AWARDS SPECIAL BUILDING PERFORMANCE
stakeholders, the client team and end-user groups, and it’s beginning to shape how the performance of the building is going to come together.’ Morgan Sindall has written Soft Landings
into the contract right from the beginning, and paid for three years of POE to be carried out. ‘The client will get a better building as a result,’ says Thompson. ‘As an industry, we don’t think about handover early enough; we need to be thinking about these things right at the outset.’ Clearly, the fi rm is convinced of the
merits of Soft Landings; Morgan Sindall has now introduced a nationwide Soft Landings forum to instigate a unifi ed approach across the group. Lessons are also being learnt at consultant Max Fordham, where experience of a two-year aftercare service for the Hayward Gallery (see box, page 10) is feeding into future Soft Landings projects. ‘The client can now see the benefi t of Soft Landings, and we will be including it in ongoing work at the East Wing of the Southbank Centre,’ says Tamsin Tweddell, senior engineer at Max Fordham. ‘User involvement has been lacking in
building design and this approach tests the design as you go along.’There is, of course, a cost to all of this and, with the industry slow to recover from one of the worst recessions on record, is this the time to be adding to client overheads? ‘It’s more a case of “can you afford not
to do it”,’ says Bunn. ‘The improvements on energy performance alone will allow
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clients to justify every penny. ’ BSRIA estimates that the additional
costs of incorporating Soft Landings is between 0.1% for buildings between £10m to £30m, and 1% for buildings below £10m construction cost. This includes a fee of £8,000 to £15,000 for an independent POE. There are many published examples where the energy savings achieved as a result of POE will far exceed the costs of Soft Landings, but Gary Clark admits the user group does need to develop case studies that provide a compelling business case for potential clients. Clearly, this is an initiative whose time
has come. Soft Landings are a key part of the BIM Task Group’s Digital Plan of Work, due to be announced shortly. They will also be referenced in the updated Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) Plan of Work, due to be released in April 2013. The BIM Task Group has also made it clear that they expect public sector projects to undertake Soft Landings on all future projects, in order to enable the expected performance of the buildings to be delivered, in practice. This adoption by government is certain to drive interest in the Soft Landings approach. Indeed, Clark has plans underway for a
regional user group in Scotland, as well as a research project into the cost of facilities management and how Soft Landings can help to reduce that. With more and more consultants and contractors seeking to differentiate their services by offering the approach to clients, isn’t it time your business prepared for a soft landing?
March 2013 CIBSE Journal 11
TM22 and Soft Landings
To measure the energy used in a building the BIM Task Group propose to use the CIBSE TM22 tool. This is a simple spreadsheet-based tool for recording energy use and identifying areas where it may be excessive. A version of TM22 is also due to be published later this year.
As an industry, we don’t think about handover early enough; we need to be thinking about these things right at the outset
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