BuroHappold (United Kingdom)

Los Angeles International Airport is building a new concourse — via an innovative off-site construction and relocation method — that celebrates the city’s modernist appeal and prioritizes sustainable design.

PurposeThe main aim of this study is to identify how evolutions in the electricity mix and climate change affect the LCA results of buildings regarding the multitude of environmental impacts. This is of critical importance now, and one that is likely to receive growing interest in the future. Firstly, because carbon might become a secondary environmental impact to mitigate as economies achieve decarbonisation milestones, and secondly, due to concerns around the trade-offs between the environmental impacts.MethodsThis study evaluates the lifecycle environmental impacts of a case study office building in London by considering climate change in the UK (using CIBSE weather files) and electricity mix evolution in the UK (using National Grid ESO data), EU (using EU commission data) and China that influence operational and embodied modules of LCA. Electrification of transport is also considered, reflecting the forementioned electricity mixes. A dynamic LCA approach was followed in which the inventory was modified to reflect future electricity mixes. The influence of climate evolution was considered through dynamic thermal simulations according to London’s future climatic projections provided by CIBSE’s weather files that were then translated into lifecycle environmental impacts through the modified inventory.Results and discussionResults of applying a dynamic approach in LCA show that there are several co-benefits of grid decarbonisation when it comes to the building’s environmental impacts. However, ecotoxicity and land occupation might come to light. Climate change led to minor reductions in the operational electricity needs, indicating that no significant savings are to be expected in the case of actively cooled buildings without free ventilative cooling. Evolving electricity mixes do not significantly reduce material embodied impacts for this case study, showing that the reduction of lifecycle impacts cannot rely only on future electricity mix evolutions. The electrification of transport was found to have an adverse effect on the building’s embodied ionising radiation impact, highlighting the importance of sourcing materials locally to avoid long transportation distances. A new type of performance gap is proposed for the building’s lifecycle environmental impacts. This can be defined as ‘the difference between the predicted and the actual environmental impact resulting from the mismatch between the actual case and the life cycle inventory’.ConclusionsFuture research is needed to investigate how sensitive results are to other assumptions and how improvements in material manufacturing affect the obtained results.

The British Standards Institute’s appointed technical author for the PAS 6463 standard on designing and managing the built environment for neurodiversity shares a summary of the purpose, structure and influence of the guidance.

With a warming climate and existing inequities in the built environment, it’s critical to examine pathways for reducing energy consumption and heat stress on city residents, especially in disadvantaged communities who bear the brunt of climate change. Modeling the urban context remains a challenge for accurate performance prediction in urban building energy models (UBEMs). We build upon existing research by leveraging open-access data to describe the urban context. First, we use socioeconomic data to develop archetypical UBEMs that describe disparities across a city. To capture features of the environment often ignored in UBEMs, we introduce an “urban context vector” created from satellite data. In doing so, microclimatic and urban heat island effects are captured in the weather file, providing insight on how the urban context affects building performance. This paper demonstrates a generalizable model to produce multi-scale predictions of retrofit impacts on energy consumption and heat stress. By leveraging the interpretability of UBEMs with open-access contextual data, cities will be better equipped to develop informed policies to reduce energy inequities and heat stress.

This paper reports on an investigation into the role of experiential knowledge in growing capacity for producing low-cost buoyancy aids with soft goods manufacturers – tailors – in Zanzibar, set within complex knowledge exchange collaborations under academic-industry partnerships. In this study, the makers' practice of tailoring and their local environment knowledge had a formative role in designing a prototype ‘workflow system’ for local, small-batch production of low-cost rescue throwlines as part of a wider community-led water safety programme. The study builds on a previous phase of the research that identified limitations with a human-centred design (HCD) approach to the creation of opensource instruction manuals for low volume production of rescue throwlines. We propose that the previously incumbent HCD approach through its problem-solving procedures obscured the importance of the local makers’ participation in the problematisation of the manufacturing process. By foregrounding the local makers’ knowledge of the whole manufacturing process, from sourcing materials in the market to making and testing the products, this study aimed to investigate how the local makers would devise and develop their own methodological approach to making the rescue throwline, examine what the findings would suggest for the design of the throwline, and explore how this knowledge might be exchanged with other collaborators in the project. A further and longer-term aim is to support the development and impact of local capacity building in end-to-end drowning prevention management by demonstrating the importance of experiential knowledge in existing local communities of makers. A participatory making approach informed by design thinking underpinned the design of the study. An experimental participant-led approach to the generation of data draws attention to the different positions and types of knowledge negotiated. The study elucidates some of the barriers for exchanging this critical experiential knowledge with collaborators and exposes challenges for creating new social infrastructure within the community concerning drowning prevention. It concludes that managing complex knowledge exchange in prototyping in the Zanzibar context requires an iterative methodological approach to the co-construction of knowledge centred around the experiential knowledge and skills of the users of the ‘workflow system’.

Correction for ‘Rapid single step atmospheric pressure plasma jet deposition of a SERS active surface’ by Oliver S. J. Hagger et al., Mater. Adv., 2023, 4, 3239–3245, https://doi.org/10.1039/D3MA00249G.

Abstract EDGE Suedkreuz ist eines der größten in modularer Holz‐Hybridbauweise geplanten Gebäudeensembles in Deutschland. Es erstreckt sich über zwei Bürogebäude mit je sieben Stockwerken und einer verbindenden Tiefgarage, die vollständig mit Ladestationen für E‐Fahrzeuge ausgestattet ist. Vattenfall Deutschland wird hier sein Hauptquartier haben. Von Beginn an wurde ein Fokus auf die Nachhaltigkeit der Gebäude gelegt. Es galt sowohl den CO2‐Fußabdruck des Gebäudes zu reduzieren, nachhaltige und gesunde Materialien zu verwenden als auch das Wohlbefinden der künftigen Nutzer:innen zu berücksichtigen. Die modulare Holz‐Hybridbauweise ist ein wichtiger Bestandteil, um diesen Anspruch zu erreichen, und musste in das Engineering‐Konzept integriert werden. Dazu wurde Buro Happold mit einem multidisziplinären Team beauftragt und lieferte ein ganzheitliches Konzept aus Tragwerksplanung, technischer Gebäudeausrüstung, BIM‐Management und Nachhaltigkeitsberatung. Der Beitrag geht darauf ein, wie es den Ingenieur:innen gelang, die innovative Holz‐Hybridbauweise von CREE in dem Tragwerks‐ und TGA‐Konzept umzusetzen und erläutert Sonderkonstruktionen wie u. a. das ETFE‐Dach des Atriums.

<p>Education City Stadium is one of seven venues in Qatar commissioned specifically by The Supreme Committee for Delivery and Legacy for the 2022 FIFA World Cup. Holding 45,350 people, this spectacular venue will stage eight matches, from group games through to the quarter finals. The stadium was officially opened in June 2020 and has already hosted the final of the FIFA Club World Championship.</p><p>The design includes an efficient cable net roof (Figure 1) aligned with the structural imperative to reduce material use and, therefore, embodied carbon. This design helped meet the Supreme Committee target of a five-star GSAS (Global Sustainability Assessment System) rating. The project team are rightly proud of achieving that target.</p>