Ventilating the office: balancing COVID-19, climate change and energy bills

We are working to transform the construction industry with our focus on efficiency and solution driven practices, such as Offsite and Design for Manufacturing.. Digital Delivery Apprentice Charlie Hall, first came on board with Bryden Wood after completing his GCSEs in 2016.

Using a DfMA strategy allows for deployment of resources and materials to be carefully pre-planned, making it even easier to monitor and limit over-spend..When you need fewer materials, there is less to be transported to site, meaning fewer transport movements, lower emissions and a reduction in local air pollution.

There can also be less packaging used.(And in the future we should all be striving for packaging to be reusable, eliminating waste from packaging altogether).. A further benefit of reduced quantities and transportation of building materials is lowering the capital cost.We can achieve this through the reduction of raw materials, excavation and construction works, but also through shortened construction programme, which limits overhead and prelim costs, as well as creating a path towards more sustainable construction.. Low operational carbon.

Alongside developing the architectural design to reduce the overall building volume, we should adopt passive design measures, such as considering building orientation, using optimised facades to balance winter heat loss and summer heat gain, enhancing daylight and using natural or mixed mode ventilation.These sustainable building measures will reduce the MEP plant loads so that plant takes less space; reducing the building volume further.

It will also result in reduced energy consumption in use, as well as reducing the capital cost of MEP systems.. To make sure we use the most appropriate passive sustainable design measures, we test them for optimum results using computer simulations.

This means we know far more about how a building is due to operate than we ever have before.•​ Outboard design: rooms facing outdoors with toilets adjacent to the corridor.

•​ Nested design: rooms facing outdoors and connected to corridor.Toilets nested..

The first option represents a trend in hospital design in which patient rooms are open and easily accessible from corridors, in order to improve staff-patient visibility and increase operational efficiency.Unfortunately, this in turn means that the toilets are located on the façade, blocking daylight and views out, and thereby interfering with design for wellness principles..