CIBSE national conference
IN THEIR WORDS
‘It’s engineering’s time in history to anticipate where society will be and invest’
Keith Clarke
‘Buildings are seldom tuned up properly, and controls are a mess’
Bill Bordass
Delegates took part in a number of panel-led question-and-answer sessions over the two days.
Make performance details visible
n
POST-OCCUPANCY
Bill Bordass of the Useable Buildings Trust offered
delegates a simple checklist of how to design, develop and maintain reliably sustainable buildings: ‘Keep it simple, do it well, follow it through, and tune it up.’ Reviews of recent buildings
show that they often perform much less well than anticipated, for both energy use and occupant satisfaction. Good environmental performance and occupant satisfaction can go hand in hand, but only where good, committed people have made it happen, Bordass insisted. One key problem is that the requirements being set for new buildings are overly complex, often with the addition of ‘bling’
Bill Bodass... keep it simple.
technology. ‘Buildings are seldom tuned up properly, and controls are a mess,’ Bordass said. One underlying cause of poor performance is that the initial ‘design estimate’ of a building can be overly optimistic about energy loads, for example by ignoring night-time usage. Nor does the design take note of enough detail in relation to a building’s services and operations.
‘Under threat we fail to conduct the real post- occupancy evaluation of a building’
Rob Manning
‘The design intent is simply not
managed through the development process and into building usage,’ Bordass said. ‘We have to make building
performance visible. We must take action now. ‘We need to build upon what
works and improve what doesn’t. And all the players involved need to be motivated.’ CIBSE’s TM22 document begins
to show the way on how to provide more transparency for buildings’ performance, but it needs to be updated to include more on design intent, Bordass argued. ‘But a universal framework
can become too complicated,’ he warned. ‘We must have performance details visible at different levels, and communicate these clearly.’
Industry is its own worst enemy
FUTURE TRENDS
Building services engineers are the sector’s own worst enemy, said Paddy Conaghan, partner at Hoare Lea. He stressed that other sectors are seeing opportunities that building services has missed during the recent ‘party years’ in construction, such as carbon management. He was also critical of the UK’s
failure to invest in research and development, which would see a changing market bypassing UK industry: ‘In the design community we are far ahead of most other members of a design team, but
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often we have to drag them and our clients to the right place. ‘Plainly if everyone else is in such
dire need of training, people are not listening to us. One senses a spiral of decline accelerated, probably, by the economy, but also by our own hand.’ Referring to the recent interim
report by the Innovation and Growth Team that highlighted the barriers to achieving ‘quantum change’ in the construction sector, he said building services was implicated in a lack of inspiration in the supply chain and between the institutions – something the IGT identified as a ‘systemic failure’.
David Gann, group innovation executive at Laing O’Rourke, echoed some of Conaghan’s assertions: ‘Investment is the answer. We have to find a way of systematically putting innovation into our organisations.’
‘Plainly if everyone else is in such dire need of training people are not listening to us’
Paddy Conaghan
‘People treat a contract like going to the dentist – they just get it out of the way’
Richard Ward
Thank you to the event sponsors
CIBSE would like to thank the following companies for their valued support at the CIBSE national conference:
Main sponsors:
Frese Ltd Fläkt Woods Ltd
Dinner sponsors:
Fläkt Woods Ltd Lochinvar Ormandy Ruskin Air Management Ltd
Exhibitors
Amtech Group Baxi Commercial Heating Belimo Automation Ltd EDSL (Tas Building Designer) Hoval IES
David Gann... investment is key.
Kampmann GmbH Modern Building Services Polypipe Trox UK Ltd WindowMaster
June 2010 CIBSE Journal
21
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