A Green Vitruvius

Principles and Practice of Sustainable Architectural Design

Vivienne Brophy, J Owen Lewis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136528712
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Sustainability in Architecture

2000 years ago the roman architect Marcus Vitruvius Pollio wrote the ten books on architecture establishing the concept of the pattern book offering design principles and solutions that is still referred to in every architect's education. A Green Vitruvius is intended as a green pattern book for today.

Now fully updated, this well established textbook provides advice suitable for undergraduate and post graduate students on the integration of sustainable practice into the design and construction process, the issues to be considered, the strategies to be adopted, the elements of green design and design evaluation within the process.

Classic design elegance is found in the holistic clear solution.

SECTION 1: PROCESS

INTRODUCTION

Every experienced architect is familiar with the different stages of their national design and construction process. As processes may vary from country to country, in this publication the structure adopted reflects ACE and European standardisation discussions.

The management of this process is not the architect’s exclusive responsibility. In varying measures, at all stages from pre-project, through the project and the detail design to construction and acceptance, the architect may be exclusively responsible, have shared responsibility, or merely play a partial role. However, there is always an architect-client contract, there is a project brief and the architect must work with specialist consultants, whether professional engineers or contractors with design responsibility. National building regulations are inescapable. No matter what the precise extent of the architect’s responsibility on cost estimation, the definition of quality includes reasonable value for money.

INCEPTION

Briefing

Initial Studies

DESIGN

Concept

Preliminary

Developed

Detailed

TENDER

CONSTRUCTION

Supervision

Commissioning

OPERATION

Operational and Maintenance Support

REFURBISHMENT

INCEPTION

• Briefing

• Initial studies

DESIGN

• Concept

• Preliminary

• Developed

• Detailed

TENDER

CONSTRUCTION

• Supervision

• Commissioning

OPERATION

• Operational support

• Maintenance support

REFURBISHMENT

The input of the architect and the other project team members – client, engineering, cost and other technical specialists, contractors and subcontractors – differs greatly from stage to stage. To significantly improve the performance of buildings, and particularly larger buildings, it is necessary to combine passive strategies, active systems and innovative technologies; this requires an integrated building design process in which multiple disciplines and design issues are brought together in a manner that permits synergistic benefits to be realized. A whole-of-system approach, considering interconnections between the building form, envelope components and their systems, will require project team members to integrate their roles and responsibilities and act collaboratively. The role of the architect is of considerable importance in the realisation of sustainable development. The architect, as usual leader of the design team, has a professional duty to incorporate sustainable strategies and to inform the client and design team of these issues. The opportunity to influence the environmental performance of the completed building varies with the stages: the potential for improvement is greatest at the initial stages, and as the project reaches building permit or building regulations approval is reduced and less cost-effective.

Any list of key issues will be arbitrary. We might have chosen three, or six, or twenty. The most important issues vary with climate, and hence with project location. Key issues also vary with building size and complexity, and with building use, and hence the demand for heating, cooling, ventilation or daylight. A summary list should be treated with caution. However, the design process balances many different issues, and somehow the architect must manage to deal intuitively with all those issues, especially at the early stages. So a table of key strategies at different stages is provided.

Table 1.1 Green Strategies at Different Stages of the Process

INCEPTION

The Client-Architect Relationship

The scope of services to be provided

In some Member States, the content of the client-architect contract is regulated by law, with the scope of the architect’s appointment, fees to be charged and conditions of the architect’s appointment prescribed by the State. Elsewhere, these matters are negotiated individually.

Fees for green design

Certain marketing advantages may accrue to providing what have often been seen as the ‘special services’ of green design at no extra cost to the client. Leaving this aside, there are conflicting viewpoints about the ethical acceptability of charging special fees for green design services. Many architects feel that professional duty indicates that they should undertake sustainable design work as part of their standard service. No building designed at this time which ignores environmental issues can be said to be good architecture.

On the other hand, extra work is inevitably involved in a service which results in improved environmental performance, reduced energy consumption and lower life-cycle financial cost. Many architects are of the view that such work merits compensation by way of an appropriate extra fee. While many materials and component suppliers provide sustainability-related information on their products as a matter of course, a good deal of time can be spent assessing environmental performance of materials. Also, contractors may need time-consuming reassurance about innovative aspects of the work, and much time may be needed for particularly thorough site inspections.

Table 1.2 Green Tasks which might be Identified in the Client-Architect Contract

Finally, it is correct that particular expertise in any professional area, whether green design or any other, be appropriately rewarded.

Every architect will individually decide this, having regard to the individual circumstances of fee negotiation, personal and client commitment, degree of expertise available and so on. At the same time, it will never be possible to isolate fully time spent in sustainable design research and studies and recover all the extra cost involved. Where they have not done so already, national professional organisations should consider incorporating ‘green design clauses’ in their standard client-architect contracts.

Consultants

Scope of input

The choice of consultants is important, especially at the outset of the project. They should be competent, firstly to understand the issues involved and, secondly to give the architect the best advice. In a green design process the focus of specialist consultants will often be different. In the green building, consultants first optimise the use of passive environmental control measures, having regard to life cycle as well as initial cost. Only then should they advance active systems. By increasing the passive contribution, active systems can often be much smaller, and of a radically different nature, than those in a conventional building.

A second way in which the nature of some specialist inputs is different in green design is in precision of estimating. Conventional engineering, particularly in space heating, cooling or artificial lighting systems, works to constant pre-determined design standards. The primacy of passive measures means that some degree of tolerance, or lack of fixed conditions, is to be accepted. Studies show, moreover, that building users tolerate wider environmental variation when they themselves can influence the situation, for example by opening a window or turning on a light, and significant cost and energy savings can be achieved by even small shifts in design temperatures.

Appointing consultants

In selecting consultants, the architect should specify from the outset that sustainability is a fundamental consideration in the project, and identify the consultant’s level of understanding in this regard. The goal of the design process is to integrate specialist areas to achieve optimum performance of the total building, not to achieve optimum performance of the separate parts; and performance is to be considered over the project life cycle, through design, use and decommissioning.

Consultants’ fees are often calculated as a proportion of the cost of the specialist work. Where mechanical and electrical engineering services are concerned, this might for commercial reasons tend to increase the scope of heating, cooling, lighting and ventilation installations. The cost of the services installations is regularly as high as 30–35% of total project cost. It may be useful to agree a different fee basis, and calculate the fee as a proportion of the total cost. This has the advantage of allowing for advice even where there may be no conventional service installations. Daylighting studies, calculation of alternative heat losses and gains and of ventilation rates, and modelling of total building performance are all indispensable to environmentally aware design, and engineers are often better equipped than architects to carry out the numerical, as opposed to intuitive, studies, necessary in any moderately complex building. An added refinement to the total building percentage fee is to pay a fee premium inversely related to the energy costs during the 12 months after handover, measured on a kWh/m2/yr index. Alternatively, the fee can be calculated on an hourly basis, or be fixed. A fixed fee can act as an incentive to minimise the scope and complexity of specialist measures to be installed.

Early consultant appointment, site visits and multi-disciplinary project meetings can contribute enormously to...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• The Green Building
• SECTION 1. Process
• SECTION 2. Issues
• SECTION 3. Strategies
• SECTION 4. Elements
• SECTION 5. Evaluation
• References
• Index