cooling throughout. I used that as a metaphor for the design, and the client went for our solution partly on the back of that biomimicry explanation. These days we have a lot more digital and electronic tools for doing analysis, so we rely more on finding data-driven solutions than intuitive solutions, but in those days we used those kind of metaphors very strongly.
How has the introduction of benchmarking systems such as BREEAM and LEED affected your work? The introduction of BREEAM and LEED has been a powerful force for change. It’s not the answer to everything, but it has raised the bar across the industry to an enormous degree. In the early days, we worked with universities in the US. They might say they wanted to go for LEED Silver, but once they found out another university was going for Gold or Platinum, they’d step up too. It’s the same with property developers. They set out with fairly low ambitions. Once they understood what was involved, they started to compete to be the greenest, the biggest and the best.
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The introduction of these bench- The Comcast Center Today, using products like Philadelphia (left) marking systems has also provided Grasshopper and Maya, we can link Gardens by the Bay an extraordinary way of getting the software together to produce enorin Singapore (right) whole supply chain up to speed. mous models that allow us to really Twenty years ago, the company that get under the skin of a building. supplied the plasterboard or hauled the trash Once we have the data we need, we can get back on the site wouldn’t have had a clue what you to the architects very quickly with the answers. meant if you’d talked about sustainability. Now they all know which LEED or BREEAM credits their particular service will get them and what Can you think of some really they have to do to achieve them. excellent examples of sustainably-
designed buildings?
What single advance in technology has most contributed to the work you do? The ability to link different pieces of software and run dynamic simulations is the most significant development. It has completely transformed our work. We used to do so much by instinct. I remember once it taking me two weeks to manually calculate a single load case for a new building, and by the time we got the calculations done, the design had gone past the point where you could impact it. It was very frustrating and difficult to make improvements.
Renzo Piano’s Beyeler Foundation Museum near Basel in Switzerland is stunning. I love the way it manages light. That’s been an inspiration for me since the very beginning. I was very impressed by the Hepworth Wakefield [UK] gallery by Chipperfield. The way the environmental systems have been so seamlessly integrated into the building is fantastic. The Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki by Francis-Jones Morehen Thorp is another really beautiful building with great environmental credentials. The materiality of it, the systems and the way it was all put together by the teams working on it was very impressive.
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