Emerging Trends in School Design

Last week a bunch of Cullinans keen beans attended ‘Shaping the Future: Spaces for Education’ talk at the Geological Society  - part of this season’s ‘Emerging Trends’ series by the Royal Academy.  The speakers were Philip Marsh (drMM), John Whiles (Jestico Whiles), and Simon Allford (AHMM).

In the current era of parent-led grass roots initiatives a wide spectrum of school types is cropping up from Free Schools to Academies and beyond.  The time is ripe to ask: how can school design attitudes evolve to meet these new challenges?

Simon Allford conveyed energy in his interrogation of the problem at hand, calling for designers to reconsider the brief for schools.  He argued that architects should ignore overly specific briefs and instead conceive schools as part of the city fabric, rather than allowing the design to be driven by a programme that changes as often as educational policy.  Allford’s plea for ‘highly bespoke yet inherently adaptable design’ cited the Uffizi Galleries in Florence as an example of a building which goes beyond its brief to form lasting public space.

View of the river Arno framed by the Uffizi Galleries in Florence, Piazzale degli Uffizi

Most of the evening covered well publicised past projects such as the Kingsdale Secondary School Sports Hall by drMM which, whilst admirable for its creative use of ETFE and glulam structure, can hardly be considered as an ‘emerging trend’ as it was completed ten years ago.

I left disappointed by the lack of emerging school design philosophies shown, but motivated to continue the debate on the subject (those of us who attended stayed behind for an animated discussion)!  Hopefully others had a similar reaction and will be inspired to join a more focused debate on design for the next generation of schools.  Overseas inspiration is easy to come by - for example, the climate-sensitive and cost-effective DPS Kindergarten School in Bangalore, conceived by architects Kholsa Associates as a prototype school for South India.

Terracotta jaalis and colourful corrugated sheets provide playful shading and a nod towards the vernacular architecture of the region, set within the rigorous framework of a modular concrete typology.  Natural ventilation, light and local materials harmonise in this project, which came top of the education category at the 2013 Inside Festival awards and is a delight to read about.  Could such an approach begin to answer the call for innovative ‘highly bespoke yet inherently adaptable design’ for schools and if so, what would the British equivalent be?

 

 

 

The central courtyard at the DPS Kindergarten

What housing crisis?

On Monday the rising star Shadow Minister of Housing, Emma Reynolds, enthusiastically briefed a full-house at NHBC about emerging Labour Party plans to deal with the housing crisis.  She talked about ‘Build First’ to encourage SMEs to make up the numbers to 200,000 homes a year using smaller public sector sites which they paid for later, hence Build First.  Little definite beyond that as Sir Michael Lyons’ Housing Commission is not due to report till later in the year and the election isn’t till 2015. But she went some way to answer some of the questions raised by James Meek’s excellent review of the recent past ‘Where will we live?’published in the London Review of Books. 

For Reynolds the issues are numbers, affordability and quality, including size, none of which is helped by the Coalition’s ‘Help to Buy’ programme supporting re-mortgaging and houses up to £600k, unaffordable to most first time buyers.  Garden Cities are part of the programme as trailed by the Shadow Chancellor Ed Balls at the NHBC Annual Lunch in November but the question is where?  She batted aside the idea that these would be warmed-up eco-towns but declined to name any locations; the difficulties to be overcome include the free market price of land and the difficulty many Local Authority planners now have finding the necessary resource for strategic planning.

I asked her about this since the Coalition has abolished Regional Planning, encouraged  nimbyism in the South-East through the National Planning Policy Framework and seen the Local Authority planning community decimated by financial cuts; I suggested that, as a result, planners were back to (battling the lawyers with) development control.  In reply to another question she talked about the ‘Right to Grow’ (beyond the Authority’s boundaries) for towns like Stevenage, Luton and Oxford and the ability to swap green belt land.  This is like the expansion of Cambridge redrawing the City boundaries, following extensive community engagement.

She was warmly received, answering most questions confidently but I felt that her reliance on homes ‘being more attractive’ as a means of winning over the nimbies was a tad optimistic!

Sustainability Talk: Passivhaus - what's the hold up?

Last week Cullinan Studio asked an expert panel to discuss Passivhaus for our monthly Sustainability Talk. The main question of the night was - what's the hold up? Why has the UK not quite embraced the system as readily as our continental cousins? Our panel argued that digging a little deeper into the issue reveals there a number of misconceptions about Passivhaus to be blamed for stalling its popularity.

Architect Justin Bere refuted the common argument that Passivhaus means a sentence to architectural banality. Bere suggested it's more useful to see Passivhaus as a tool to ensure quality and comfort rather than a stringent aesthetic style. In the face of the extra costs associated with the system, he called upon some research his practice has been involved in, which demonstrates the capacity of Passivhaus to reduce whole life costs (with the caveat of an economic context of low to middle interest rates).

Justin Bere of Bere Architects

Also addressed by Bere were common misconceptions about MVHR interfering with relative humidity. He cited performance feedback which showed MVHR to consistently enable optimum relative humidity levels of 30-60%. As for the question of whether UK builders are up to the challenges of building Passivhaus, Bere believes the architect  can go some way to help. From ensuring the detailing rigour starts at their drawings, to choosing specifications that harmonise with the system (for example specifying window fixing that required predrilled holes) and appointing an "airtightness champion" on-site.

Will South, of Passivhaus specialist consultants Cocreate, agreed, saying that the architect should be willing to teach the contractor. He also advocates Passivhaus courses for the whole team, including the client: the fact is that even well-designed Passivhaus buildings are overheating, so its as much about education as design.  He believes that Building Control represents the minimum standard - this "bottom" isn't where we want to be: longevity and quality are more readily on offer with Passivhaus. In this way, Passivhaus is as much about quality assurance as it about comfort, of course through meticulous detailing. In response to the issue raised that the airtightness values required are excessively low, South conceeded this is a case of overdesign, but doing so to allow for the building to change and grow without adversely affecting the whole system.

Will South from Cocreate

Ivan Christmas, Senior Development Manager at the London Borough of Camden, has been at the helm of what is currently the UK's largest residential Passivhaus project: Chester Balmore, in Highgate New Town. The project only began to aim for Passivhaus certification at tender when contractors Willmott Dixon were brought on board, demonstrating that the system can be designed in at a later stage. Bear in mind this change did also mean a change in architect (from competition winners Rick Mather Architects to specialists Architype) in order to achieve the redefined design goals. Both Christmas and Ben Shuster of Willmott Dixon pointed out the project's fanned bays and adherence to conservation constraints show that a real design dialogue has been allowed to take place - unaffected by Passivhaus requirements.

Chester Balmore in Camden - currently on site

It was particularly useful to have wisdom shared from the perspective of several members of the team that would be responsible for delivering a certified building - the architect, client, contractor and specialist consultant. As the evening devolved into Q&A, it was clear that although achieving the full certification may be a stretch, even with some deviation, Passivhaus is definitely a better baseline to leap from. The real hold up lies in practicing the balancing act of rigourous Passivhaus detailing and wider architectural design choices.

AJ Footprint Live conference: The Green Rethink

On Tuesday Johnny Winter and I attended the inaugural AJ Footprint Live conference, promisingly entitled ‘The Green Rethink’. Keynote speakers Sir Terry Farrell and Dr Ken Yeang began each half by offering their vision of a sustainable built environment. Farrell paired sustainability with ‘urbiculture’, placing the city at the heart of sustainable development so long as it is developed holistically and diversely, particularly encouraging an active and vibrant ground plane (citing Darwin’s ‘tangled bank’ and Jane Jacobs’ notion ‘organised complexity’). 

Yeang, a well-known purveyor of the literal greening of the built environment, underlined we must “rethink our relationship with nature”. He suggested that the next generation of green buildings must: be better integrated with nature, function as a living system, repair wider fragmented landscape and enlist natural processes for systems such as closed loop water drainage.

The Green Rethink's first panel of the day

Some of the ideas and studies presented were already well worn, and packed panels did mean several sessions were too short to fully relate enough detailed information. For example The Technical Briefing panel crammed in the upcoming Part L revisions, Soft Landings and the issue of closing the building performance gap. Although this left almost no window in which to debate how this really feeds back into improving good practice, an interesting provocation was made by Roderic Bunn of BSRIA, in the suggestion that Part L should demand certain compliance within building operation.

The tight schedule was, however, studded with moments of inspiration. Patrick Bellew’s list of top green innovations to keep an eye out for was certainly compelling: electro-chromic glass, entrepreneurial energy storage, smarter green facades and joined up systems on site (e.g. the smart use of waste for power in Gardens by the Bay).

A few interesting points were also made in the panel entitled on ‘More Homes, Better Homes’. Alison Brooks hit the nail on the head by urging a renewed focus on the suburbs, using Newhall Be as a case study. Nick Raynsford MP noted that although mass house builders have shown improvement in recent years, the only way to sustainably solve the housing crisis with the immediacy required is through increased public spending.



Alison Brooks Architects - Newhall Be

Other case studies worth picking out included Architectes Associés work, which demonstrates the large scale potential of Passivhaus with their office and mixed-use projects in Belgium. Cloud 9's Media ICT project in Barcelona, effervescently presented by Enric Ruiz-Geli, has shown the great potential of “dealing in particles” in building façade technology (case in point below: nitrogen mist turning glass to translucent walls to prevent solar gain). The fact that these sorts of projects seem to thrive better on the continent suggests the UK planning system and construction industry must play some innovation catch-up!

Cloud 9 - Media ICT, Barcelona

Happold Lecture Take 2

Friday saw Robin Nicholson reprise his CIC Ted Happold Medal Lecture for Cullinan Studio and guests during a wine and cheese evening at Cullinans' canal-side office. Speeding through the last 25 years of the construction industry, Robin's lecture hinged on his experience of various landmark construction industry reports, taskforces and forums.
 

Throughout the talk, a common theme picked out by Robin was an increasing change of bias evident in each report, shifting towards a focus on the client and end user. This goes hand-in-hand with the more socially-driven agenda that has emerged at the forefront of sustainable practice.

 

 

For Robin, the 1994 Latham Report ('Constructing the Team') signalled the first time members of the construction industry created a "public interest manifesto", rather than a self-serving industry report. Four years later, the "industry-shaking" Egan Report ('Rethinking Construction') championed the concept of demonstration projects in order to better assimilate lessons learnt throughout the construction process - another move in favour of client and user. As well as this, Robin described the Egan Report as a significant "early stumbling" into sustainability. How much these projects realistically impacted upon future good practice is up for debate, however they made clear the complexity of true change in the industry.

But Robin maintains the future should be bright. From the optimistic Paul Morrell notion that "design is free if there is a 10% building performance improvement", to the presence of think tanks such as EDGE which continue to debate industry progress and direction , to the smartening of practice through BIM, its clear that attitudes are evolving. Success and sustainability will lie in properly seeing concepts through in practice - in Robin's words "now we just need to do it!"



Further reading:

- The Carbon Tracker Initiative's report "Unburnable Carbon 2013" which few audience members had come across.

- Zero Carbon Britain 2013 report: Robin noted that the Zero Carbon Britain launch had a very poor representation from the construction industry.

- EDGE 2013 report

 

 

Nairn's London

Joining us for lunch last Friday, Gillian Darley mentioned her new book about Ian Nairn - 'author of Nairn's London, the OUTRAGE series in the AR and more - you have probably never heard of him'. If you hadn't clearly others have as you can pay £264.94 on Amazon for a copy. I picked up mine for a pound in Hitchin in 1985 and found it an eye-opening prompt to take me exploring bits of London I might have missed. The overriding message which holds as true today as in 1966 is it doesn't matter what a building is like as long as it's good. Hence his inclusion of Owen Luder's newly completed Brutalist eyesore Eros House in Catford - 'This most craggy and uncompromising of new London buildings turns out to be full of firm gentleness' - alongside The Paragon at Blackheath - 'perfect urbanity meeting perfect rurality head-on' - alongside S.S.Teulon's St Mark's Silvertown - 'an architectural imagination the size of Blake's - it must be kept'.  It was and is now the home of Brick Lane Music Hall.
Incidentally, the freehold for Eros House is up for sale for £10,000.

The Happold Lecture 2013

Last night, Robin Nicholson became the ninth recipient of the prestigious Happold Medal.

The Medal was awarded jointly by the Construction Industry Council (CIC) and the Happold Trust. Robin received the Medal after delivering the Happold Medal Lecture 2013, entitled 'Collective responsibility for a sustainable industry'.

The Happold Medal Lectures form an occasional series of groundbreaking lectures on a wide array of topics, with a focus on sustainable development. They are in memory of CIC's founding Chairman and visionary engineer, Sir Edmund (Ted) Happold.

The 2013 Medal was designed by Kenneth Grange.