Autodesk explains increase in sustainable building

Pete Baxter of Autodesk outlines why sustainability in the construction industry will move from a few niche green projects to mainstream architecture in less than a decade.

The EU's Energy Performance of Buildings Directive (EPBD) is having a major impact on the construction industry throughout Europe, with its goal of 20 per cent energy reduction by 2020.

This is being reflected by proposed changes to Part L of the building regulations due to come into force next year, but the speed and frequency of these changes is make it difficult for the industry to keep up.

Sustainably designed buildings are cheaper to run and as sustainability in construction becomes more widespread, cheaper to build.

The message is getting across to the wider architectural community with 90 per cent of projects expected to incorporate sustainable design by 2012.

Building information modelling (BIM) technology can help create sustainable design.

An integrated BIM workflow enables the design and construction teams to use digital information to design, simulate, visualise and manage projects, all before they are built, and to monitor their performance, improve their usefulness, and extend their useable life.

The consequence is more informed decisions much earlier in the design process.

Sustainability begins when a project is first imagined, the building must be considered holistically from conception.

An holistic approach helps improve decision-making at the earliest stages.

BIM also helps designers understand how a building fits together - unlike working in a traditional environment.

Designers can quickly produce any number of concepts and schedule out all of the quantities.

For example, they can schedule the percentage of recycled materials to be used or the embodied energy in a project.

They can take it a step further and export it out to analysis to measure the building's operational performance.

Running a performance analysis through software such as Autodesk Ecotect Analysis, for example, will give the designer an indication of performance at the concept stage.

This might include luminance that would provide insight into the lighting requirements within a space or the potential for reducing the reliance on powered light.

There are also implications for heating and cooling the building by changing the materials used.

The designer could, for example, test incorporating a wall with embedded photovoltaic panels that take advantage of solar energy, and work out how to protect the building envelope against too much heat gain.

This would require systems to cool down the building in certain areas, perhaps through natural ventilation, different concepts for which can be run through the same analysis tool.

This kind of performance analysis is a logical piece of the BIM workflow, yet it is equally possible to take concepts that have been created in a more basic CAD format and run them through the analysis to arrive at informed design decisions with sustainable integrity built in.

All of the major corporations (and many smaller ones) have a sustainability strategy which declares their environmental goals and how they plan to achieve them.

Marks and Spencer, has mandated that it will be carbon neutral by 2012 and other retailers like Sainsbury's and Asda are in similar positions.

As legislation continues to change, there will be some designers that will continue to deliver projects in the old way.

Even simple sustainable measures such as recycling grey water and harvesting rain water have already been rejected as too costly or impractical.

By contrast, many forward thinkers in the architectural community are totally focused on sustainability, even using it as a business differentiator and driver, tapping into the issues of bio-diversity and ecology in addition to that of energy saving.

I have absolutely no doubt that those in the construction community who will be here for the long term will be those who embrace change rather than have it thrust upon them.

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