'Retrofit for purpose' by Penoyre and Prasad

Judging by there being over 10m hits on Google, ‘Retrofit for Purpose’ is a title that resonates. Penoyre and Prasad’s book of that title, subtitled ‘Low energy Renewal of Non-Domestic Buildings’ and launched by RIBA Publishing at Ecobuild, is essential reading especially for those teaching architecture as solely the art of building new buildings.

The reality is that we need to make much better use of the buildings we have already got rather than pulling them down before they have even been paid for; and of course expecting new buildings to last for at least 200 years.  This book tells you how, with 11 case studies preceded by 6 classic essays including ones by Sunand Prasad and three heroes of Building Performance Evaluation - Bill Bordass, Roderic Bunn and Rajat Gupta with Matt Gregg.  I was less familiar with the experience in Germany and USA presented by Mark Siddall and it was interesting to learn that in the Sates it was private sector commercial that pulled the transformation not legislation. But the show-stopper for me was Richard Francis’ economic and management arguments in ‘Spend to make: financing commercial retrofits.’  Francis of The Monomoy Company spells it out so clearly and suggests ‘there are signs that a fundamental shift is under way’ and not before time.

Assembling the data for the case studies must have been a battle of wills, a battle well worth fighting as we have good comparable energy and carbon data, plans and sections and before and after photographs.  There are 5 offices, 2 university buildings, 1 visitor centre, 1 leisure centre, 1 school and Penoyre and Prasad’s own heroic transformation of the Guy’s Hospital tower.  I should probably declare an interest as one of the offices is our own transformation of a Victorian Foundry into a really comfortable BREEAM Excellent office, showing off our own work.  

Looking south towards the canal before and after retrofitting

Siddall suggests that to comply with the ‘EU Energy Efficient Directive, a 33-year programme will be required necessitating the refurbishment of 492,350m² of the total estate per year.  At say between £500 and £1,000 per m², the annual expenditure would be some £250m to £500m per annum; and that is just for the public estate leaving aside over 3m privately owned non-domestic buildings’.  And that will require top architects, engineers and construction managers with new skills, working collaboratively.  LETS GO!

The physiognomy of buildings

Another point that Victoria  Haines' made in her Ecobuild presentation on research for CALEBRE on user barriers to retrofit has been rattling around in my mind. This was the observation that windows are particularly cherished as features that define the character of their homes. When people are considering improvements they are often concerned about the impact that alterations to windows will have on the character of their homes and are reluctant to change them, often knowing more about them than 'the experts'.

Is this just sentiment or an indication of something deeper? The observation highlighted an issue that has been intriguing me for a little while - the emotional connection between people and the appearance of a building. Not so much the building as a whole, but specifically the composition of the facade. Our former partner Jonathan Hale's probings on the relationship between architecture and the body suggest this area is under researched. We are used to thinking about this in aesthetic or performance rather than psychological terms.

There's been a lot in the news recently about the autism spectrum and Asperger's syndrome - even the recent dramatisation of the novel 'The curious incident of the dog in the night-time' drawing attention to it.  Sufferers have difficulties developing empathetic relationships with other people and have  impaired non-verbal behaviour such as poor eye contact or a total inability to read facial expressions.  

Whilst physiognomy - the practice of assessing a person's character by interpretation of their face - might be seen as pseudoscience, an appreciation of the importance of understanding body language or 'kinesics' in communication, leadership and successful group work has become mainstream. We make constant conscious and subconscious readings and judgements about people's character and mood by their appearance and gestures which we do well to recognise. 

I think there is a useful parallel with buildings, and that reading the facade in anthropomorphic terms can help develop a richer narrative about it - a new physiognomy of buildings.  As well as analysing a facade in functional and cultural terms, we should listen more closely to our emotional response. 

By ignoring or seeing as irrelevant the potential for this reading, we are in danger of suffering from a kind of Asperger's syndrome of architecture.

People often talk of windows as being the eyes of a building. Knowing how important eyes are to communication between people, it would not be surprising if windows added more to its character than other elements of the architectural composition.  As we demand more of our building envelopes to improve thermal comfort and control energy flows, we must not lose sight of those emotional responses that make us comfortable in our environment.  The CALEBRE research suggests the great retrofit mission might founder unless these too are recognised.

Customer Appealing retrofit

Ecobuild this year was as overwhelming in ideas as in products with its excellent seminar series. In the 'Refurbishing Britain' theme, lessons from CALEBRE focused mainly on technical solutions. But as the CA in CALEBRE stands for 'Customer Appealing', Victoria Haines summary of findings on people's appetite for improving their homes was particularly interesting.

After all, if we could get our teenagers to turn down their heating and turn off their lights we would probably be closer to the 80% reduction needed than replacing our boilers with heat pumps.

This is in the wider context that energy efficiency as such is a low priority for most people: comfort yes, cost of fuel yes but reducing carbon emissions no. The evidence suggests that unless there is a simultaneous change in behaviour and attitude, homes refurbished as part of the Green Deal or otherwise will be more comfortable but not reduce emissions.

Barriers to retrofit include the comfortable relationship people have with their homes, particularly older 'hard to treat' properties.  Her evidence shows that most people make the major changes to their homes when they first move in, with a readiness to live with disruption then that they would not tolerate 20 years later.

With the scale of the refurbishment challenge needed we have focused on physical solutions - still with many questions over their effectiveness. Clearly they are important but are only a part of a more nuanced approach needed. 'Hard to treat' solid wall properties are a huge challenge to meeting our emissions reduction targets. Linking a reduction of Stamp Duty to undertaking major Green Deal work would be a neat way of both incentivising energy-saving refurbishment at a point that most suits people, as well as stimulating the housing market.

In the meantime, the bigger question remains - how do we change our behaviours to live within our means?

Healthy Retrofit

A good event on 'Healthy Retrofit' at Cullinan Studio's newly refurbished Foundry building on Wednesday last week, with retrofit challenges and achievements covered by Johnny Winter of Cullinan Studio, Neil May from ASBP and Richard Griffiths of Parity Projects.

The 'Healthy Retrofit' talk was hosted by Cullinan Studio in their new BREEAM 'Excellent' retofit offices.

Brendan Sexton of Cullinan Studio introducing the evening and our latest annual sustainability report.

Johnny Winter of Cullinan Studio began the evening with a talk on the retrofit of 

our Baldwin Terrace studios, including some of the lessons learnt from the process.

Neil May's talk on (a seemingly dry subject) -  'How sustainable products can assist with moisture control in retrofit' - was particularly timely.

Neil May of ASBP.

29% of UK housing stock is solid wall construction. As a nation we have to upgrade it successfully if we are to reduce our carbon emissions and provide comfortable homes that people can afford to heat.

Under the Green Deal, this widespread form of construction is labelled 'hard to treat'.

It's an odd situation to be in. At last, and for all the Green Deal's faults, something is being done to tackle the challenge of widescale retrofit of our existing housing. Now there is a growing pressure to get this work underway. But do we actually have the technical solutions?

The general 'golden rule' for the Green Deal is that the cost of carrying out improvement works is matched by savings in fuel bills. 'Hard to treat' properties can't meet this rule: the cost of insulating solid wall properties far exceeds the savings in fuel bills. To get this work done, additional subsidy is needed. This comes from the utility companies' 'Energy Company Obligation'. This subsidy is not given away but is paid for by a general increase in all our fuel bills. The utility companies are obliged to meet set carbon reduction targets, hence the pressure to get this work underway and fast.

Building Magazine on 8th February reported Encraft's recent study, which showed that the costs of the upgrading 'hard to treat' homes has been woefully underestimated.The effective cost per ton of carbon saved they estimate to be £180 compared with the government's £80, a difference we will all have to bear through increases to our fuel bills.

So it is more than ever important that the technical solutions employed do actually work.

Neil's overriding point was that we do not yet have robust, widely applicable, whole building solutions based on sound science: inappropriate and partial solutions seriously risk causing a new generation of moisture-related problems, from mould growth and ill-health, to fabric degradation and premature decay.

To meet this challenge we need the pace of research and dissemination to accelerate.

In the meantime, we need some good rules of thumb to guide us. In this debate the five 'principles for building' still stand up*. What are they? Two overriding constraints, two overarching objectives, and the fifth a guiding caution.

• 'High to low' restates what should be obvious, that gravity generally makes water flow downhill, that temperature goes from hot to cold, that vapour diffuses from high to low vapour pressure.
• 'Separate lives' reminds us that buildings are assembled in a process and that different materials move and decay at different rates, processes which if ignored cause premature failure.
• 'Continuity' of performance is an implicit objective for the building envelope. The increased performance we now expect from our building envelopes, where internal conditions are held further apart from the external environment, means design has to be more rigorous to achieve this. Continuity of the measures to achieve continuity of performance has become more critical, whether at the air tightness line or thermal insulation. This might be obvious but it is only the Passivhaus standard that appears to recognise that continuity (by truly avoiding cold bridges and demanding a demonstrable air tightness performance) is an essential rather than a nice-to-have. By its nature, 'continuity' is often in conflict with 'separate lives'.
• 'Balance' is the objective that encompasses the equilibrium of environmental conditions, of structural forces, and distribution of resources. Achieving balance is often in conflict with the constraint of 'high to low'.
• The fifth, cautionary principle can be called 'creative pessimism' - accepting that in the world of building what can go wrong at some point will, and creatively anticipating it. I enjoyed Neil's restating this as the 'principle of forgiveness'.

The relevance of all this is that accepting and working with these principles by following some rules of thumb - 'going with the flow' - rather than fighting them against does reduce the risk of failure. Increasing thermal resistance towards the cold side and increasing vapour resistance towards the moist side is one such rule. External wall insulation still needs to be continuous but is inherently less risky than internal linings. Fighting against the principles always requires more highly stressed solutions, such as 100% vapour barriers. That is why we should all be concerned about the prospect of 'hard to treat' homes being internally lined with insulation.

Colin Rice, Cullinan Studio

*Addleson and Rice, Performance of Materials in Buildings, 1991

 Richard Griffiths from Parity Projects.

Q&A session following the three presentations.

The 'Healthy Retrofit' talk was presented by ASBP (Alliance for Sustainable Building Products) which is a cross sector, not for profit organisation, comprising building product manufacturers and distributors, specifiers, designers, architects, contractors, public interest and sustainability organisations, academics and other building practitioners.

The ASBP are committed to accelerating the transition to a high performance, healthy and low carbon built environment by championing the increased understanding and use of building products that meet demonstrably high standards of sustainability.

Launch of Cullinan Studio

Since Ted Cullinan set up the practice as a cooperative in 1965, we were 'Edward Cullinan Architects'. Today we changed our name to 'Cullinan Studio': we are the same people, Ted still works with us and we continue to operate as an employee-owned architects' practice.

Our move to new studios in October this year seemed like a good time to change our name to reflect the wider scope of services we provide than the term 'Architects' suggests. Ted's philosophy and design approach has infused the practice's work, methodology and cooperative structure - the name 'Cullinan' has come to represent a way of doing things - a culture. 'Cullinan Studio' reflects this.

Yesterday evening we had a party to launch our new offices and new name, where we also launched an anthology we have created about what inspires us, who we are and where we are.

A big thank you to: Global Generation who provided the food, which was all sourced locally to London; artist Bobby Lloyd, who created the art installation 'Choreographies', which was a response to the internal re-workings of the space from artists' studios and gallery into our work space; Calverts who printed the anthology; and Jonathan Marfleet and friends for providing the hospitality.

Thank you also to everyone who came along and made it a very enjoyable evening.

Here are a few photos from the night:

After giving a speech about the new office and our new name, Roddy Langmuir invites the guests to join in a game to celebrate collaboration

 Global Generation preparing the delicious food