LEADER
Invisible touch
When we talk about climate resilience, we’re really talking about keeping people healthy
This issue, we have a spectacularly inert building on our cover. The Ray Dolby Centre is designed to house some of the most sensitive equipment in the world, and the level of vibration transmission is 250 times lower than human perception. Nevertheless, the scientists working there say they do notice how quiet the laboratory spaces are and how little sound is transferred from outside.
That got me thinking about the way we experience buildings, with all of our senses. You don’t necessarily need to be able to see the structure to tell what it’s made of. If you walk into a thermally massive building on a hot day, it should immediately feel cool. If you’re in a structure that provides natural acoustic isolation, you probably feel calmer.
The occupant experience gained in prominence as part of the wellbeing and healthy building movement. But I’ve noticed that design considerations such as the quality of the indoor environment and providing access to nature have been given greater urgency as essential factors in climate resilience. After all, when we talk about adapting buildings for climate change, what we’re really talking about is keeping people healthy in a future of more frequent flooding, overheating, droughts and wildfires.
In June, the UK Green Building Council published its Climate Resilience Roadmap – a very welcome
initiative and a huge undertaking, to which I was asked to contribute because of my work providing guidance to improve property-level flood resilience. At the launch, I was struck by London climate resilience lead Emma Howard Boyd’s description of buildings as “our first line of defence”, driving home the message that keeping people safe starts with how we design, build and adapt.
As we come to the end of another UK summer of record-breaking temperatures, it’s more apparent than ever that we need to make sure the homes we build today will be comfortable year-round in future conditions.Thermal mass is valuable, but so is good design – to provide appropriate ways of “purging” the heat from the structure. For homes, this typically means natural, night-time cooling, which ideally means they should be dual-aspect to enable cross-ventilation.
There’s a good example of how architects are taking thermal comfort on board at Juniper House, where most flats are dual-aspect and the south facades have deep balconies and recessed windows. Fortunately, humans are much less demanding than scientific equipment, and designing safe, comfortable buildings is not rocket science. There is a nice synergy between the way a narrow footprint can provide cross-ventilation, while bringing in daylight to support our mental health.
Nature-based solutions are not hard to integrate into urban space – replacing hard surfaces with permeable block paving is a simple way to capture and clean rainwater as part of a sustainable drainage system. This can support street trees, even during drought, but also helps to manage flood risk – another synergy.
At the Dolby Centre, I love how the architects have managed to squeeze 3,000m2 of outdoor space into the plan. That should help to make sure that this highly technical building engineered for machines will be hospitable to humans too, today and in the future.
Elaine Toogood, senior director, MPA Concrete and The Concrete Centre