Objecting to IKEA

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The Sainsbury’s store in Greenwich, which I worked on with Paul Hinkin of Black Architecture in the late 1990s is set to be demolished to make way for a big blue IKEA box, despite its being regarded as the most influential retail building worldwide in the last 30 years (Building Services Journal).

Photo: Millennium Sainsbury's

The Greenwich Council Planning website is open for comments on the IKEA Outline Application which requires the demolition of Sainsbury’s. I urge you to make a brief comment in support of retaining this important building.

My comments on the application are reproduced below:

The Greenwich Sainsbury’s was the first retail store to achieve BREEAM ‘excellent’, long before this requirement was adopted into planning policy. The original design achieved a 50% reduction in Carbon emissions at a time when the Building Regulations did not even measure Carbon. Further, the design focused on minimising the fundamental need for energy, rather than simply displacing energy supply from the grid to renewables. If a new building’s Carbon performance is predicated on renewables, then when the technologies eventually fail the building’s full demand will revert to the grid. By contrast the Sainsbury’s store will always be a low Carbon store by virtue of its fundamental design.

It is an appalling waste of resources and completely unsustainable to allow this store to be demolished so soon after construction. It is unfeasible that this should have come about by Sainsbury’s being able to place restrictions on the re-use of the existing building. Greenwich Planning Committee could make a strong statement about sustainability by calling for any restrictive covenant to be set aside and the building retained.

If the existing Sainsbury’s Store must be demolished please consider conditioning all of the building fabric improvements and energy efficiency measures set out in the Energy Assessment produced by Envision Energy in support of the IKEA application. Energy saving design is expensive compared to general construction and is typically value engineered out prior to contract. Without the full set of features described in the Energy Assessment, you would be left with a standard store design, compliant with the Building Regulations, but no more.

With regard to renewable energy, the IKEA development should aim to utilise the ground source energy potential left as a legacy by the Sainsbury’s store. Boreholes were sunk to serve as heat rejection for food refrigeration in the Sainsbury’s and these could be repurposed to serve a ground source, space heating and cooling system. This would be preferable to adding heavy goods vehicles delivering woodchip in an already congested part of South London, or the installation of photovoltaics, which essentially relies on offsetting to achieve Carbon abatement.

Sustainable Building Needs New Language

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For those who don’t subscribe to The ENDS Report, here is my opinion piece from the February 2014 edition:

The construction industry has a communication problem. We presently use completely different language from our clients when discussing the value and benefits of the property that we design and build.

The built environment is clearly responsible for significant environmental impacts. It is regularly stated that buildings account for around 50% of the UK’s carbon dioxide emissions and about 80% of UK water consumption. This has made construction the focus for a raft of legislation and initiatives aimed at reducing these impacts. However, we need to be careful that we do not throw the baby out with the bathwater.

The consumption of energy and water attributed to buildings is actually due to consumption by the people inhabiting them, plus some waste from inefficient systems and operations.

Clearly, we must work hard to eliminate the waste. Waste, in any form, is an un-necessary cost and avoidable environmental burden. However, in order for construction to make significant progress we need to take into account the human element. People consume energy and water, not buildings themselves. We need to stop considering buildings in isolation and assess the complex socio-economic system that is our built environment.

Buildings deliver significant social and economic benefits. We spend most of our lives in buildings. Buildings enable children to learn and businesses to thrive. Buildings house essential services that sustain us and cultural activities that enrich our lives. We must weigh the benefits of new construction as much as the impacts that it creates. Too narrow a focus risks biasing our judgment.

It is now common to see buildings labelled ‘sustainable’ as defence against environmental antagonism, even though there is no universally accepted definition of the term. Is a sustainable building one that is built solidly and capable of enduring, or is it one that can easily be taken down and its materials re-used? Does a building have to deliver social improvement to be sustainable, or simply achieve a high score on an environmental checklist?

In the absence of common understanding, we tend to invent measures for sustainability based on issues familiar to us. Different groups cleave to issues that suit their agenda or that can be simply evaluated. Construction presently focuses on carbon emissions as a proxy for sustainability. Following standard valuation practice, both operational and embodied carbon emissions are expressed in terms of the building floor area. Yet these measures are largely meaningless to the leaders of the businesses that will occupy buildings.

Businesses have their own measures of performance and success. In commercial enterprises these involve profitability and productivity ratios. Hospitals measure their performance in terms of recovery rates and schools by the learning outcomes achieved. These business performance indicators are almost all human related, whereas construction indicators are generally asset based.

We need to bridge these disparate aspects of performance and create new indicators that are genuine measures of sustainable outcomes within the built environment.

The simple construction metrics of cost and carbon emission by floor area do not reveal any information about the benefits of a building’s design. Imagine instead measuring construction cost and carbon emission for a new office building by the number of workstations accommodated. This would provide direct measures of the efficacy of the office design in terms that are meaningful to potential occupiers. Once the benefits of the design approach are made explicit in terms of business performance, our preconceptions are often overturned.

Natural ventilation is the doyenne of sustainable office design as it requires very little energy. On the other hand air-conditioning is often eschewed due to its high energy consumption. However, natural ventilation requires low occupation density and clean outdoor air, whilst air-conditioning is suited to more polluted city centres and permits higher occupation densities, in other words more productive staff in the same space. Thus, air-conditioned buildings may actually achieve a lower carbon footprint per worker, even thought they have a higher footprint per square metre of floor area.

Design quality should also feature in sustainable property metrics. Numerous studies have shown that high quality design promotes higher productivity and less absenteeism in offices, better learning outcomes in schools and improved recovery in hospitals. Suitable metrics would allow business leaders to immediately relate beneficial business outcomes to energy and water consumption via the vector of staff. This is a compelling tool for the future of property related decision making.

It doesn’t end with commercial offices. If designers understood end user businesses a little better we could develop appropriate metrics for cost and carbon efficiency appropriate to any business sector. We would measure the efficiency of a hotel by bed spaces and a distribution warehouse by the number of pallets of goods accommodated. It will require some work to establish the full range of suitable measures, but this will lead to better business outcomes for construction, as well as for its customers.

Design-led businesses, such as Apple, have generated enormous value by focusing on their customers’ needs and innovating to fulfil them. As construction comes to better understand end users’ true needs and desires, it will naturally find the means to innovate. Developing the language to demonstrate how construction is addressing its customers’ needs will be a first step on the road to creating real value in the industry.

We are only just beginning to realise what it might mean to really be sustainable. In order to move to a genuinely sustainable construction industry we need to evaluate the social and economic benefits and impacts of buildings in addition to the environmental impacts associated with their delivery. We need to start applying the tools used by economists and sociologists to our understanding of the sustainable built environment. Post occupancy evaluation of buildings needs to capture intelligence on business and social improvement as well as figures for energy performance. Equipped with new insights into customer needs and the language to debate them, the construction industry could be set for stellar performance.

What I Learned This Week

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This week, well actually over the last few weeks, I have learned that the UK construction industry is incredibly conservative, even more than I previously realised. I’ve also learned that the younger generation of professionals appears to be conditioned by received wisdom without necessarily examining the issues for themselves. Any challenge to the sacred cows of construction is seen as an affront and not an opportunity to learn and improve. I find this very worrying for the future of our industry.

Those that follow my blog or tweets will know that I am not afraid to express my opinions. In fact it is one of the main reasons that Building Design included me in their ranking of influential people a couple of years ago. But I am finding that activism for change is falling on increasingly deaf ears in construction. The mainstream construction industry seems to be losing the ability to think about the issues, particularly when these involve unwelcome truths or wicked problems.

It started a couple of weeks ago, when I found myself in dinner jacket and black tie in the debating chamber of the Cambridge Union, which is modelled on the House of Commons, as part of a team arguing against the suggestion that “BIM is the Answer”. I chose to challenge two BIM dictums: that it will lead to more innovation and that it will generate greater collaboration. Lets be clear, I believe that BIM will be immensely helpful to the industry, but not in those ways.

Firstly, innovation is disruptive. Innovations come along and change the paradigm. Therefore it is not possible to model any innovation within the existing paradigm. That is why BIM cannot possibly stimulate innovation. A building information model can only be built from the existing paradigm and therefore true innovation is excluded from the modelled environment by its very nature.

Secondly, any technology that requires people to spend more and more time behind computers is a natural barrier to creative collaboration. Collaboration requires quality face to face time. Innovative businesses such as Apple and Ideo structure their teams to provide as much face to face contact time as possible to spark ideas which lead to innovation.

Counter arguments from the audience simply reiterated the cliches that BIM provides a less costly environment for innovation than bricks and mortar and that working on a common model equals collaboration.

I think that this reveals the complete misunderstanding in construction of what innovation really means. At The Atkins Christmas Debate on Innovation and Education it was clear that innovation was being defined by engineers as incremental improvement, not disruptive change. It is true that BIM will help deliver incremental improvement for construction, but that is not enough to be called innovation.

Construction teams are divided in order to drive down what is perceived as unnecessary expense. This is a barrier to collaboration so we invent management structures (of which BIM is one) to overcome it. As the management structures become more onerous we need to deploy staff simply to fulfil their demands. BIM is already the preserve of specialists that may never even meet each other. That is not collaboration.

Then last week we had the online Saint Gobain debate on whether there is a useful definition of a sustainable building. The discussion was wide ranging and should have provoked some genuine reflection on what it means to be sustainable in the 21st Century. In the end, the audience voted that there is a useful definition of sustainable building, even though nobody had been able to identify what it was. Once again the debate audience appeared to reject the opportunity to re-examine the issues but cleaved to the status quo.

I was on the losing side in both cases, but that is not what has made me sore (well only a little). No, rather, it is the retrenchment in the face of argument that concerns me most. As with climate change, we have almost reached a point where BIM and sustainability have become ideologies. The supporters and opponents of these positions become retrenched in response to any contrary argument and real debate about the issues is suppressed.

There have been other instances recently that have reinforced my jaded views. I can’t reveal confidential information but suffice to say I was invited to offer my opinion on a scheme only to find that the designers were not willing to discuss the issues, only to assert that their solution was sustainable despite evidence to the contrary.

Labelling buildings or construction tools as something they are not (or may be only a little) as pre-emptive defence against antagonists seems to have become prevalent. Has our industry become so beaten down that we now see every opportunity as a threat?

BIM has enough going for it already without making inflated claims to its capability. Sustainability is so wide ranging as to enable us to improve performance in so many ways, yet we still label buildings on the smallest justification. The fact that we have these tools and capabilities shouldn’t prevent us from striving to do better. Lets call a thing a thing and not pretend that it is more or less than it actually is.

(Actually politicians seem to think that they have magical powers that allow them to change the nature of something by calling it something else. This can be the only reason why the new Part L, which is to be enacted in April 2014, is called Part L 2013.)

The construction industry has been an amazing place to work for the last 25 years. It could be even more amazing in the future, but we need to stop hiding our heads, address the difficult truths and get on with making a real difference. Or am I just getting old and grumpy?

Saint Gobain Debate Final

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This is it. The final arguments are up on the Saint Gobain Debate Site, along with guest comments from Jon Bootland. The voting is still neck and neck so please make up your own mind.

I believe this debate has been really helpful in flushing out issues that we in construction must address. The debated question is somewhat ambiguous and the arguments deliberately provocative. We’ve received terrific contributions, which have extended the argument beyond what the debaters could have managed. The voting has been neck and neck throughout, which suggests that opinion really is divided.

Re-reading the arguments and contributions, there is one thing that stands out for me: the confusion over what sustainability actually means. We have debated various sub-sets of meaning but still have reached no useful definition of what a sustainable building is.

We’ve discussed rating systems which focus on impacts of constructing and/or operating a building. But these don’t address whether a building will be a benefit or a burden to society. Whether it will be loved and endure, or be hated and demolished. Whether it promotes wellbeing amongst its occupants and users. Local plans address some social and economic issues, but do not address indicators such as ONS’s national wellbeing or BRE’s societal cost of poor housing.

It is hard to evaluate these intangible, checklist unfriendly, issues. But we must confront these truths if we are to make the transition to a sustainable construction industry.

Most certainly we need to improve our understanding of building performance and the prediction models so that they better reflect actual outcomes. We must improve the education and skills of construction professionals and equip ourselves to tackle these issues. Then we must improve our communications in order to present truthful information about building performance in a useful way.

These however, are simply the business improvement actions required of a progressive 21st Century industry. Merely doing what is necessary will not transform us into a sustainable construction industry.

We should not delude ourselves that the transition to genuinely sustainable construction will be easy or cheap. It will require conviction and commitment.

Would a simple definition of a sustainable building be useful anyway? I think not.

Sustainability does not arise from a label applied to buildings. Sustainable is not something you do, sustainable is something that you are. Sustainability is an ethos, a thought process. Sustainability informs everything you do.

Creating ‘sustainable’ labels incentivises us to strive towards that particular goal, often at the expense of other significant issues. As long as we persist in labeling buildings using checklists, we will promote cherry-picking from a limited range of issues, glorifying a few good features to conceal the bad.

Delft University compared environmental rating systems and discovered that it was toughest to get a high score under BREEAM. This should be a mark of excellence. Instead it means that LEED has become the system of choice as it is simpler to gain the highest rating. The effort that should go into sustainable design has been diverted into effort to find the lowest hurdle.

To become a sustainable industry, we need to apply our professionalism and our imagination to eliminating all which is damaging or degrading.

We need to identify all possible harms that could arise from construction, operation and inhabitation of buildings and work to eliminate them.

We need to strive for Zero Harm. Zero Harm to the biosphere that makes life possible on this planet. Zero Harm to our fellow humans, including those as yet unborn. Of course my dream of truly Zero Harm construction is practically unachievable. But surely it is our duty as 21st Century professionals to get as close as we can.

Construction is good at managing risk. Why can’t we apply the same processes to managing harm?

Rather than using sustainability checklists that only address the common features of buildings, we would create harm mitigation plans bespoke to each building project. The development team could clearly demonstrate their understanding of the true range of possible impacts and the measures that they have taken to mitigate them. Such an approach also provides the essential flexibility required for design compromise, which is lacking in some of the checklist ratings.

If Sherlock Holmes were alive today, I am certain that he would concur: “When we have eliminated all possible harm, that which remains must be sustainable”. Isn’t that worth striving for?