Asides

Lifespan

As designers we should understand the consequences of our actions on the future. Often it can be difficult to visualise the lifespan of our work in relation to climate change, the materials and our own lives. This diagram started from one of many conversations with Apparata in preparation for the Architecture Foundations 100 Day Studio presentation.

Making this, highlights just how little time we have to design and build something that will be around for the next 60 to 100 years, or even longer. Those practicing or studying now, will likely live through the time we have to limit climate change and live in the world we have created.

It made me ask, who actually cares for the buildings that we make? That it will change owners, it may have many tenants, it will no longer be the responsibility of those who designed and built it and policy will change many times to tell us if it is a good building. On the smaller timescale of the climate emergency, home ownership in the UK is within the time we have to make change, so at least they need to care about reducing the buildings impact.

Looking backwards, I hadn’t appreciated just how different the time taken for materials to form is. Some have been created over millions or billions of years, while others grow in the same time that we’ve understood climate change.

It is hard to predict how long a material will last, if left uncared and unmaintained it is only a few hundred years. Some buildings have lasted over 6,000 years due to care or sheer force of will and I wonder how many of mine might last. One of the most striking things you can see is that carbon emitted now, will be in the atmosphere for the next 300 to 1,000 years. Longer than all the discarded materials and long after the 100 year life of the building they were released for.

The Green Recovery

The Green Recovery

As part of The Engineering Club‘s, Furlough College – Mini Masters, I have been running The Green Recovery module. You can find out on the website here.

The idea behind it, as with all Engineering Club activities, was to celebrate the culture of engineering. In this case to expand peoples knowledge and skills during the lockdown or while furloughed. During the course you have an ongoing project with tutorials, which is supported with sessions on culture, creativity, skills and the green recovery.

WHOLE LIFE CARBON CALCULATION, CÍARAN MALIK

I gave an introduction to Whole Life Carbon (WLC) Assessment and the parts of design that affect each module.

NET ZERO OPERATIONAL CARBON, JULIE GODEFROY

Julie did a great job, focusing on Operational Carbon and design decisions needed to reduce it.

ZERO AND NEAR-ZERO IMPACT BUILDINGS, XAVIER AGUILÓ I ARAN AND ANNA MESTRE

Xavier and Anna showed how some projects have been evolving from BAC to reduce the carbon and environmental impact of them. They did a great job of showing a whole system approach to reduce the impact; using the mass in one place to reduce the demand elsewhere.

BLUE GREEN INFRASTRUCTURE, DARREN Woolf

Darren did a great job of explaining the social and environmental benefits of incorporating more blue and green spaces, or infrastructure, into our cities.

REGENERATIVE DESIGN, MARTIN BROWN

Martin gave a great introduction into regenerative design, sharing some great projects which have done it and some of the methods they used.

Furlough College Mini Masters

The Engineering Club is running a 6 week course for anyone who works in the built environment with time on their hands during the quarentine and I’ve been asked to help organise the Green Recovery module.

You can find out more on the website but I’m planning to run sessions on Whole Life Carbon Assessment, whole system thinking and regenerative design among others.

Building Life Strategies

We all say, for a design to be sustainable, principles need to be embedded in the project from the start.

While teaching students want to make positive decisions but there is so much to balance it can be overwhelming and thinking about what happens after your project can be too much to consider.

I made this to introduce some of the options and then they can learn about how to implement them as the project develops.

Embodied Carbon Calculation Exercise

We need to eliminate the carbon footprint of our designs to prevent the climate emergency. In order to be able to reduce the carbon footprint, we need to be able to calculate it first. If you are interested in learning about Whole Life Carbon (WLC) Assessment, this is an exercise I’ve made to introduce calculating embodied carbon.

The exercise is uses a simple frame, with 4 types of elements (foundations, slabs, columns and staircase) and one material to introduce designers to calculation process. You can complete this by hand, using the spreadsheet or whatever carbon calculation software you have access to.

Step 1: Download the Exercise

Download the drawing and a template for reporting (in line with the 2020 GLA draft reporting guidance):

Carbon Calculation Exercise DrawingDownload
Carbon Calculation Exercise Report TemplateDownload

STEP 2: Calculate the mass and Volume

Start to complete the table adding the material information for the different elements; material, volume and weights

Step 3: Add the CArbon Coefficients

Add carbon coefficients for each of the different modules using values from the ICE database, LETI or whatever source you have available. I gave a lecture on the process for the engineering club here.

The embodied carbon can vary between locations and suppliers. The Embodied Carbon Calculation Group [ECCG] have been working on this exercise and the IStructE have been very supportive and will be publishing the results.

If you work through the exercise, please fill in this form. It would be great to have your thoughts and if you could share your results so we can continue to develop this.

The Engineering Club

Aside | | Ciaran Malik
People from different areas of engineering discussing a variety of engineering topics.

I was at an engineering club event the other evening and was struck by how great it is to have a space to bring people and engineers from different backgrounds to celebrate engineering.

If you don’t know it, it is a club that invites people to discuss bicycles, kite power generation, sketching, lighter than air travel and more.

The particular event I was at was called “We wish we had made that” where engineers were presenting designs and ideas by other companies which they thought were impressive and cleverly done.

The Engineering Club

I was at an engineering club event the other evening and was struck by how great it is to have a space to bring people and engineers from different backgrounds to celebrate engineering.

If you don’t know it, it is a club that invites people to discuss bicycles, kite power generation, sketching, lighter than air travel and more.

The particular event I was at was called “We wish we had made that” where engineers were presenting designs and ideas by other companies which they thought were impressive and cleverly done.

Technical Studies, Tectonic Explorations by Samson Adjei

Samson was in the process of writing a technical studies book and after much begging on my part, he let me review the book from an engineering perspective.

The book is really interesting; I’m always curious to see how architects explore technical ideas. He also focused the book on being a primer, and fills a gap between existing books and suggests what to look at if you want to explore an idea in more detail.

Paper Tetrahedrons

An instillation as part of the engineering late at the Victoria and Albert Museum. Paper Tetrahedrons was an evolving sculpture that allowed people to add to the structure and create a collective design.

The tetrahedron is a stable and efficient shape being made of triangular faces. When two are combined it continues to be stable and we wanted to see what collectively we could create.