DESIGNING FOR THE DESIGNING FOR THE DESIGNING FOR THE DESIGNING FOR THE

Words by Harry Wyatt Images by Michael Tsang

Michael Braungart, insists that the dominant philosophy of ‘eco-efficiency’ is inadequate because it only seeks to limit the environmental impact, but ultimately the impact is still there; we are simply slowing the rate of it. We need to go beyond the design of a building as a 3D object with a static performance calculation; we need to consider its entire lifetime including where it comes from and where it might end up.

Your building is located not just on a site in an urban and cultural context, but also a temporal one. The materials come from somewhere and have been something in the past. In a future beyond the life of the building they will go somewhere and become something else. All of this movement will impact someone’s present. Think of a timber building; its skeleton was once a grove of trees and at the end of its life perhaps that same timber will go into another building, or into furniture or maybe it will rot down and return its nutrients to the earth. A plastic membrane will have likely come from crude oil and may end up inside sea-life if it is not handled responsibly at the end of its life. In a circular economy all waste should be managed as nutrients for something else; decaying trees are nutrition for the eco-system; scrap plastic is a nutrient for new plastic.

Designing for time was integrated into this year’s Basil Spence brief, with the building changing use from a flagship building for a major development to a centre for advanced technology. The three groups winning the critics’ choice awards all showed that they had considered time as a factor beyond the single change of use. The first prize project was designed to change to adapt to the growing community around it. With a little adaptation it could become a sports centre, a college or three residential blocks. One runner up scheme had a living façade which changed with the seasons to provide appropriate shading and had a life 2 programme that intended to support lifelong learning, so the people would keep coming back and making use of it. The other runner up leased rather than bought technically complicated materials from suppliers to ensure they would return to a place where they could be recycled at the end of life.

Already at Bath we are coming up with rich and exciting ideas for how time can be used as a design parameter. Despite the more limited scope of most architects’ work in real life, modern technology is offering us a chance to bring the design of buildings from something quite static to something continuously operating. Increasingly rich sources of data allow us to make more informed decisions already about where the building and materials are coming from; grappling with the unpredictability of what happens next is more of a challenge.

While we invariably design for performance as well as space, most buildings have a performance gap between the exciting environmental credentials promised by the architect and the actual reality. A better understanding of how the building will be used from earlier stages, the delivered building meeting the specifications and a clearer strategy for its use and servicing are all necessary. There are multiple reasons for this, from poor estimates of usage, construction to a lower specification, leaving out variable power load or using the systems inefficiently. Using BIM (building information modelling) to a high level of maturity promises to alleviate some of these issues.

We are living in the age of data so we must learn how to use this and apply it appropriately. Working more closely with consultants and the contractor with BIM is already allowing us to build closer to what is intended, as all the systems can be tested virtually before hitting the site. This can also save on material, energy and time. Used effectively, BIM can help us design the building for use and thus for time. At the usual handover from contractor to client a mature BIM model can be passed to end users of the building to allow them to more easily understand how it works. This can allow for better operation of the systems in place and makes servicing, upgrading or adapting them a far simpler