086 SUSTAINABILITY
volume and that’s still a bit of a conflict. I don’t think we should necessarily be scuppering housebuilding for the climate emergency, but we definitely need to balance it somehow. But we are seeing councils pushing for it, such as the GLA and Bristol City Council.
We get clients asking for ‘zero carbon’ without always realising what it really means, but even so that is a great and very positive starting point.
Many clients are attuned to sustainability as a business priority, but what role should architects and developers be playing in guiding or encouraging other clients about the importance of carbon-neutral choices within a project?
One of the great abilities of architects – and I say this as an engineer within the architecture industry – is that they are very good at conveying incredibly complex information in quite an engaging and succinct way. It’s about that advocacy and intelligibility.
Some clients will listen, but others won’t. Getting those around to a certain way of thinking is the real challenge.
What we need as an industry is the ability to cost it and put it in terms that clients and developers already recognise. I do feel it is often the cost issue that is really holding us back and I don’t think there are too many quantity surveyors who are grappling with it in the same way that perhaps the rest of the industry is. It’s quite damning, particular given that the RICS has perhaps the best whole-life carbon assessment methodology. I’m not quite sure what the disconnect is – perhaps a generational thing – but as the quantity surveyors and project managers are often with the client at the very initial stages, talking about the feasibility of a project. Carbon should be part of that story first and foremost, alongside cost. You don’t generally see a value engineering exercise aimed at reducing the carbon of a project, but you certainly see them when it comes to reducing the cost. And yet, they’re not mutually exclusive; on a recent project we changed the framing system on the building following a value engineering process and it saved a huge amount of carbon as a result, with no discernible impact on the building internally.
From below left Croft Gardens uses high-quality materials that emanate a sense of permanence; rooms have been designed to prioritise health and wellbeing
CASE STUDY CROFT GARDENS
Croft Gardens is a project by Feilden Clegg Bradley Studios for King’s College, Cambridge, proposing residential accommodation for students and fellows in a new community south-west of the city. The project will create 84 new homes for graduates, fellows and their families, as well as gardens and communal areas. Targeting a 100-year design
life, the scheme uses high-quality materials that emanate a sense of permanence. Externally, soft waterstruck gault clay bricks and handmade plain roof tiles reference surrounding vernacular materials. Alongside the high standards of Passivhaus building performance, the project has been created with a holistic view of sustainability within the contexts of the immediate site and global climate. It has prioritised achieving excellence in health and wellbeing, landscape and nature, water, materials and waste, community and neighbourhood, and construction impacts. It is expected that Croft Gardens will be carbon negative for the first seven to ten years of operation, driven in a large part by the embodied sequestered carbon through use of CLT for its structure and timber as an internal finishing material. It is due for completion in May 2022.
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