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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.
What is Soft landings? It's a neat variant of a post occupancy service, where the design team is stitched much more closely, including via financial incentives, to how a building performs after completion. It all started for Way when he set up an impromptu office in a finished project, the Glaxo Wellcome House in Middlesex. he put up a sign outside identifying himself as the architect and, horror of horrors, fraternised with our industry's end users. he had identified what I described as a "gaping hole in the service offered by construction teams". "There doesn't seem much interest in getting feedback from what we do. The building industry is curious in that respect," Way told me.
Way devised the Soft Landings concept as a result, with the backing of client David Adamson, who was at Cambridge University at the time, and a bunch of enlightened consultants. My article pointed to the clear benefits it offered to clients and end users without a mention of energy use or climate change, which were clearly not priorities earlier in the decade. Now BSRIA, in the form of ex-Building Services Journal editor Roderic Bunn, has taken up the reins and is about to trial the system on some project and will launch a manifesto for Soft Landings next month.
Bunn's article describes the service as one that "closes the credibility gap between what building designers intend to happen and what happens in practice". And he offers some interesting details - the service needs up front funding but Bunn estimates that it can cost "as little as 1% of the construction budget". There should be a carrot at the other end, he adds, an incentive for environmental and energy targets hit by the project team. He estimates £30,000 on projects of £15-20m in value. The sharing ratio would be 20% each of the architect, M&E engineer and M&E contractor and 40% for the main contractor.
Bunn concludes: "In the near future the industry will be grappling with designing truly carbon-neutral buildings. Soft landings could be one of the main mechanisms to achieve it." Here's hoping.
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