084 SUSTAINABILITY


What are some of the material and product choices that can make a big difference to the sustainable outcome of a project?


What we’re really talking about here are materials or products that don’t need as much processing, but when you take a step back and look at it intuitively, it’s probably just a better material. You can get really bogged down in trying to find environmental product declarations, but actually we’re quite privileged as an architectural practice that quite often we are right there with the clients from the start. It means we’re really able to inform them on some fundamental choices, like timber being better for one project or brick for another. So from that starting point, to have the intuition to target a product that is less processed is a good starting point.


Having said that, we really want to use natural products where possible. Te difficulty here is the balance with longevity and resilience, which many natural products don’t have. So you can end up with a really natural material inside, but something like bricks or ceramics externally, which are not particularly low carbon, but are long lasting.


When we are assessing the sustainability of our buildings, we don’t tend to finish a project and then go away. We like to go back and continue to support that building. If we can create a building that lasts 100 years instead of the 60 years that were intended, then that’s the really exciting thing for us.


How do you look to measure the sustainable impact of your projects? Is it always a major component of your discussions with clients?


Tis is where our free online tool designed to aid carbon- neutral building – FCBS Carbon – comes in. We realised we needed to make decisions at an early stage, before we could actually know what the materials were going to be. We might know roughly what will be used, but we won’t know the form factor, or what will happen if you add 300mm to the floor height, for example. Would that make a big difference or not? What if you changed the glazing ratio?


As an industry, we don’t have the intuition yet to be able to know all this year. FCBS Carbon is not hugely accurate, but it is consistent and it fills this ‘intuition gap’. Once you start to build replacement cycles into it, you can easily see both what the upfront impact is, as well as the whole-life perspective. It enables quick dialogues between all parties in order to model it. As I said, it is not exact, but it does give a good feel, and zero carbon is often part of that discussion.


Typically, these things would be scoped out by engineers, who would wait for a frozen plan to pull this information together. We might then make some changes – possibly many changes – and it would have to go back to the engineers and there would perhaps be another four weeks before you can update the picture. It’s about being agile with your carbon calculations.


Tings like climate emergency declarations are incredibly helpful. Even if nothing directly results, the increasing awareness and discussion is an important part of the overall process. We’re finding that commercial clients are able to access pools of cash or favourable terms of lending that are there to improve environmental outcomes. All these factors really help. And where we have higher education clients, universities have to respond to the increasingly strong views from younger people about sustainability so that can be a big push.


What we’re not really seeing as much as I would like is action from housebuilders. We still have a housing crisis, and there still seems to be a functional emphasis on


Building better


Dr Joe Jack Williams


Associate and researcher, FCBStudios


‘When we are assessing the


sustainability of our buildings, we don’t tend to finish a project and then go away. We like to go back and continue to support that building’


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