Debate 11 - Paper 3

Some messages from surveys of buildings in use

Bill Bordass, William Bordass Associates and a member of the Probe Team

Background

I spend a lot of time going into buildings and finding out how they actually work. Sometimes for curiosity, sometimes for owners and occupiers who have problems, sometimes for people wanting to make improvements or to build something else; and often for third parties wanting to find out how buildings perform - particularly their moving parts, their internal environment, their energy consumption, and what their occupants and management think of them.

Some of the findings have been published, most prominently as part of the PROBE series in Building Services - the CIBSE Journal. Here, in studies part-funded by DETR, the Probe team has re-visited interesting buildings which were written up in the Journal at the time of their completion, and tried to find out how they were working two or three years afterwards

Survey findings

I have been in a lot of really good buildings … and some really poor ones (”here we wipe our feet on the way out” as one occupant said). However, even the best ones usually have some things wrong. Not surprising in itself … but the same issues also recur. These include, for instance:

• Poor airtightness of the building envelope, even in mechanically-conditioned buildings which are allegedly ’sealed’. Their leakiness has in part been exacerbated by trends within the industry to prefabrication and subcontract packages. The components may be well-packaged, but the interfaces (both technical and managerial) may not be, so system performance suffers.

• Control systems (both manual and automatic) which do not work well for occupants and management … and often not in a technical sense either.

• Design-management misfits, in particular buildings which demand a lot of their management - often more than the occupiers are prepared to provide or can reasonably afford. The occupiers may not be doing enough … but did the designers expect too much? And were the procuring clients properly tuned-in?

• Unintended consequences of new (and not so new!) techniques and technologies.

• Partly as a result of all the above, energy consumption and carbon dioxide emissions which are often well above the design estimates; plus occupants who are less satisfied than one had hoped - and consequently less productive, as the survey statistics show.

In offices, occupants’ levels of perceived control have been falling over the past ten years, while noise problems have been rising. A typical new building surveyed subtracts 2% from occupants’ perceived productivity, while really well designed and managed ones can add 10% and more.

Right First Time?

In view of the above, it is certainly necessary to get a lot more right first time. However, this is not, I think, sufficient to get the improvements we need. Indeed, the expectation that everything can and should be right first time may be making it more difficult to achieve some types of improvement. I say this in the name of Sod’s (or Murphy’s) Law - the old enemy of research scientists and development engineers. If you are doing something in the least bit different, then there will always be problems which you did not predict. As we learn more, our predictions get better, but unless we stay in well-trodden ruts, something can always take us by surprise.

In my experience, even the ruts are not always as well-charted as we might think:

• By and large, the supply side of the industry is not much involved with their products after handover. This means that anything which does not get drawn to their attention as a potential failure is regarded as a success, while in fact it may be a disappointment. In this way, some low-level but nevertheless debilitating problems become chronic and persistent

• Conversely, inconspicuous successes may go unremarked. For example, one building in Probe which proved to have been excellent in both occupant satisfaction and energy efficiency did not reach the shortlist of the Green Building of the Year award, while an audit of one of the winners showed it to be using nearly three times the predicted amount of energy!