Buildings Working
Building
a better
future
Too many buildings fail to meet designers’
goals or users’ expectations. Bill Bordass,
who has assessed many new projects, calls
for urgent changes to make low-energy and
low-carbon buildings more of a reality
T
he UK government is committed to improving the
sustainability of new and existing buildings but
seems to be going about it in a less than effective
way – strong on rhetoric but less well based on
evidence of what works and what needs to be improved,
and with initiatives from different departments that are
UBT’s findings
not very well connected. Can we achieve improvement
Why buildings
when, as Kipling said, “How very little, since things were
often fail to
made, things have altered in the building trade”? Only after that should one begin to be clever. But
deliver
We ‘rethought construction’ 10 years ago and, since instead we are being required to pile on the complexity
The design intent has not
then, have had initiative after initiative. We have a – the ‘green bling’ as Howard Liddell calls it – in the
been managed through challenge to design more sustainable buildings, and to name of sustainability.
the procurement process
improve the existing stock. However, what should be It is all likely to end in tears. For most purposes, we
and into use
an inspiring challenge seems to be turning increasingly are not going to be able to afford high-maintenance
Buildings are being used
into a bureaucratic obstacle race, full of box-ticking solutions. We need robust and resilient ones.
more than the designers
anticipated
distractions. Not to mention a continuing trust in There is now pressure to apply this flawed process
carbon trading, even after the financial traders have to bring our existing building stock up to new low-
Systems are too
complicated and baffle the
gambled away our futures. carbon standards – and this when we can’t even get
users and management We at the Usable Buildings Trust (UBT) visit new new buildings right. Do we really understand what we
Controls don’t work and
buildings and assess how they are working. We have are doing? We can’t afford to throw sackloads of money
things are left switched on
found that even the good ones seldom perform nearly at what may prove to be spurious improvements, some
The basis for the design
as well as the designers intended, particularly in terms with technical risks.
is often flawed; we just
of energy use. And, often, not by small margins – it is
don’t have the right type
not at all unusual to find the electricity use of a ‘low- Our shame
of guidance
energy’ building to be three times as high as the design We need to improve building performance radically,
Continuity of delivery has
estimates. and very quickly. How can we do it? I think the most
been fragmented, with
work packages, partial
The reasons for this general failure are many (see important thing is for us to tune into outcomes, and get
services – or should that
box). They include over-optimism in the design much more closely involved with the consequences of
be “incomplete services”?
calculations, problems with the design-management our actions. That way, we will understand what works
Too often interfaces
process, underestimation of building usage, and poor and what we really need to improve. As the architect
between the parts are
handled poorly – with
continuity of delivery. and workplace specialist Frank Duffy has pointed out:
outsourcing and value
What have we learnt? If you want to put the “Unlike medicine, the professions in construction
engineering reducing
conclusions from our studies into a sentence, I would have not developed a tradition of practice-based user
resilience and stripping
away finesse
say: “Keep it simple, do it well, follow it through, and research, preferring to outsource almost entirely to
learn from the experience.” universities.
42 CIBSE Journal February 2009
www.cibsejournal.com
CIBSEfeb09pp42-44 buildings•.indd 42 9/2/09 12:13:59
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