BUILDING PERFORMANCE 1 UNIVERSITY CASE STUDY
summer. The cover of the April 1998 edition of the Journal therefore asked the question, ‘The Best Building Ever?’. In 2011, PROBE team members returned to review how well the building had fared since then.
Fine-tuning The Elizabeth Fry Building benefited from a client representative, Peter Yorke, who was seeking good-quality, robust, low- energy buildings at normal cost levels and had gained considerable experience from previous UEA projects. The design team was keen to oblige and had worked together before on the adjacent Queen’s Building. The result was a ‘keep-it-simple-and-do-it- well’ design. During construction, critical details affecting insulation and airtightness were followed through by the team with Elizabeth Fry’s builder Willmott Dixon and the university’s clerk of works, who visited the site daily. In 1995, the first year of operation, gas use
for heating was 65 kWh/sq m, good for the UK but disappointing in relation to some Swedish Termodeck buildings. Fortunately, with the encouragement of Termodeck’s UK representative Derrick Braham, the building was being monitored for the government’s Energy Efficiency Best Practice programme. This showed that the boilers sometimes put too much heat into the fabric via the supply air, only for it to be removed by extra outside air ventilation some time later. A strategy based largely on mass
East Anglia (UEA). It revealed a modest but refined building that had exceptionally good performance in many respects. Annual gas consumption for heating and hot water was 35 kWh/sq m of treated floor area (TFA), while other buildings surveyed by PROBE tended to use 100 kWh/sq m or more. Overall levels of occupant satisfaction were the best in the PROBE dataset, particularly in
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sensing was therefore proposed, but could not be implemented using the original standalone controllers. In 1996 the university therefore extended its new Trend building management system to Elizabeth Fry – ahead of schedule. The results were dramatic, with gas consumption halved in 1997, the year analysed in the PROBE survey.
March 2012 CIBSE Journal 31
Administration office for the Hub: This was occupied in September 2011, replacing the popular ground floor seminar rooms. Note the lowered blackout blinds (inherited from the former seminar rooms) to counter solar glare through the side windows
In 1998 the Elizabeth Fry Building set new highs for overall comfort, summer temperature, and air quality, in terms of average responses to the Building Use Studies occupant survey
Bill Bordass
Roderick Bunn
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