Energy and Environmental Impact – Choices & Timing of Input

Environment-focused architects regard energy and environmental impact as core concerns that must be considered alongside and equal to form and function. Measuring the impacts of your design decisions and the resulting building’s use of resources, both in construction and after, leads to a paradigm shift – a change in understanding of what constitutes good architecture. We need to evaluate, simulate and control the energy and resource impact of our buildings. For instance we at Joseph Little Architects only accept commissions for low energy buildings and gently urge our clients towards ever higher standards.

The best environmental choice is of course one that aids these goals and is still within budget. This is about results on site after all, not theory. When a larger range of appropriate materials and technologies are known and understood then far more efficient and surprisingly cost-effective solutions can become available.



Impact of early design input on the potential energy use of a building
Courtesy of ASHRAE Green Guide

The table from ASHRAE’s ‘Green Guide’ above makes clear how critical it is that energy and environmental impact are built into the earliest design decisions. It becomes more and more difficult and expensive to introduce, increasingly to impose, these savings later. It shows that the key decisions are made when no other design professional is involved, when the architect has a roll of sketch paper, a blank site plan and a vague idea about perhaps massing, circulation or façade treatment. It is right then that the appraisal must being.

Of course this does mean re-education and re-focusing on what ‘good design’ means within the Profession. At least in the early stages of a project it means more time, more analysis, more care. I believe it would be a mistake to surrender this element of design (and design control) to a new breed of sustainability consultants as could easily happen. It may mean higher fees for the client to pay, but for a far better, more predictable, energy-saving result.

‘DEAP’ , ‘Carbon-Mixer’, ‘Ecotect’ are examples of very different tools each of which can be used with relatively little training which can give the designer a good feeling for the impact his/her design decisions could have on daylight ingress, energy efficiency, carbon emissions etc. Books such as the ‘The Ecology of Building Materials’ by Bjørn Berge and ‘The Green Building Handbook’ (Vol. 1 and 2) by Tom Woolley et al. give an invaluable insight into the most suitable or (perhaps more tellingly) the least damaging construction materials.

Once environment-conscious design is embraced the window through which to design widens again. One is left thinking why did I, why do they, ever design without this awareness and these tools? Exciting times.