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The Green Way

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Back in 2003 when I was full-time at Building - yes those bygone print days - I got to know Mark Way pretty well. A thoroughly nice bloke he was at architect and engineer RMJM at the time as head of research. He'd dreamt up a simple yet great concept called Soft Landings, which I wrote an article on it back in 2003. As a typical hack I moved on to the next subject and have given the idea little thought in the intervening years. Until a piece I spotted in BSRIA's website came to my attention which promises to give Way's vision renewed momentum.

Dunster and Egan - the unlikey pair

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Two fundamental problems and challenges facing the industry in the past decade. Two figures with wildly different backgrounds and perspectives who come up with eerily similar conclusions. Step forward the unlikely pair - industrialist Sir John Egan and the architect Bill Dunster.

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Egan wrote his report, Rethinking Construction, ten years ago and there's a good catch-up on what has, and hasn't, happened since in last Friday's Building.

George Monbiot has an off day

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Certain things which we cannot do without have become uncool - carrier bags, cheap flights, fruit from far afield. We must use them but vocalise our distaste. Surely there is something we can all agree to get rid of? Something that we can consign to the past? Coal seems a likely candidate. Coal is bad because those naughty Chinese are building two new power stations a week. It's far more polluting than gas. It involves digging up the ground. We don't produce it in this country any more. Activists want us to wear blue for World Earth Day on April 20th and call Congress and say, 'no new coal power stations!'

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George Monbiot certainly seems to think so.

Industrial revolution?

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Guest post by Phil's boss Adrian Barrick

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At this week's Shed Show at the Celtic Manor near Newport, you might have expected all visionary talk of creating more sustainable industrial property stock to be drowned out by the general hubbub surrounding the credit crunch and plunging capital values. And, frankly, who'd blame Britain's hard-boiled industrial property developers for concentrating on the business fundementals in these straitened times? Far from it, though.

The R word and sustainability

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I don't know about you but it's been pretty gloomy year so far. And now the R word enters stage left. Yes recession appears on the cards. So where does this leave clients, both in the private and public sectors, and their decisions on future sustainable budgets? Will the talk be cheap or will the rhetoric really turn to reality?

Sustainability and PFI

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This is a bit of a hornet's nest, and one that has received scant attention. Is the PFI process inherently unsustainable as it is such a long, inflexible and complicated process? Or as LibDem member of the London Assembly Mike Tuffey says in an excellent report in today's Building Design: "These 30-year PFI deals are like supertankers.. We are calling on the Treasury to issue a changed protocol.. it needs to come forward with a way to bring flexibiliy in." The London Assembly issued a report, called Emission Creep, yesterday on the public sector and sustainability and it claims that PFi is preventing on-site renewable energy being installed on new hospital sites, such as the new Barts & Royal London scheme.

Olympics - bronze medal?

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If as I just wrote 2008 (and beyond, of course) should be the year of delivery what are we to make of the Olympic green targets set yesterday? Permanent buildings to perform 15% better that Part L 2006 standards? Homes to reach Code Level 4? A legacy target of reducing emissions from the Olympics Park by 50%? I'm sure the clamour to keep costs down on this job has probably hampered the environmental ambition. So our next challenge for the next year and beyond is achieve the dream, to prove that the sustainable solution is the lowest cost one. It's a target set by a evangelical consultant I met last week and if he nails it I'm thinking he's found a licence to print money.

Costs confusion

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The glut of sustainability reports continues. How many major documents have been published this year and how many trees does that equate to? One released by the Renewables Advisory Board put the cost of hitting Code 6 in terms of the need for renewables as an average of £6K. Cue some laughter from a QS I spoke with this morning. Alliance & Leicester has also come up with some figures this week claiming that it will cost homeowners £9,000 to make their properties carbon neutral. I'm not sure guestimates such as these are really helping matters much.

TV reality

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The 800 Million Pound Train Station, a documentary on the making of the new St Pancras train station now showing on BBC2, has been gripping. Not really because of the scale and the ambition of the project but due to the access the cameras have had to the team involved. It's extremely rare to have such a warts and all view of the construction process, and confirms a lot of industry cliches: the precious and pompous architect, the stressed out but hard-nosed contractor, the feckless subbie etc etc. But in spite of the tantrums, tears and bust-ups it presents an industry that is (largely) honest, hard-working, passionate and determined.

Prefab proponents

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Two interesting speakers at an event I attended last Friday - John Prewer, who is known as the godfather of prefabrication, and Dr John Barrett from the Stockholm Environment Institute. Prewer not surprisingly offered the benefits of prefab but also added a couple of interesting points - the impression that heavyweight construction was the way to go was "false" (I think I may get him to elaborate on this for Building) and that building below the ground was unsustainable.