We all know that new buildings don’t work as we expect them
to and good money is being spent investigating ‘the performance gap’; but we do
have a solution.
Yesterday I went to a monthly CBx breakfast seminar at the
UCL Energy Institute for what I thought would be a timely catch-up but which turned
out to be a brilliant wake-up call. ‘Mr
Soft Landings’ Rod Bunn of BSRIA rattled through the story with some key do’s
and don’t’s in how to define and then deliver the client’s desired
outcomes. However like other innovative tools
such as the Design Quality Indicator, unless we are vigilant our industry will
spare no effort in turning Soft Landings into a tick-box exercise, thereby
destroying its value.
‘Soft Landings is the graduated
handover of a new or refurbished building, where a period of professional
aftercare by the project team is a client requirement – planned for and carried
out from inception onwards – and lasting for up to three years
post-completion.’
In discussion we agreed that although it does cost the
client money to procure this additional service, it is much cheaper than the
cost of operating an underperforming building for a hundred + years.
Tamsin Tweddell (Max Fordham and Partners) and Alasdair Donn
(Wilmott Dixon Construction) described the Soft Landing approach for Keynsham
Town Hall, where the public sector client decided they wanted an office with an
‘A’-rated DEC (note: not an ‘A’-rated EPC). This includes operational energy and forced the
design team, the construction team and the client to work out where the energy
risks lay at each stage of the process and who would manage them.
Rod had explained that it is difficult but just about
possible to use soft landings in a D&B contract because soft landings
demands effective collaboration. I don’t
quite know who is responsible for the industry getting itself into the current
impossible situation where lawyers and project managers fruitlessly endeavour
to satisfy clients’ risk aversion with customised contracts. Having been the client for our own office
with top engineers and an excellent contractor, the dysfunction of the controls
defies belief.
And if you think Soft Landings will just go away, then the
variant Government Soft Landings will be mandatory for public buildings from
2016 and it is said that a number of local authorities are insisting on it now.
Having been involved in the creation of soft landings
through our Cambridge Maths building, I cannot wait for us to do a full soft
landings project, starting on day one with client commitment and expectation
and all round collaboration – what a delight that would be! So we had better start by joining the Softlandings User Group.
