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Thursday 13 May 2004
Thanks to:
Everyone who replied to the “feedback” exercise in January.
Susan Roaf of Oxford Brookes University, for the invitation to the Closing the Loop: Post-occupancy evaluation conference.
Robert G Allen, studying for an MSc in sustainable architecture at the University of Huddersfield, who was the winner of the Get Sust! readers’ survey prize draw in January.
Conference report - Closing the loop: post-occupancy evaluation
Last month (April), experts from around the world gathered at the prestigious Cumberland Lodge, a former royal residence in the heart of Windsor Great Park, to discuss the oft-neglected subject of post-occupancy evaluation (POE for short).
The auspicious surroundings for the event will, no doubt, be fondly remembered by the many overseas visitors (who were treated to a free display of that “typical” English Saturday afternoon pastime - cross-country eventing!). But the historic nature of the venue was not out of sync with the subject matter - for here was a gathering of researchers and practitioners who spend much of their days trying to pin-point exactly what it is about a building that makes the occupants love (or hate) it.
Precisely how best to gather this kind of data was the subject of several presentations. Andre Potvin and his colleagues at the Universite Laval, Canada, for example, have developed an ingenious device called PAMPA, which is short for “portable array for the measurement of physical ambiences”. The researchers persuaded occupants of a new office building in Montreal to wear the PAMPA headset as they went about their normal work, and to complete on-line questionnaires periodically to record their thoughts about their surroundings. The PAMPA headset gathered quantitative data about the environment - temperatures, light levels, noise and air quality - which was later combined with the qualitative survey data plus video footage of the user’s “journey” around the building. Although still in the development stage, Potvin suggested that the PAMPA system could be a very valuable tool to help architects understand people’s experiences of buildings, and as the database grows, it may be possible to create a bank of “conceptual ambiences”.
At the opposite end of the technology scale, Fionn Stevenson of the University of Dundee described a POE study of a small social housing scheme in Scotland that relied heavily on in-depth interviews with the occupants. Her findings revealed a great deal about people’s attitudes to buildings. For example, most occupants strongly disliked the external appearance of their homes, and they put up with various internal discomforts simply because they liked the feeling of space created by the open-plan interiors.
Actually spending time with the occupants uncovered facts that typical surveys would not. The researchers quickly noticed that these terraced homes suffered from very poor acoustics, with noise jumping across from one house to its neighbour-but-one, but the occupants were less aware of it because of the background noise they tended to generate (from TVs and radios, for example). And although there were problems with the mechanical ventilation in most of the bathrooms (which had no windows), Ms Stevenson saw little evidence of mould growth - until the occupants revealed that they regularly spent time cleaning mould from tiles around showers and baths.
What both these presentations had in common was the conclusion that, regardless of the techniques used, the results of POE should be taken very seriously by designers and anyone commissioning buildings.
Speaking on the first day of the conference, Bill Bordass of William Bordass Associates and Adrian Leaman of Building Use Studies Ltd picked up the common thread running through most of the presentations - how to raise the profile of POE itself. They looked back at the 20 “PROBE” studies carried out between 1995 and 2002, wondering where all this work left the art of POE, given that the PROBE studies showed similar problems cropping up over and over again. The question facing conference delegates was how to break out of this unhelpful “loop”.
Mark Gorgolewski of Ryerson University, Canada, thinks education is the key - and he was certainly not alone in this opinion. He argued that architecture students have an important role to play, as the designers of the future, but at the moment they are isolated from the real world.
But Walter Grondzik and Alison Kwok put forward one innovative solution. They are running the “Agents of Change” project which aims to get architecture students to spend time in hands-on building evaluation studies. The project, unfortunately confine to the US at present, gives students and their lecturers a basic kit of analysis equipment and lets them loose in a building; then the participants are expected to pass on their acquired knowledge to their peers.
Other presentations over this four-day event covered the importance of lighting for health, people’s attitudes to indoor temperatures, detailed discussions of analytical methods, and case studies of buildings from around the world.
But finally, a word for the fashionistas among Get Sust! readers... Studies by Mala Endravadan and colleagues at the Universite Paul Sabatier, France, looked at the link between indoor temperature and occupant behaviour. Would people turn up the heat, or wrap up warmer? Ms Endravadan reported that, given the chance to change the indoor temperature, people in offices like it to be almost 23 degrees C (in France the government-recommended minimum is 19 degrees C) - a significant additional energy burden across the heating season.
The message is clear: put on your pullover and save the planet!
Learn more:
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• | Details of other presentations
can be obtained from the event organiser. E-mail: windsor@brookes.ac.uk. |
| • | Contact Andre Potvin, Universite Laval, Canada via http://www.ulaval.ca. | |
| • | Contact Fionn Stevenson of the University of Dundee via http://www.dundee.ac.uk. | |
| • | Contact Bill Bordass and Adrian Leaman via http://www.usablebuildings.co.uk. | |
| • | Contact Mark Gorgolewski of Ryerson University, Canada via http://www.ryerson.ca. | |
| • | Details of the “Agents of Change” project are at http://aoc.uoregon.edu. |
| © Melanie Thompson 2004 |  |
Action on sustainability at home and abroad
Last month (April), an assortment of UK government ministers joined forces to launch a nationwide consultation on sustainable development called “Taking it on: developing UK sustainable development strategy together”.
This three-month consultation will include local and regional events, and an on-line consultation (see “learn more”).
At the same event, Environment Secretary Margaret Beckett announced the establishment of a “roundtable” on sustainable consumption, which will try to identify ways in which UK citizens can move to more sustainable lifestyles and reduce our impacts on the local and global environment.
A few days later, Mrs Beckett launched “Energy Efficiency - The Government’s Plan for Action”, a document that describes how the government plans to deliver the goals of last year’s Energy White Paper. She also announced the publication of a strategy for combined heat and power (CHP) technology.
Meanwhile, according to a report in the US publication Environmental Design and Construction (EDC), there is a growing interest in greener products and projects in the United States.
As evidence, the journal’s editorial this month cites the announcement of the 100th “Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design” (LEED) certified project, and findings from a survey the journal commissioned.
The survey asked architects and other building professionals about their own “green” activities, and found that 87 percent of respondents had seen an increase in green building requests in the last two years, and that they were expecting this trend to continue. Seventy-four percent of the companies surveyed currently have a designated environmental design expert on their payroll, while only 2 percent reported that none of their projects include environmentally considerate design.
Learn more:
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• | The consultation paper “Taking it on: developing UK sustainable development strategy together” is available online at http://www.sustainable-development.gov.uk/taking-it-on/index.htm. |
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• | “Energy Efficiency - The Government’s Plan for Action” is at http://www.defra.gov.uk/environment/energy/review/index.htm and the “Strategy for Combined Heat and Power (CHP) to 2010” is at http://www.defra.gov.uk/environment/energy/chp/index.htm. |
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• | Read the EDC editorial or purchase the full survey details at http://www.EDCmag.com. |
| © Melanie Thompson 2004 | |
Tough on noise...
Amendments to Part E of the Building Regulations (sound) - Robust Standard Details come into effect on 1 July 2004. The amendments have wide-ranging implications for designers and for builders, not least because of the requirements to carrying out pre-completion testing.
Learn more:
| • | Download the “Building Regulations Part E, Sound” in PDF format from http://www.odpm.gov.uk (look under Building Regulations in the left hand panel). |
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Popular design software goes “native”
The Pilgrim Fathers took English to the States and we’ve been separated by a common language ever since... Until now, with the launch of a new version of Autodesk Building Systems 2005 that incorporates UK-localised content libraries and uses metric dimensional units.
The developers, Autodesk Inc, say that this new tool will be particularly useful to mechanical, electrical, plumbing, and fire protection engineers, and means that companies with global practices can quickly create designs and drawings that meet British Standards Institute (BSI) guidelines, and that follow drafting practices and procedures favoured in the UK and other English-speaking countries such as Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong, and Singapore.
Learn more:
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• | Autodesk Building Systems 2005 is based on content that was previously sold in the UK as COINS Building Services (CBS) solutions. |
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• | See http://www.autodesk.com/siteselect.htm. |
| © Melanie Thompson 2004 | |
New CIBSE Guide to energy efficiency in buildings
CIBSE has published an updated version of its popular “Guide F”, which has been a leading source of guidance on energy efficiency in buildings for over five years. The revisions take account of changes to UK legislation, specifically Part L of the Building Regulations, and the new Guide F incorporates CIBSE Applications Manual AM 5: “Energy audits and surveys”, a move that was made because CIBSE wishes to stress that design and the energy costs in use cannot be separated.
The Guide will be useful to building services engineers, specifiers, architects, surveyors, consultants and building owners/operators.
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• | CIBSE Guide F: Energy efficiency in buildings, ISBN 1903287340, 204pp, hardback, costs £112 (£56 to CIBSE members). Order a copy from the CIBSE bookshop at http://www.cibse.org. |
| © Melanie Thompson 2004 | |
Say good-bye to the “hot tin roof”
Green roofs are best able to cope with the expected impacts of climate change, according to a new Digest published by BRE.
Green roofs - roofs where a growing medium and plants take the place of bare membrane, gravel ballast, shingles or tiles - cope well with the higher wind speeds, heavier rainfall in winter and longer, hotter summers that climate change is predicted to bring. They also release rainwater slowly, reducing the risk of flooding.
The Digest explains that green roofs can have additional benefits when significant numbers are built in urban areas, such as improving local air quality and filtering acid from rainwater.
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• | BRE Digest 486 “Reducing the effects of climate change by roof design” is available from the BRE Bookshop at http://www.brebookshop.com. |
| © Melanie Thompson 2004 | |
Are you ready for climate change?
A one-day conference called “Understanding and Adapting Buildings for Climate Change” organised by CIBSE will help you to find out. Researchers will present the results of new studies into the effects of climate change on the UK’s building stock, while other presentations will discuss ways of adapting existing and new buildings to meet these challenges.
There will also be presentations of case studies, including the New Charter House Trust Headquarters in Ashton-under-Lyme; and the Eastside Development in Birmingham.
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• | Understanding and Adapting Buildings for Climate Change, Tuesday 6 July 2004, The Café Royal, London. Visit http://www.cibse.org/events or E-mail: jsinfield@cibse.org. |
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SET3
The third international conference on sustainable energy technologies (SET3), organised by the University of Nottingham, takes place from 28-30 June at the university’s state-of-the-art campus. Researchers and engineers in the field of energy technology will discuss their work and future strategies for sustainability.
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• | Contact Mrs Claire Hardwidge for
more information. E-mail: claire.hardwidge@nottingham.ac.uk. |
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Conference to stimulate industry-led research
The European Council for Construction Research, Development and Innovation (ECCREDI) is running a conference to showcase recent construction projects that have benefited from innovation. The event, titled “Building for a European Future” will take place in Maastricht, the Netherlands, on 14 and 15 October.
The organisers hope that the conference will also serve as a platform for a debate on the future strategy for research and innovation in the construction sector.
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• | Contact the conference organisers. E-mail: info@b4e.org . Visit: http://www.b4e.org. |
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• | ECCREDI will also be organising workshops around Europe to help groups who are preparing to submit applications to the Seventh Framework research programme. |
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Snap up some photographic equipment
CITB-ConstructionSkills and Contract Journal have launched a competition for amateur photographers. Submit images showing a successful and dynamic construction industry, and you could win photographic equipment worth £2000.
The brief is to inspire young people to find out more about joining the industry, and all winning entries will feature on a calendar which will be mailed to schools at the end of the 2004.
The closing date for entries is the 31 August, and Contract Journal is currently featuring a selection of the best entries, with the “hot shot of the month” winning £200 worth of camera equipment vouchers.
Winners will be announced on 7 October at Contract Journal’s annual Construction Industry Awards in London. Full details at http://www.citb.org.uk/news/photo_competition/default.htm.
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Design an open space
OPENspace, the research centre for inclusive access to outdoor environments, has launched a student design competition. The challenge is to design a public open space that is accessible and attractive to all sorts of users.
The competition is open to all full and part-time students of landscape architecture, urban design, planning or architecture. Submissions may be made by individuals or groups (maximum of five per group).
The first prize is £1000 and there will be a range of runner-up awards. Winners will receive their prizes at “Open Space: People Space”, an international conference in Edinburgh from 27-29 October, 2004.
Download the information leaflet in pdf format from http://www.openspace.eca.ac.uk/conference/confstudentdesigncomp.htm or e-mail: openspace@eca.ac.uk. Closing date: 18 July, 2004.
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