Curating Place 2 – Reflections

Posted on September 4, 2014 by Doug King

Last week I was happy to join several teams of architects in a site visit to Fall Hill Quarry in Derbyshire, the location for the first project to be imagined by Curating Place. Old, abandoned industrial sites such as quarries always make me feel somber, mainly for the loss of the skills and productivity that they represent. I am also desolated by the impact we have made on the natural landscape and invigorated by the restorative power of nature in about equal measure. I believe that channelling such emotional responses will be key to the success of any development at Fall Hill.

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All architecture is designed to be experienced, but it seems to me that in commercial architecture this is so often reduced to a narrow palette of visual appliqué. Yet we all know what it is to be moved by truly great architecture.

I often refer to architecture as requiring a ‘business plan’. By this I don’t mean a bald accounting of rental income versus construction cost. Instead, I mean designers must understand and empathise with their public to create an offering that will be genuinely attractive. To do this the design must expand beyond the simple physical stuff of building and engage with social and humanistic issues to deliver both service and a truly meaningful experience. Only this rounded approach will lead to the architecture enduring. Vitruvius had it right all along, we just seem to have forgotten it in the rush to simple commodity.

People will pay handsomely to create memories that will last them a lifetime. Think about your own experiences and what you are prepared to pay. It could be enduring a night in the rain and mud to hear your favourite band, or a month’s salary for a meal in a Michelin starred restaurant. On the other hand, no-one would consider MacDonald’s or Burger King as providing a great experience and so they are reduced to competing with each other over price. If our creations fail to provide memorable experiences they will simply become commodities to be traded at lowest cost, but otherwise ignored.

The reality is that all buildings need a purpose and, more often than not, a large part of that purpose is to generate revenue. True, there are examples of grand 18th Century follies, which apparently have no purpose, but that is of course far from the truth. Follies were built with the specific purpose of creating experiences. If the conjunction of architecture and business in the modern world can offer experiences that exceed expectation then customers will not only return in the future, they will tell their friends, thus ensuring the success of the business and the architecture.

I have come across many developers and developments that labour under the misapprehension ‘build it and they will come’. This is a disastrous fallacy, as has been demonstrated by numerous Millennium Commission funded projects from the National Centre for Popular Music to the Millennium Dome. No, we must only build what we know will prove to be attractive and enduring. This actually requires some long, hard thinking about the people who will use our designs, what they need, what they want and what might surprise and delight them. Once you have identified and designed the means to delight your customers then you will have developed a ‘business plan’ that will sustain your architecture.

Sustainable Hypocrisy

Posted on July 9, 2014 by Doug King

If you have read my posts or tweets over the last few months then you will probably know that I am pretty peeved with Sainsburys over the future of the Greenwich store that I helped design for them back in the late 1990s. Sainsburys want to move to a more profitable location and, apparently, to stop any competitor gaining a foothold in the area they have placed a legal covenant on the land at Greenwich to prevent it from ever being used again as a food store.

The building was specifically designed to be the best and most energy efficient food store possible, mainly through a passive approach but also by recycling heat from the refrigeration plant and cooling the surplus with groundwater. To prevent this groundbreaking building being reused for its intended purpose is the anthesis of sustainable development.

The passive design features of the building (daylight, thermal mass, natural ventilation) would equally benefit many other retail uses, but the only party currently interested in purchasing the site is IKEA, who apparently cannot imagine how to adapt their big blue artificially conditioned box model to use daylight.

Both Sainsburys and IKEA have defended their respective positions. Their people in charge of sustainability have stated that the store was a prototype, things have moved on since 2000 and both new stores will incorporate the latest sustainable technologies. Well I think that shows just how little clue these corporate sustainability wonks really have. As far as I know daylight has been around for a while, is pretty well proven as a concept and is not likely to be superseded any time soon.

In IKEA’s case they state that their new store “will achieve a BREEAM ‘Excellent’ rating and will include technologies to help minimise the store’s carbon footprint such as photovoltaic (solar) panels.” Funny that they consider this to be an advancement in sustainability when, 15 years ago, the original building achieved the first ever retail BREEAM ‘Excellent’ without any contribution from solar panels. IKEA goes on to state how they are reducing their carbon footprint across stores by 11% through switching to advanced LED lighting. Hmmm.. the Sainsburys Store reduces lighting energy consumption by around 80% simply using daylight! I think it is unlikely that IKEA will ever recognise the irony of generating electricity from the sun just to run their technically superior LED lights.

Then, the other day, I read an article about Sainsburys proclaiming their latest sustainability hit, a new store powered entirely by food waste, presumably the kind of approach that represents a “significant advance” over passive energy conservation as used at Greenwich. It seems that a new store at Cannock in Staffordshire is to have a private wire connection to a near by anaerobic digestion and generation facility and will send its food waste there for conversion. Yes this will divert food waste from landfill and put it to a better use, but this is not a sustainable solution. Food is for eating! What will happen when energy demand at the store increases, will Sainsburys start to deliberately divert food to the waste stream in order to keep feeding the anaerobic digester?

The supermarket retail model is largely responsible for the waste of around 40% of food. This is a HUGE problem! A business that was genuinely focussed on sustainable development would be working to reduce the food waste problem at its root: packaging, handling and overstocking. To try and greenwash a problem like food waste with pseudo energy efficiency really is the worst sustainability hypocrisy that I have ever come across.

If Sainsburys and IKEA want to demonstrate that they are genuinely concerned about sustainable development then they will have to try a lot harder, or they should simply shut up. At present all they are achieving is to demonstrate that they really are only prepared to pay lip service to sustainability in the pursuit of profits.

UN EcoBuilding

Posted on March 15, 2014 by Doug King

I’ve just returned from one of the most fulfilling building openings I have ever been to, that of the United Nations Ecobuilding in Podgorica, Montenegro. Even though this is technically no more advanced than any other low energy building I have designed, I believe that the potential for beneficial change that this building offers is greater than all the others put together.

The building, on the bank of the River Moraca, represents a ground-breaking new way of working for UN regional agencies as well as leading edge low energy building design. The building was the brainchild of Garret Tankosic-Kelly, formerly Resident Coordinator for the UN in Montenegro. The five UN agencies operating in Montenegro were working from independent locations in Podgorica. The creation of a new building was an opportunity to streamline operations as well as create synergies between the agencies.

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The Austrian Government sponsored an architectural competition in 2005 to find a design for the building. I helped Daniel Fugenschuh, architect from Innsbruck develop the concept inspired by the sentiment ‘Delivering as One’ as described in the brief. All the UN agencies were to be placed on the same floor level and under a unifying roof form.

The Montenegro Government gifted land for the building in a prominent position on the edge of the Moraca River. The design responds to the location by recessing into the riverbank to create an iconic building without dominating the skyline. The work spaces project onto the riverbank like fingers, each housing two agencies with a fourth finger accommodating the café and terrace which can be used for informal meetings and social interaction.

Energy consumption has been substantially reduced compared to the norm for the region using simple methods such as providing plentiful natural light and natural ventilation in lieu of sealed construction and air conditioning. The river carries meltwater from the surrounding mountains and creates a natural pocket of cool air within its banks. This is utilised for passive cooling in conjunction with the massive, insulated concrete slab roof. Large rooflights, cut through the slab, allow daylight to penetrate into the offices below along with full height glazing on the western elevation overlooking the river.

The building is heated and cooled using a heat pump coupled to groundwater abstracted from a borewell on the site. Podgorica sits atop a vast underground catchment from the mountains, which surfaces in nearby Skadar Lake, the largest freshwater body in the region. The water temperature is a constant 11°C year round and for most of the year this is low enough to cool the building directly, but in the summer months a heat pump can be used to refrigerate the cooling system water to extract additional cooling capacity.

The primary means of cooling the workspace is a network of pipes embedded in the concrete roof slab. The slab is insulated on the outside and the concrete left exposed on the inside to form the ceiling of the offices. Heat from the interior is continuously absorbed into the concrete and any surplus is carried away by the circulating cooling water. This system will operate to deliver background cooling when internal temperatures rise above 22°C.

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When the outside air temperature is low enough in the evenings and overnight the slab can simply be cooled by passive night ventilation using the opening windows. However the occupants will need to keep the windows shut during the summer when temperatures can rise to around 40°C for weeks at a time and remain above 30°C overnight. Under these conditions the ground water cooling will operate continuously, supplemented by conventional central air conditioning during the day when the indoor temperature exceeds 26°C

The solar heat gains to the building are mitigated by shading the roof with a photovoltaic solar canopy which, at 86kW, is believed to be the largest building attached photovoltaic installation in the Balkan region. The solar power generation will be sufficient to meet the majority of the building’s power needs. When there is a surplus of electricity generated, this will be fed into the national power grid, another first for Montenegro.

The building is well insulated and uses solar control, triple glazed windows to Passivhaus standards. With the relatively mild Montenegran winters there is typically little call for heating and the idea of heavily insulating the building was unusual for the local contractors. However the insulation pays dividends in limiting heat transmission in the summer and in winter the heat gains from occupancy will generally be sufficient to keep the building warm. However, for the occasions when the temperature does drop, the heat pump can act in reverse to heat the building, drawing heat out of the groundwater. The solar canopy has also had to be designed to withstand 1m snow depth.

When we started the project we unknowingly faced years of trying to persuade the Montenegran construction industry and regulatory authorities of the possibility of delivering low energy buildings in the region. Almost every feature we proposed was “impossible to achieve in this country”. Nevertheless we persisted and with time the awareness of new technologies and techniques grew and, with it, acceptance of what we were proposing. The breakthrough probably occurred when the electricity company changed their rules to allow grid connection of solar PV generation. Thus after eight and a half years the building is finally finished and delivers 95% of the initiatives that we hoped.

This project has clearly advanced the leading edge of building technology in the Balkan region. However, what is most significant is that the final design and construction was realised in Montenegro by Montenegran consultants and contractors, not merely imported from Northern Europe as typically happens. The local development and construction team have gained a huge amount of new knowledge and experience with novel technologies. This is the process I refer to as Co-Design, where we share our knowledge and expertise to enable others to raise their skills and knowledge, rather than simply presenting them with a fait accompli. The building meets European requirements for new buildings to be near zero energy consumers, some five years ahead of schedule and the Montenegran team now has the skills to replicate this indefinitely. This is a key outcome for Montenegro as it seeks membership of the European Union.

We now hope to set up a programme to monitor the performance and use of the building through the first few years of its life. We want to engage both the University in Podgorica and other European Universities in sharing knowledge on how modern architecture can evolve in South Eastern Europe without unnecessarily depleting the region’s resources.

Objecting to IKEA

Posted on February 5, 2014 by Doug King

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

Posted on January 28, 2014 by Doug King

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.