Tag: CASE

Historic Building Services Symposium featured in CIBSE Journal

A symposium held at the Chartered Institute of Building Services Engineers (CIBSE) on 25 July 2018, organised by Dr Henrik Schoenefeldt in collaboration with CIBSE Heritage Group has been featured in an article in the September issue of CIBSE Journal, written by Liza Young, Deputy Editor. To read the full article, please see here: http://portfolio.cpl.co.uk/CIBSE/201809/28/.

The symposium, ‘Historic Building Services in Education, Practice and Research’, explored the value of studying historic building services and how it can inform the practice and education of building service engineers today. Through talks and discussions, the event provided a forum for practitioners, engineers and educators to investigate these questions. Speakers and panel chairs included Professor Dean Hawkes, University of Cambridge, Dr Neil Sturrock, Chairman of CIBSE Heritage Group, Caroline Cattini, Historic England, Phil Jones, Chairman of CIBSE CHP & District Heating Group, Dr Henrik Schoenefeldt, University of Kent, Andrew More, Senior Building Services Engineer, Historic England.

Kent School of Architecture MSc Architecture and Sustainable Environment students, and CASE (Centre for Architecture and the Sustainable Environment) PhD students presented their work at the event, in addition to a PhD student from Cardiff University.

Urban Albedo project hosts workshop at London City Hall

CASE (Centre for Architecture and the Sustainable Environment) organised a very successful workshop at London’s Living Room, City Hall on Monday 15th October 2018, marking the beginning of Green GB week.  The workshop, ‘Urban Albedo: Digital tools for urban resilience and growth’, was co-orgnised with Greater London Authority and the London Climate Change Partnership (LCCP), along with Brunel University and Loughborough University, who are both project partners.

The workshop, chaired by the former President of the Urban Design Group, Colin Pullan, brought together leading urban and building scientists, as well as practitioners from different backgrounds, to inform the impact of urban morphology and materials on urban albedo and its importance for health and well-being.

The speakers from the Industry Panel included:

  • The Concrete Centre
  • Fosters + Partners
  • SWECO
  • IESVE
  • CIBSE Resilient Cities

For further information about the Urban Albedo research project, please see here.

CASE Open Lecture: Dr Susan Parham, University of Hertfordshire

The upcoming CASE Open Lecture will be given by Dr Susan Parham, Head of Urbanism and Planning at the University of Hertfordshire on Tuesday 16th October at 6pm in Marlowe Lecture Theatre 1.

Her talk entitled, ‘Just what is ‘sustainable urbanism’ when it comes to food?’ will explore some of the ways cities and food are intertwined – drawing on urbanism research from the historical and contemporary city and its peri-urban edges, and will consider food’s sustainability as a highly contested area today in relation to what foodspace ‘works best’. Drawing on her own (and others’) applied research in the UK and elsewhere, Susan will consider some current design and planning focused urban foodscape and systems proposals for food-centred placemaking and retrofitting. Susan will argue the proposition that these approaches might contribute to responding to sharpening sustainability imperatives now and into the future.

Dr Susan Parham is Head of Urbanism and Planning at the University of Hertfordshire and Academic Director of the International Garden Cities Institute (IGCI). She researches and teaches on placemaking including food and urban design, planned settlements, sustainable materials, and masterplanning and retrofitting. Susan’s most recent book is Food and Urbanism (Bloomsbury, 2015) and her latest book chapters are in The Routledge Handbook of Landscape and Food (2018), Agrourbanism (2018) and in Future Directions for the European Shrinking City (RTPI Library Series, 2016). Susan is a member of the Royal Society for the Arts and the Royal Town Planning Institute.

dalby_square_margate

Climate change adaptation and intergeneration living in a heritage townhouse in Margate

CASE, alongside Thanet Council and the School of Psychology, have been working on the Dalby Square project in Margate.

The project aims to tackle climate change, an ageing population and housing shortages. The refurbishment of the heritage townhouse in Dalby Square, Margate, has now been completed and Kent County Council are seeking the tenants. The three-generation family will be part of the innovative project, where extensive monitoring will take place, to evaluate the climate change adaptation strategies, focusing on overheating, thermal comfort and energy performance, while testing the concept of multi-generation living. The team was interviewed for the BBC news for the south-east last autumn.

At the end of the project, a ‘Sustainable Heritage Toolkit’ will be published to help other coastal towns across the UK.

Further information about the project can be found here and for more information about applying for the scheme, please contact Oakwood Homes on 01843 221133.

 

Sustainable Museums through the reuse of historic building services

Dr Henrik Schoenefeldt has been invited to speak about his current research project at the UK Spring Conference of the International Association of Museum Facilities Administrators (IAMFA), which is held at the Natural History Museum, London, on 3 – 4 May 2018. For the full list of speakers, see here.

He will be taking part in the main plenary session entitled‚ ‘The Technology Challenge Modernising Estates’ Systems‘. The event will be attended by 70 delegates, which include facilities managers from most major museums in the UK and Henrik will be will be exploring how findings of his current research project at the Houses of Parliament could be used to address questions of sustainability in historic museum buildings. The project investigates how far historic principles of ventilation could be reutilised and integrated within a modern sustainable system. As many museum buildings from the nineteenth and early twentieth-century followed similar approaches to ventilation and as such the research can offer potential lessons for their refurbishment. Can the reuse of historic principles provide an alternative to the installation of completely new technologies?

MASE students present at Cambridge Conference

Seven students from the MSc in Architecture and Sustainable Environment presented papers at the 5th Annual Conference of the Construction History Society, which was held at Queens College, Cambridge on 6 and 7 April 2018. The focus of this year’s conference was on the history of building services and its relationship to the development of construction technology. It was an international conference with delegates from countries across the world, including Australia, US, Switzerland, Germany, Belgium, Bulgaria, Sweden and France.

The students’ papers were based on research they have undertaken in the context of the module AR828 Rediscovery under the supervision of Dr Henrik Schoenefeldt. It is a specialist module on the history of environmental technologies within the MSc. In this modules students undertake research in the history of building services, which included  detailed case studies on the original environmental principles underlying the design of historic buildings.

The conference gave students the opportunity to gain important skills required in academic research, such as the writing of papers, going through the peer-review process, speaking to larger audiences about their work or taking part in plenary discussions, which involved dealing with critical comments or challenges questions from delegates or panel chairs.

Cover of Conference Proceedings

Seven peer-reviewed papers were published in ‚Studies in the History of Services and Construction, The Proceedings of the Fifth Conference of the Construction History Society, Queen‘s College, Cambridge, 6-8 April  2018 (Cambridge: CHS, 2018)

The engagement of students in the conference forms part of initiatives that Dr Schoenefeldt has been leading in conjunction with his National Teaching Fellowship Award and ‚Between Heritage and Sustainability‘, a research project funded through the Arts and Humanities Research Council.

Dr Schoenefeldt giving opening keynote lecture at Queen’s College, Cambridge

Dr Schoenefeldt gave the opening keynote lecture of the conference and acted as chair the main building services stream.  His lecture, which was entitled ‚Towards a History of Building Services’ explored the relationship between construction and building services in the design of the Palace of Westminster.

CASE Open Lecture: Professor Sue Roaf, Heriot-Watt University

The next CASE Open Lecture will be given by Professor Sue Roaf, from Heriot-Watt University on Tuesday 20 March at 6pm in Marlowe Lecture Theatre 1.

How to Design a Comfortable Building

Comfort is a very costly business. Around 40% of global GDP is spent on buildings, for their construction, operation and demolition and most goes in keeping buildings cool or warm enough to occupy – using air-conditioning and central heating systems. That was fine in the age of cheap 20th century energy but as fossil fuels become less affordable – how will we afford to stay comfortable in the increasingly unstable and extreme weather, political and economic systems we occupy?  We need now to re-learn how to design buildings that can keep people thermally and economically safe in difficult times, not least in a warming world when so many modern buildings are over heating badly. This talk covers issues related to how and why many modern buildings fail to do so and describes a range basic Comfort Design Tools.  It proposes a three step method for designing comfortable buildings, based on lessons learnt while developing the adaptive approach to thermal comfort and describes a range of fundamental opportunities and planning methods for use during early comfortable buildings design stages.  It then outlines a few useful mind-set mantras that might help the designer in the process.

Sue Roaf gained her first degree in Architecture in 1975 at Manchester University. She subsequently went on to gain her Diploma in Architecture at the Architectural Association in London where she also took her Part 3 professional exam in 1978. In 1989 she was awarded a PhD for her study of the Windcatches of the Central Persian Desert from Oxford Brookes University where she taught from 1989 to 2005 both in professional studies, technology and design. She has practiced for a number of years on the design of housing, schools, hospitals and town planning.

She is best known as a designer for her Oxford Ecohouse which was the first UK building with an integrated photovoltaic roof. She is an award winning designer, teacher and author and is Co-Chair of TIA, the International Teachers in Architecture organisation and Co-Chair of the Westminster Carbon Counting Group. She began teaching at Heriot Watt in 2007 in the School of the Built Environment.

PhD Seminar Series: Leonidas Tsichritzis

The next PhD Seminar will be given by Leonidas Tsichritzis on Wednesday 14th February at 4PM in E.Barlow (Eliot College).

The effect of height related urban morphology characteristics on pedestrian level winds

The evaluation of wind environment has gained a lot attention lately as it has been associated with issues relevant to urban climate quality such as heat island intensity and air pollution, which many large metropolitan areas are facing and affect humans’ health and prosperity. Within the morphological and climatic context of Greater London this study aims to associate pedestrian level wind comfort with urban morphology as well as with wind directions. Approximate 20 case studies representing real urban areas with dimensions 500x500m, which receive a range of morphological characteristics yet medium to high building coverages, were examined through CFD simulations. For every single case study eight wind directions were tested while the BRE wind comfort criteria and guidelines were used for assessing wind comfort for the different types of outdoor human activities. The results of the study provide valuable information showing some influence between the pedestrian level wind environment of London and building morphology characteristics which contain information relevant to the height of buildings.

Leonidas Tsichritzis is a 3rd year PhD Student and Graduate Teaching Assistant. Prior to joining the Centre for Architecture and Sustainable Environment in order to conduct his own research, awarded with a GTA Scholarship, Leonidas has worked as an architect and environmental design consultant in Athens.
His research interests are covering a wide area of sustainable and environmental design in terms of promoting the energy autonomy and the decarbonisation of built environment as well as pedestrian comfort in local but also in urban scale. More particularly, his research is focusing on assessing and classifying the pedestrian level urban wind environment as far as concerned to wind comfort and safety for different types of outdoor human activities by evaluating designated characteristics of urban geometry which dominate the wind flows around buildings for the climatic and urban context of London.

Keynote at launch of major international conference “Landscape Architecture & Microclimate”

Professor Marialena Nikolopoulou gave a keynote speech at the launch of the First International Conference on Landscape Architecture and Microclimate ever held, at Tongji University, in Shanghai, China, on 26-28th January 2018.

The conference marked the completion of the key research project of the National Natural Science Foundation of China “Research on design theory and method of landscape architecture response to microclimate suitability in urban livable environment”, unique in bridging the discipline of landscape architecture with microclimate studies. The conference was a big success with 210 participants from 76 universities and various professional associations.

Professor Marialena Nikolopoulou to give talk at Wageningen University

Professor Marialena Nikolopoulou will be talking about her leading research on human thermal perception and climate adaptation in cities in a talk entitled ‘Open spaces in the 21st century city: from the thermal dimension of space to climate change’ as Visiting Professor at Wageningen University, in the Netherlands,  funded by the Wageningen Institute for Environment and Climate Research on Tuesday 28th November 2017.

For further information: https://www.wur.nl/en/Expertise-Services/Chair-groups/Environmental-Sciences/Landscape-Architecture-Group/Show/lecture-Niolopoulou.htm