London Build – A few thoughts

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A few thoughts from Megan Ancliffe after attending London Build;

I attended London Build yesterday and enjoyed several thought-provoking panel sessions. I thought I’d share some of the points raised in the panel sessions I attended and my thoughts below;

Panel: Integrating Regenerative Principles into Design Thinking

I’ve been hearing about the concept of Regenerative design more and more but never spent the time to fully get my head round it so I was interested to hear from the panel on the subject. Very simply, the idea is that buildings should, like nature, have an overall positive impact on the environment. One example from the panel was that a designer would use the maximum solar and water resources a site will receive and then use these to set limits for the design brief. EG. the water use of the building can’t exceed the maximum rainfall that site will be subject to.

This was an interesting premise but also raised questions for me;

We already know that there are limitations with certain building forms with regards to solar PV provision; As buildings increase in size and height – there is a threshold past which their roof space is not large enough to accommodate enough PVs to provide all the electricity use for the building. I would assume rainwater collection may suffer from a similar restriction – you need a certain surface area relative to the amount of people you are trying to serve. As such will regenerative design simply not work for certain building forms eg. blocks of flats in central London? Or are there other solutions for these buildings?

This is an design philosophy I’d like to learn more about, I’ll be adding panel member David Cheshire’s book to my Christmas wish list: Regenerative by Design: Creating living buildings and cities.

WORKSHOP: Uncertain AI Futures: What Could AI Mean for Our Industry, Our Places and My Role?

This session was a wildcard choice for me, my default position of new technologies is usually scepticism. I think humans have a tendency to rush to create things just because we can without fully thinking through the social or moral implications of that technology . I’ve been generally steering clear of AI other than dabbling in Chat GBT to rephrase the odd sentence so I was interested to hear from this panel of young Arup engineers on the subject.

Firstly, it’s impressive to see what a large engineering firm are doing with AI. I can see the benefits in harnessing technology to analyse data in advanced ways . The main part of this session was an interactive workshop where we broke into groups to discuss the future of AI using a technique of using two axis and what happens if AI is developed more or less along these. You can see from the photo of our brainstorm board the axis were set up as Value Driven Vs Profit Driven and Cooperation Vs Fragmentation. This gave four scenarios from a best case to arguably a worst case and in between.

I went straight for the worst case quadrant as my gut feeling for the future of AI but the discussion in our group was varied and really interesting. I’d say the older of us in the group (including myself!) were more doubtful that AI would be developed in a positive way and that it would include and transform all parts of construction. We were also concerned about using AI in the future to say advise on planning policy or on sustainable solutions; who would be making the moral judgements of these policies, can we trust AI with this?

Younger participants had a more optimistic view of the potential pointing out the critical issue is the data that is fed into the models which led on to a discussion on bias in AI data and how to avoid this. Overall a very thought provoking session.

PANEL: Designing for Ultimate Performance: Passivhaus Standards

Saving the best until last, Passivhaus had the last slot of the conference. I’m obviously biased as a Passivhaus Consultant but I think there was a level of technical clarity in this talk which is notable in contrast to some other panel sessions on sustainability I saw.  This is why I practice Passivhaus – its science and performance based, no greenwash!

Some interesting points were covered in the session;

• The challenge of mitigating overheating was discussed and that Passivhaus is much more rigorous check than Part O achieves. This has been our experience at Delta Q as well. A panel member made the point that architects need to design less glazing and more shading – agreed!
• There was a timely discussion on Fire regulations and Passivhaus. I agreed with the point that Passivhaus training is very focused on timber buildings and single dwellings. It’s a whole different ball game when you get into concrete, masonry and multi-residential buildings. Sourcing products in the UK that are fire compliant and meet Passivhaus performance is often difficult.
• Another interesting point was made on master planning, pointing out that it would help if building forms that are more efficient such as terrace housing and flats are prioritised in master plans as this would help make Passivhaus easier and cheaper to achieve. Planning large estates of detached houses should be avoided
• There was a great question posed to the panel of where they see Passivhaus as a standard going in the future. Including for flexibility in the timing of electricity use was flagged as an area not yet captured by Passivhaus but that may need to be introduced.  Also with the release of the new Net Zero Carbon Building Standard, projects will likely need to build to the Passivhaus standard to ensure they can meet the criteria which is measured in use not in design hence the performance gap reduction achieved via Passivhaus is critical. This is the same conclusion we’ve come to at Delta Q, we expect to see more uptake of Passivhaus to ensure this standard can be achieved.