Category Archives: Philosophical

Saint Gobain Debate Day 4

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Yesterday should have seen the rebuttal statements published in Saint Gobain’s debate. However for some reason their site has not been updated, so for those of you who want to keep up, here is my second piece arguing for the motion. If this argument sways you in any way please go to the debate site and vote. Remember you can change your mind and you can vote as often as you like before 19th December.

There is no useful definition of what a sustainable building is

My opposer seems to agree that, whilst there are assessments for a range of building performance issues, there is no overall useful definition of what a sustainable building is. Some assessments focus on construction, some on building performance, some on design quality and some on health and wellbeing. But where is the definition of a sustainable building that considers all of these aspects, and also the ones that the construction industry does not dare to mention?

We have both lighted on the Georgian townhouse as an example of a sustainable typology, even though sustainability, in its current sense, could not have been further from the architects’ minds. In fact Georgian townhouses are amongst the hardest properties to upgrade to current standards of energy efficiency, given their solid wall construction, often inhabited roof spaces and, typically, conservation status. This is sufficient demonstration alone that there is no useful definition of what a sustainable building is.

But what about those issues that the construction industry does not face up to? The industry is good at optimising buildings once a developer has already determined to build. How about the fundamental decision of what and where to build? Where are the sustainability indicators for communities who’s economic life is bled out of them by (sustainably constructed) out of town malls, for Code 4 housing estates built the wrong side of bypasses away from schools and shops, for the proposed demolition of a recent exemplar superstore because of a restrictive covenant on the building’s re-use?

The Qatar World Cup stadium has already been described as the world’s most sustainable stadium on the basis that it will use solar energy to power the vast air conditioning system necessary to stop the players collapsing in an environment hostile to sporting endeavour. Is this really sustainable? Could these resources not be better deployed elsewhere? How about solar power for schools in developing nations? Oh, sorry – they’re not wealthy enough to buy sustainability.

Then consider the shocking rates of death and injury amongst migrant workers building these facilities. We must surely ask ourselves – what is the purpose of this construction? Is it a genuine contribution to human development? How have the developers, designers and contractors acted to protect the rights and freedoms of present and future generations?

In order to be genuinely sustainable, we have to consider a much, much wider range of issues than we in construction are prepared for. The complete gamut of issues cannot possibly be condensed into a simple definition or single assessment methodology. Just because we measure whatever issues first occur to us does not mean that we have necessarily addressed the germane issues.

To presume that a singular method could reveal any meaningful understanding of the relative sustainability of a hospital and an office is nonsense. Businesses have their own measures of sustainable performance and success. In commercial enterprises these involve profitability and productivity ratios, whilst hospitals measure performance in terms of patient recovery times. These key business performance indicators will not yield to the methods of analysis applied in construction. In fact we barely even speak the same language.

Still further, these business indicators do not capture the social impacts on workers and other users of their services. Where are the measures for the impacts of long hours in a stressful frontline job? How do we account for affordable housing being an unaffordable commute away from a job in the building that we have so carefully and sustainably built?

We are only just beginning to realise what it might mean to really be sustainable.

Genuine sustainable construction requires expertise far beyond that which we can muster amongst construction professionals. Yet presently, we do not appear to be prepared to accept this fact. Creating a genuinely sustainable built environment to enable sustainable change in society will take immense effort and commitment. Yet, we persist in insisting that we can do it on the cheap with our simple checklist assessments. Perhaps we shouldn’t blame the industry alone, since our political leadership also lacks any significant commitment to sustainability.

For me however, the real problem is that the very notion of sustainability has become so deeply debased in the service of finance that it no longer has any currency.

In a 2009 poll, Building magazine asked the question: “Will Sustainability Survive the Recession?” Over half the respondents reported that “clients were already asking them to drop sustainability elements”. Fortunately, Building helpfully defined ‘sustainability elements’ as “renewable energy systems and sustainable building services”.

How can an element possibly be sustainable if its incorporation in a building is subject to whim and economic fair weather? If a building is sustainable, it will bring social and economic benefits that would make it more attractive in a recession, not less. This simply reveals that, in the common perception, sustainability has become synonymous with EcoBling. As EcoBling does not deliver tangible benefits it is considered an unnecessary expense to be borne only in placation of political vagaries.

The planning authorities, whether local or national, have created this situation by their rigid insistence for on-site renewables as the principal mark of sustainable development regardless of other environmental, social and economic impacts.

Well ‘sustainability elements’ are clearly back in vogue, to judge by the recent slew of project proposals appearing in the press, but we still have no useful definition of what a sustainable building is.

Saint Gobain Debate Day 1

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For those who are not following on Twitter or have otherwise missed it for some reason, this week I am battling it out online in the inaugural Saint Gobain Debate. I am proposing the motion that: ‘There is no useful definition of what a sustainable building is’, which is being opposed by Jon Chadwick of Associated Architects.

You can follow the debate, contribute and vote here.

Otherwise here is a copy of my opening argument:

There is no useful definition of what a sustainable building is.

In order to have a definition of what a ‘sustainable building’ is we must first have a definition for ‘sustainable’. A widely recognised definition is that of ‘sustainable development’ taken from the Brundtland Commission report Our Common Future:

“Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”

In this context however, ‘development’ is human development, not the bricks and mortar development of real estate. The Brundtland Definition is big picture stuff and cannot so easily be applied to individual buildings. Nevertheless, we should respect the principle. All human activity has impacts, construction and operation of buildings particularly so. We must certainly work hard to deliver functional and cost effective buildings at the lowest possible impact.

We have at our disposal numerous means of assessing impacts. BREEAM, the BRE Environmental Assessment Method, is probably the most comprehensive. BREEAM has been refined over many years to assess a building’s impacts in: energy and water use, health and wellbeing, pollution, transport, materials, waste, ecology and management. However, even this comprehensive checklist of impacts does not make BREEAM a measure of how sustainable the finished building might be.

Whilst BREEAM is one of the better checklists, we often see sustainable credentials claimed on much more flimsy grounds, such as the Passivhaus Standard or even Building Regulations SBEM. Referring to these limited issue assessments as making a building sustainable misleads the public and potential purchasers. It creates belief that buildings can magically become sustainable through the addition technology fixes to address headline issues like carbon emission.

That road leads to Eco-Bling. It is now common to see specious claims to sustainability made on the grounds of urban wind power or city centre biomass heating.

Focusing on any limited range of issues, without considering the entire system within which buildings exist, can lead to perversely un-sustainable outcomes. The principal competitor to BREEAM is LEED, ‘Leadership in Energy & Environmental Design’. Despite its arresting name, recent research by Professor John Schofield in the USA reveals that a high LEED score has no statistically significant impact on primary fuel consumption, nor carbon emissions associated with a building.

If an internationally recognised ‘sustainability’ rating system has no discernible impact on its eponymous objectives, there can be no justification for any claim on lesser grounds.

So, what is the alternative? The Oxford English Dictionary defines ‘sustainable’ as “to be capable of enduring”. Thus, before labelling a building ‘sustainable’, we must consider its useful longevity. We need to have some measure of the period over which the impacts will amortise. In other words, we need to assess the quality of the design and its appeal to society. Whether it is best fitted to the occupants’ needs or is simply a money spinner for a developer. Most importantly, we need to assess whether the design is sufficiently flexible for a building to endure through numerous incarnations.

I suggest that some of the most sustainable buildings in UK cities today are Georgian terraced houses. The Georgian design ideals of proportion, space and light ensured that many buildings were valued by subsequent generations. Not only for their beauty. These buildings have proven sufficiently flexible to be reincarnated as shops, offices, multiple dwellings, museums and many other uses. Far from conforming to a modern checklist approach to sustainability, these buildings were simply designed thoughtfully with their future users in mind.

I believe that this is the key to sustainable buildings. A sustainable building is one that its occupants will want to go on occupying. A sustainable building is one that enables its occupants to be more comfortable and more productive, as well as consuming less energy and less resources. Sustainable buildings bring business enhancing performance benefits to commercial occupiers. How can any building be sustainable that does not contribute to the social development of its occupants and its neighbours?

Without assessing longevity, social contribution and business performance benefits equally with impacts and costs, we cannot make any judgements about a building’s real worth.

At least for now, there truly is no useful definition of what a sustainable building is!

Lies, Damn Lies and Thermal Images

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Last week someone took a thermal camera and tried to create a scandal over energy waste by the Big Six energy companies. They did this by taking thermal images, properly known as thermographs, of energy company office buildings purporting to show them wasting heat. They then sent these images to picture agency SWNS who distributed them to the national newspapers. Many of the national dailies ran with the story. So far I’ve seen versions in the Telegraph, The Mirror and The Daily Mail along with The Plymouth Herald and a handful of online news sites.

Now the problem with putting a thermal camera in the hands of someone who doesn’t know how to use it is that it is an instrument of measurement, not a simple camera. The thermograph is created in false colour and in order to interpret it you need to know the temperature sensitivity and range settings used and the emissivity of the surface being imaged. Clearly the ignorant user of this particular camera just tweaked the settings until he or she got a nice bright red building against a dark blue sky intended to make us thing that the buildings were very hot.

Now I am going to reproduce the images here for purely educational purposes, to demonstrate the fallacy of thermal imagery like this, and not for any kind of commercial gain (please take note SWNS if you happen to be looking at this page).

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In the image above you will notice the strident reds and oranges, intended to make you think there is a lot of heat leaking from the building. However the colour range is just a representation and can be adjusted to cover any temperature range that the thermographer chooses, simply by adjusting the upper and lower limits of the sensitivity range. Look at the photo below and then back at the thermograph. Now you should immediately notice that the surface of the carpark in front of the building is showing up as the same temperature as the first floor and that the trees to the left and right of the shot are the same temperature as the ground floor. Now either these are very hot trees or ….

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Now glass itself is a tricky material for thermographers. At the near infra red glass is pretty much transparent, but becomes less so at longer wavelengths so it is pretty much opaque at environmental temperatures. Glass also has a high emissivity, which means that it is very good at absorbing and emitting radiation. Thus in windows and facades the glass is generally treated to reduce its emissivity in order to cut down on the transmission of heat. However, depending on whether the concern is heat loss from the building or heat gain from the sun, the emissivity could vary at different wavelengths. When something has low emissivity, by definition it has high reflectivity. Glass further complicates the issue by having high surface specular reflection. So without extensive checking the thermographer cannot necessarily determine what portion of the infra red detected by the camera is a result of the surface temperature of the glass and what is merely a reflection of the temperature of the surroundings.

Any reputable thermographer would ensure that the emissivity of the materials was properly accounted for and publish the temperature scale along with the image as in the one below that I produced some years ago for a well known client (you might be able to guess).

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So, if you are a building owner and someone offers to undertake a thermography survey for you then please do question their credentials. If you are a newspaper reader and you see a thermograph without a reference temperature scale then do not believe your eyes.

Now I don’t have any particular love for the Big Six. But trying to create a scandal by falsifying thermal images like this is not on, and shame on agencies and newspapers who don’t even check with their science editors before publishing such rot.

Consultation for Whitewash

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The government is currently consulting us, the great unwashed public, on Allowable Solutions for ‘Zero Carbon’ homes. The scope and extent of these consultations makes it clear that the term ‘Zero Carbon’ is about to become pretty meaningless. I do hope that we are not being asked to consult on a whitewash.

The working definition of ‘Zero Carbon’ has been prepared by the Zero Carbon Hub. This definition includes three components: fabric energy efficiency, onsite Carbon Compliance (Renewables & LZCTs) and finally allowable solutions. The first two components are presently regulated under Part L of the Building Regulations. Allowable Solutions is essentially an offsetting scheme, which allows house builders, where necessary, to make up the final gap to ‘Zero Carbon’ by funding offsite Carbon mitigation measures.

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This structure is entirely logical and should have been workable had it been developed as a complete system. Unfortunately, as in so many other aspects of energy policy, the policymakers do not understand the importance of systems. The ‘Zero Carbon’ working definition was broken down into its three components and each was subject to separate consultation and agreement.

Fabric Energy Efficiency was the first to be considered. However, rather than adopting a challenging new standard for British construction, such as the Passivhaus fabric energy standard, this working party backed off, presumably under pressure from the builders. But that was felt to be OK as the Carbon Compliance layer would surely ensure that the overall Carbon reduction targets were achieved.

The debate around Carbon Compliance unfortunately also fell short of what should have been possible in an enlightened construction industry. The final proposal was that Fabric Energy Efficiency & Carbon Compliance together should achieve a 60% reduction below 2006 Part L. This was felt to be a target that could be achieved by 90% of house builders by 2020, four years after ‘Zero Carbon’ becomes a requirement. Hardly a challenge sufficient to promote step change in working practices.

But this did not matter, as the consultees were certain that the Allowable Solutions would be drawn sufficiently tightly to encourage on-site Energy Efficiency and Carbon Compliance to at least this level.

Since then of course we have had the long delayed announcement of the 2013 Part L revisions (now only coming into force in 2014). This sets the Target Carbon Emissions Rate for housing just 6% below the 2010 Part L (cumulatively 29.5% below 2006 Part L). So in 2016 ‘Zero Carbon’ will comprise 29.5% cumulative reduction in Part L emissions to date, a huge step of 30.5% reduction in the 2016 Part L, with the expectation that 10% of the industry will still be unable to comply four years after that, and 40% Allowable Solutions.

Now we are beginning to see the true picture of Allowable Solutions as well. The Government feels that house builders who are unable to build low carbon housing should not be penalised by the expense of Allowable Solutions. Thus the cost of abating a tonne of Carbon will be capped. This means that the builder may not have to pay the actual cost of abatement or may not achieve the full abatement required, depending on the abatement methods available.

One of the suggestions to overcome the price barrier is that Allowable Solutions ‘Providers’ will spring up to take money from house builders to deliver aggregated abatement projects. That sounds like a great opportunity for bankers who are already making a great deal out of the Green Deal and the renewables incentives. Further, in order to ensure that Allowable Solutions are available at the lowest cost it is proposed that they could include abating Carbon emissions from existing buildings.

What?! I hear you ask.

Yes. Under these proposals it could be possible for a very ordinary new house, without substantial improvement in energy performance to be classified as ‘Zero Carbon’ if some money is spent on improving an existing, worse performing building.

But surely, in order to meet our 2050 Carbon budget we need ‘Zero Carbon’ new homes in addition to ALL existing buildings becoming Nearly Zero Carbon too. Does this suggestion not simply lead to double counting of Carbon abatement whilst actually achieving very little?

Well, actually, yes it does.

I thought that the point of gradually tightening the performance standards of buildings through the Building Regulations towards ‘Zero Carbon’ was to encourage the construction  of better performing buildings and stimulate innovation and improvement in our industry. Now I see it for what it is:

House builders will be able to continue with business as usual. They will take a bit more money from house buyers on the sale price to funnel into offsetting schemes. The offsetting schemes will be arranged by financiers to invest in profitable, easy energy efficiency retrofits in existing buildings. The bankers will harvest the profit that should have been financing these measures independently in the first place. House builders, Government and the Banks all win. The only buildings that will be left out of the abatement gravy train are those that are classified as hard to deal with. These will only get refurbished under the Green Deal ECO mechanism and subsidised by – you’ve guessed it – energy bill payers.

Corporate Sustainability Rhetoric

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About a decade ago it became all the rage for corporations to develop Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) policies. Originally CSR was clear. It encouraged corporations to consider their impacts on the societies that quite literally sustain them. Society consumes their goods and services, provides them with staff and, especially in the case of bankers, pays for their mistakes. Initially CSR had very worthwhile aims, but now is more commonly used simply to out-worthy competitors.

So how was CSR – Corporate Social Responsibility replaced with CSR – Corporate Sustainability Rhetoric?

Well, like many aspects of business the innovators and early adopters have a clear mission and understanding of what they are doing and why. However, by the time that any new practice becomes the subject of business improvement handbooks, it simply becomes a fad that everyone has to follow in order to maintain market share. At this point the followers are simply looking for the easiest route to show compliance.

Thus CSR has gone the way of Quality Assurance (QA). In the early days both CSR and QA were business improvement activities. A CSR policy allowed business to connect with the community that supported it. A well written QA system supported and enabled the business operations. Now both of these ideals have been reduced to tick-box auditing with the simple purpose of allowing businesses to demonstrate that they are no worse than their competitors.

So, we have now reached the point of “Sustainability Accounting”. Rather than recognising that all human activity has impacts, and taking responsibility for these, sustainability accounting uses a limited set of performance indicators to demonstrate worthiness whilst often obscuring the real issues. This approach clearly has great appeal to judge by the burgeoning of sustainability or carbon consultancy.

Now I guess political leaders must also be reading these same business improvement handbooks. Because, as we know, the private sector has all the answers doesn’t it? Maybe this explains why we are seeing rhetoric replace action on sustainable development in all spheres of life, including politics and national leadership. Competing organisations in any sphere from supermarkets to governments now vie to be seen to be more sustainable than each other without actually doing anything concrete.

We need to stop obfuscating and start taking responsibility for our actions once more. To begin with, we have to acknowledge that all human activity has impacts and that these impacts may go far beyond the present sustainability indicators. We need to take responsibility for all these impacts and work to minimise or mitigate them.

We need to start taking responsibility for our resource and energy consumption, for social development, for the health of our economy and for protecting our vital biosphere. We cannot continue to cherry pick just those issues which allow us to demonstrate our worthiness in limited spheres. These responsibilities also extend across the generations. We cannot simply ignore our responsibilities because we will not be around to be held accountable by future generations.

Its time to throw out the sustainability rhetoric and put responsibility back in business!

An extended version of this article was published here: The Conversation
And Here: The Guardian Environment
And Here: 2 Degrees Network

You can comment and join in the conversation at any of these locations, or just comment below: