INDUSTRY OPINION
Engineers solving the wrong problems, says CIBSE President
Buildings will become safer and more sustainable if building services engineers take a broader approach, according to CIBSE President Fiona Cousins.
“There's been a tendency to emphasise the skills that are to do
with keeping a piece of machinery running as opposed to keeping the whole of the building running and optimised.”
S
peaking as a guest on the industry podcast ‘Behind the Built Environment’, Cousins challenged the engineering community to lift their “eyes to the horizon” and take more account of social needs, biodiversity, and embodied carbon. “As the electrical grid begins to decarbonise, energy effi ciency is becoming less important,” she told the podcast hosted by the Building Engineering Services Association (BESA). “We've been working in a changing context for a long time [which] means we must think hard about the questions we're asking ourselves as engineers.”
She told BESA chief executive offi cer David Frise that engineers were “brilliant at solving the problem once the problem is defi ned…but we spend a lot of time solving the problem that we defi ned for ourselves…a long time ago”. “Over my career what good looks like has changed quite a lot. If we look back fi ve, six or seven years, none of our clients were asking for decarbonisation…now they all are.”
Serious
Cousins, who is a director of the global engineering fi rm Arup, said taking a broader view of engineering challenges would also
help to address the serious safety issues raised by the Grenfell Tower tragedy.
She added that the public inquiry report showed costs were driven down “as quickly and as hard as they could be” [because] people involved “weren't as aware of the outside environment as they should have been”. “[So] what is the bigger problem that we're trying to solve?
Where is the value? Some of those broader criteria, whether it's safety or climate change or society, are all about not solving just the problem that's in front of you…but how do I make a safe building that contributes to climate change mitigation that is safe in times of climate change adaptation [and] that perhaps supports biodiversity?” Cousins, who is Arup’s Americas region chair and a group
board member, urged the industry to move away from a position where “cost drives everything”. “The best projects that I've worked on…were right at the beginning, the design goals have been set [and are aff ordable but are] also carbon neutral, or deliver a certain programmatic requirement, or [are] restorative of the natural environment.” She said value should be measured on a “whole life” basis and
14 December 2024 •
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