Building Sustainable Futures

The rapid growth of population in the twentieth century and its continuation in the twenty-first century (pushing the world population to over 7 billion), together with ever-increasing demands on our planet’s dwindling natural resources, has created a crisis of enormous magnitude that can no longer be denied. Numerous global initiatives led by the United Nations (UN) and other international and national agencies, targeted at the growing impact of environmental damage on every aspect of our lives, have created a sense of urgency to act (and to act now) before it is too late.

The energy performance of buildings and the ability to accurately predict energy demand is of global importance. As the relative cost and environmental impact of harnessing energy increases so does our need for energy efficiency. Designing, constructing and retrofitting buildings to be more energy efficient requires a thorough understanding of the way each building behaves and responds to its climatic variations. Although the measurement of a building’s energy consumption is straightforward, understanding why consumption differs from that expected requires a detailed and systematic building performance analysis. The way a building is assembled and retrofitted affects performance, and thus each aspect of a building’s makeup should be measured or monitored to understand its behaviour. When attempting to understand the performance of a building, it is important to consider each element, the components used and the way that they interface to perform as a whole. The measurement of building components in the laboratory is relatively well documented, but the testing and measuring of buildings once constructed in the field is an emerging science. This chapter presents the methods used to survey, measure and monitor building performance in the field and how the work is being used to inform the next generation of energy-efficient buildings.

The whole-life sustainability of a building should be underpinned with a demonstration of functional value and an awareness of the direct environmental impact. While a great deal of energy and resources are consumed in the construction of buildings, this is marginal when compared to the operation costs and associated energy used during a building’s life cycle. Many reports identify the build costs and associated resources to be less than 1 % of the whole-life operation costs. The exact energy use of a building can vary widely, depending on the use, energy efficiency of the building and occupant behaviour; thus, a greater deal of attention should be given to understanding the energy used in buildings and how energy efficient operation is achieved.

The maintenance phase of construction project exerts the biggest influence on project sustainability which is measured in terms of environmental, social and economic impacts. Building maintenance itself is profoundly influenced by decisions at the design phase. Typically, building maintenance programmes are designed using preventative or responsive approaches. While the former have an adverse impact on both the economic and environmental priorities, the responsive methods tend to compromise the interests of the users. It is therefore argued that the just-in-time methodology is the only approach that is capable of producing an optimised and balanced solution to building maintenance scheduling. However, due to its retrospective nature, this method has posed serious practical challenges. On the other hand, with the advent of visualisation technologies and virtual prototyping, we are now capable of making informed decisions about design parameters as well as generating building maintenance scheduling that would facilitate a just-in-time solution. This chapter presents a visual methodology for developing just-in-time solution through visualisation of the degradation of building components. To this end, the chapter presents the overall time-based visualisation model and demonstrates the simulation process for two major building components—the lighting and flooring systems.

The same core team from architects, FCB Studios and environmental engineers, Max Fordham worked together over a decade, developing a series of sustainable exemplar buildings. These were all realised via the careful setting of sustainable design briefs, clever design solutions and post-occupancy monitoring to evaluate what worked and what did not. Over this 10-year period, key themes evolved such as use of daylight and artificial lighting, natural ventilation and thermal mass, IT and building controls. The team explored these themes over the course of this relationship, using each previous building to provide feedback that could be used in the design of the next. This chapter provides an introduction to each project and the key lessons learnt across the entire series of buildings. In summary, it aims to highlight some key strategies to deliver a sustainable exemplar building.

As the planet faces the issues of climate change, it is now accepted that global warming will have a significant and threatening impact upon climate, which will have a significant impact upon nearly every aspect of economy, environment and society. It is also widely accepted that buildings contribute to as much as one third of total global greenhouse gas emissions, and this is primarily through the burning of fossil fuels in their operation, consuming up to 40 % of all energy. It is therefore a necessity that each nation seeks to make the reduction of green house gas emissions from buildings as part of their climate change strategy.

The definition of a sustainable building is not a straightforward one. There are many criteria upon which the sustainability of a building can be judged, including but not limited to energy performance, financial viability and environmental and social impact. Any determination of the sustainability of a building will be dependent upon the criteria used to assess it. Much of the work undertaken by the Leeds Sustainability Institute on building sustainability focusses on energy performance in buildings.

It is not practicable to test every aspect of all the buildings that are built. As we understand the behaviour of buildings from field and laboratory tests, the data can be used to produce generalised assumptions about the way a building, and its component parts will behave. These models simulations are now an integral part of our understanding of the performance of buildings. While the assumptions made in models and simulations can be relatively imprecise when first developed, as their development is advanced the models become more detailed, reliable and intelligent. Researchers are constantly updating and calibrating the sensitivity of their models, using new data from the field and in-use studies to improve the reliability and accuracy with which the models can operate. The construction industry is heavily reliant on the use of models and simulations to perform a variety of design and analysis calculations, for predicting energy consumption and performance of finished buildings, and to demonstrate compliance with regulatory or voluntary performance standards.

The role urban design and urban designers can play in helping to deliver high-quality, sustainable built environments is now well established, both in the UK and elsewhere. Previously known as ‘Civic Design’, with the ‘urban’ coming to the fore in the USA during the 1960s, this activity is multidisciplinary in its approach and holistic in its general outlook. Urban design practitioners pride themselves in filling the spatial gaps between the traditional functions of the architect, who usually concentrates on designing an individual building on a single site for a single client, and those of the planner, who works on policy making and delivery for whole neighbourhoods, towns, cities and even regions. Urban designers claim that, unlike their professional colleagues, they are uniquely able to focus on, amongst other things, the quality of the public realm, the street, the square and the spaces between buildings.

Even though urban design is now a recognised profession amongst those responsible for delivering our built environments, there is a tangible lack of confidence amongst those who aim to practise this profession. This manifests itself in an incessant need to define and continually restate the remit of urban design, and the role and function of urban designers. It is also evident in their seemingly endless, but helpful, desire to identify and codify a series of rules and principles for helping to design and create good-quality, sustainable places.

Change is an inherent aspect of human civilisation, and it is rarely comfortable. Cities across the globe are subject to constant change, and no urban area is likely to be immune from the forces that bring this about. Indeed, as the twenty-first century progresses, the nature of our towns and cities is going to have to change far more radically than it currently is, if we want them to be sustainable, create or maintain a healthy setting for people, places and investment, and if they are to retain their rightful role as the nucleus of human culture and as motors for innovation, economy and regional development.

This chapter is structured in three parts that use different entry points to approach sustainable architecture as a condition of a material assemblage that combines concepts, buildings, structures, educational and professional practices, political and financial conditions, global technologies, local techniques, friendships, alliances, weather conditions and apparatuses of capture. Part 1 provides a thinking device for discussing architecture’s lively matter beyond the straitjacket of sustainability guidelines and questions the Siamese birth that ties sustainability to development. In Part 2, Waterbanks—PITCHAfrica case study—unfolds the complex assemblage of sustainable architecture operations in Africa. In Part 3, both authors reflect on the architecture knowledge assemblage within which their alternative professional and educational practice emerged. Can their experimentations with ATOPIA and SARCHA be understood as ‘sustainable’ architecture practices? To formulate differently the chapter’s main question: Can ‘sustainable’ architecture be produced only within a different mindset that generates another type of practice and education?

The pairing of community and sustainable development has dominated the international policy agenda for at least three decades with its assertion that the imperatives of capital accumulation can be balanced for the needs of social reproduction. As a framework of state strategy, the concept of sustainable communities has come to define a particular mode of governance in which the responsibility for ameliorating the impact of unfettered growth is devolved to place-based voluntary and community associations. The community provides a model of sustainability in which the economics of collective consumption and the politics of community action can be engaged in the planning and stewardship of local development. The strategies of sustainable communities that result combine the market zeal of spatial liberalism with themes of redistributive justice and equality, finding in the concept of community both a model of resilience and self-reliance and conversely a dynamic of mutual aid and co-operation.

The issue of sustainability which started as an environmental concern has gained currency in research and media for a number of years, and it has been defined in a number of ways, each reflecting a particular approach or theoretical basis. While the term ‘sustainability’ has been in use for around two decades, the most referred to aspects are environmental, economic and social sustainability. Environmental sustainability is perhaps the most easily quantified. The impact of the development on the ecology of the earth is to be kept to a minimum. The embodied energy of materials used on site, the energy consumption of the development once complete and lived in are measured or projections of such consumption are considered to gauge the impact of the development. Economic sustainability is probably the most easily quantifiable of the three measures of sustainability. The project simply cannot be carried out unless it functions as an economic proposition.