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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
Dr Henrik Schoenefeldt will be giving a talk at St. Stephen’s Church in Canterbury on Thursday 23rd November at 7.30pm. His talk entitled ‘Profane Gothic: Rediscovering the Palace of Westminster’s 19th Century Ventilation System’ will cover the restoration and renewal within the Palace of Westminster, and explores how the gothic architecture of the Houses of Parliament has been shaped by its innovative Victorian ventilation system.
Dr Henrik Schoenefeldt is Senior Lecturer in Sustainable Architecture and AHRC Leadership Fellow at the Kent School of Architecture. He is currently on research leave leading a large AHRC funded project investigating the Houses of Parliament’s historic ventilation system. The project, entitled ‘Between Heritage and Sustainabiliy – Restoring the Palace of Westminster’s nineteenth-century ventilation system,’ feeds into the Palace of Westminster Restoration and Renewal Programme.
Liza Young, Deputy Editor at the CIBSE Journal, was taken on a private tour of the Palace of Westminster, led by Dr Schoenefeldt for a feature article which is in November’s issue of CISBE Journal, of which Henrik is the cover star. The issue, including the full-length article on p.24 – p.28, can be viewed here: bit.ly/2m31xd4
The next CASE Open Lecture will be given by Ze Nunes from MACH Acoustics on Tuesday 7th November at 6PM in Marlowe Lecture Theatre 1.
Ze is the Founding Director of MACH Acoustics. He is passionate about the role of acoustics in improving the built environment and committed to sustainability as a fundamental principle of good design. A proven innovator, he relishes the interdisciplinary challenges of great architecture, always ready to break with convention in the quest for better answers, a combination that has seen MACH Acoustics win countless jobs with the largest contractors and most celebrated architects.
Acoustics and low carbon buildings
What if we could see how sound behaves how it enters and moves around a building?
Would this help us design greener better buildings?
Acoustics can be challenging to grasp because we cannot ‘see’ sound. When assessing a building’s thermal performance, thermal imaging clearly shows the impact of different design solutions.
MACH are greatly innovative, applying clever visuals and creative thinking to explain the unintuitive nature of acoustics. Modelling and visual representations of sound are shown to deliver truly clever, beautiful buildings.
This talk takes a ‘David Attenborough approach’ to inspire and inform designers, by visualising sound. With the overall aim being that if we could see soundcould we make our buildings significantly more sustainable?
