bid stages to allow good briefmaking and a robust design to emerge with adequate stakeholder consultation

The position paper can be found here (pdf, 6 pages). They admit in the paper that PFI does not currently result in ‘good design in public buildings’ and wastes money, time and effort. The paper calls for more money for the public client earlier in the process for option appraisal, and also calls for central and local gevernment to increase their design departments.

Could the council design team, many of whom were sold off to the private sector in the last decade, be set for a comeback?

mel starrs Uncategorized PFI, Procurement, project brief, RIBA

Last week I attended an event organised by Construction News Conferences at 27 Sussex Place: ‘Sustainable Construction in Practice‘. Below are some notes and thoughts from the day, roughly in the order of the presentations. Some of the presentations were not available in paper on the day and when these are released on pdf I may add to this list.

One thing which did strike me about the event was the high proportion of women attendees – from the delegate list I’d estimate 36%. Interesting?

Sue Innes of Constructing Excellence kicked off the proceedings and quoted one of my favourite stats – 1% absenteeism in an office can account for the same amount of money as running the office for a year.

Deborah Brownhill of BRE then presented a quick whistlestop tour through the Code for Sustainable Homes, Part L1A and EcoHomes. CSH is currently post-consultation, and there have been 400 responses for the BRE to assess. We’re not due a response until September when hopefully all will become clear. It is based on EcoHomes, but with minimum standards to be met in each of six categories (EcoHomes is tradable). A case of ‘watch this space’…

David McCullough from Carillion was one of the most animated speakers of the day. He had the tough task of whizzing through Part L in 30 minutes and did a decent job of it. He answered back to all the doom and gloom around the implementation of Part L and suggested that perhaps our expectations of parliament were too high and we should just all get on with accepting the principle and getting on with things. He highlighted the change in roles between architects and ‘experts’ – the building regs are now a science and ought to be done by competent persons (a great opportunity for some of us). He also mentioned that SAP tends to favour slightly larger dwellings due to the scaling on discrete elements such as washing machines, which is a useful fact to know.

Barry Plowright from Atkins was a stand-in speaker and I don’t have his slides. The most entertaining bit of the morning came when a senior researcher from University of Oxford asked a question afterwards, one of the answers to which was to install a desalination plant. The UoO guy exploded and said a desalination plant would be ‘utter madness’ and add to the carbon emissions – good point.

Rachel Wooliscroft from Wates gave a presentation on waste. Has anyone else noticed how the Albert Hall has become a unit of measurement? Did you know, the UK produces enough waste to fill the Albert Hall every 2 hours. Wates’ target is to produce zero non-hazardous waste to landfill by 2010, a worthy goal.

After lunch Jerry Williams of Taylor Woodrow gave a quick overview of the National Assembly of Wales and how it was built as a sustainable project. 100% of the cooling comes from 27 No. 100m deep geothermal bores, and heating is via a wood chip boiler.

Rita Singh from Construction Products Association spoke about responsibility versus sustainability. Unfortunately I don’t have her slides, but she had some interesting points to make. The website has lots of the benchmarking information she talked about (almost too much information).

The final section of the afternoon were the ‘names’, Isabel McAllister, George Martin and Cal Bailey:

Isabel from Cyril Swett did a very enthusiastic cost-benefit analysis of sustainability and confirmed what I have begun to suspect. The numbers don’t add up, but if you (as a developer or a client) don’t get on board then you will begin to lose out in future (rather than gain today from implementing sustainability). The slides have yet to be issued and this is one I will definitely be looking at again.

George Martin has the oddest job title in the industry ‘Head of Re-Thinking’ at Willmott Dixon, which I suspect is a nod to Egan. I wasn’t that impressed by his presentation (not much to bring away from it) but he did highlight DQI‘s which use a similar tool to the sustainability workshops which I run (I’m not yet a DQI facilitator).

And finally we listened to Cal Bailey of NG Bailey persuade us that MMC (modern methods of construction) are the key to sustainable construction. OSM (off site manufacture) solves many of the co-ordination, quality and carbon issues associated with a ‘live’ building site. I am almost convinced, although I still see the benefits of training a local workforce in certain situations.

As with all these conferences, some of the most interesting conversations went on in the tea breaks. As a result I’ll be checking out Hockerton versus BedZed.

mel starrs Uncategorized Albert Hall, Barry Plowright, BREEAM, Cal Bailey, Construction Products Association, Cyril Swett, David McCullough, Deborah Brownhill, EPBD, George Martin, Green Building, Isabel McAllister, Jerry Williams, National Assembly of Wales, News, Part L, Procurement, Productivity, Projects, Rachel Wooliscroft, Rita Singh, similar tool, statistics, Sue Innes, Sustainability, Taylor Woodrow, United Kingdom, University of Oxford, wales

I’m unashamedly pinching my topic today from a great post over at Inhabitat last week on ‘The Next Big Thing in Green Building‘. Guest writer Jared summarises his finding from the Developing Green conference. His four key ideas were learn, zero, sell and people. What I love about this medium (the internet) is the realisation that the exact same issues are topical here in Leeds as 4500 miles away in Seattle:

Learn – post occupancy studies were all the rage when I began in this industry almost 10 years ago. The PROBE studies were in full flow and it never even occurred to me that people would ever NOT monitor what happens in a building once it’s built. Unfortunately the funding for PROBE dried up and the topic had since fallen out of favour. It’s starting to make a welcome comeback on most people’s radar. BSRIA have started a project ‘building bridges between FM and design‘ looking at feedback loops between building operators, designers and managers. The quote I liked the best was this:

‘Inevitably, one gets what one asks for. When one buys a cheap electrical appliance, one shouldn’t be surprised if it comes with a generic, badly-translated manual.’

Whilst searching for what ever happened to PROBE I came across ‘Usable Buildings‘ which looks to have some useful information, as well as an archive of all the original PROBE studies (over 20) originally published in BSJ. One of the one’s I particularly remember was the Queen’s Building at de Montfort Uni (picture above courtesy of Leicester’s environment city site). No.4 was co-written by a current colleague of mine, and Bill Bordass had a hand in most of the others (and seems to own the Usable Buildings website). Bill, along with Max Fordham, is one of the great characters and pioneers of the industry.

I’ll skip over zero (too much to write about that in this post!) and go straight to sell. As Jared quite rightly points out:

‘It is possible to develop a green building within traditional budgets and make a profit. But it’s more than life-cycle analyses and reduced operating costs. Jerry Yudelson, associate principal at Interface Engineering, and author of The Insider’s Guide to Marketing Green Buildings, talked about marketing value and quality. There is the immediate pitch to buyers upon construction, but the longer-term impact may be the bigger story. As energy prices skyrocket, buildings that perform more efficiently will be less risky investments and more valuable to future owners and tenants. And as more states and cities enact laws and mandates requiring LEED certification and other sustainable building practices, green properties will be more and more the norm.’

Translated to UK, read BREEAM for LEED and try to imagine the consequences of EPBD on the property market over the next 10 years. The way that property is financed, especially private commercial buildings, is not currently set up to complement this – the disconnect between who commissions the building and who ultimately pays the bills is too great. REIT‘s may improve the situation – we’ll have to see.

And this leads us neatly to people, or the folk who ultimately have to sit in the building, pay the bills and maintain it. Which brings us full circle back to learn. Neat.

admin Opinion Bill Bordass, BREEAM, Energy, environment city site, EPBD, Green Building, Jared, Jerry Yudelson, Leeds, Marketing, Max Fordham, Procurement, REIT, Seattle, Sustainability, United Kingdom

It’s nice to sit down with an enlightened client who wants to monitor the building once it’s built. Scary how seldom it happens.

There are a number of resources out there to assist the design team and the client, and with TM39* ‘Building Energy Metering’ from CIBSE now cited in the Building Regulations Part L2A, it will hopefully only be a matter of time before every building is capable of being monitored.

Free and actually available are a number of publications from the Carbon Trust **(as they are known this week, previously have been under the guise of BRECSU and Action Energy) in Good Practice Guide GPG 348 ‘Building Log Books – A users guide’. Another really useful document on there is GPG 362 ‘Procuring smart, energy efficient office buildings; Providing clients with a technical briefing for design teams’ which anyone faced with asking a design team to design them a building for the first time should read.

*not yet published (what a shock)

** registration required

mel starrs Uncategorized Carbon Trust, energy efficient office buildings, Metering, Procurement, Resources