Change for change’s sake

Together with colleagues from the Greater Cambridge Planning team, 3C Building Control responded to the next phase of government consultations aiming to positively affect climate change, which closed on 13 April. This time it was the Future Buildings Standard, generally looking at non-domestic buildings

WRITTEN BY: NICK KENDALL, COMMERCIAL MANAGER AT 3C SHARED SERVICES

Like the Future Homes Standard, the Future Buildings Standard will set challenging principles for new and existing buildings. And everyone is hopeful that changes to the Building Regulations will lead to positive climate change.

The consultation this time was technical and complicated, looking at the relationship of fabric efficiency, solar gains, cooling requirements, daylighting, and the risks of overheating – which will be a very delicate balance. It predominantly references draft Approved Documents F and L.

Solar shading will probably form an integral part of building design and must not come from impermanent things, such as trees. Where balconies are used as shading, they should not contribute to thermal bridges and we must understand the orientation of a building; they might not offer the same benefit to all elevations!

The consultation seeks to use Primary Energy as the ‘principal performance metric’. This is defined as ‘energy from renewable and non-renewable sources which has not undergone any conversion or transformation process. It is a measure of the total energy used, including energy losses from extraction, processing, conversion and transportation’ – but I must confess to being confused by it as a measure and how useful it might be.

London Energy Transformation Initiative (LETI) might have a better idea; setting energy use intensity targets in kWh/m².yr. This way, goals are set for how a building works in reality.

In some respects, the consultation document is not ambitious enough. It uses those old ideas for existing buildings that they should ‘not be worse than they were before’, when there is often a clear opportunity to make improvements.

This consultation is taking a serious look at what we need to do to halt climate change and respond to recent infection-control concerns.

So, we should shout for joy, we should sing its praise! But only, as the draft Approved Document F suggests, if we ventilate at 15 litres per second per person with outdoor air for rooms that have ‘aerosol-generating activities’. It is likely that you will not be able to recirculate air from other spaces

“Solar shading will probably form an integral part of building design”

unless it goes through a series of filters, including UV, HEPA and germicidal.

I think we need to focus on the passive advantages of fabric efficiency, good design and quality construction – and this only comes from us all working together. Future building design will be different, but there will definitely be a future – for cleverly considered, carefully constructed buildings.