We can turn to techniques such as robotic welding to make the parts, for example, and use popular distribution warehousing equipment on site.
It’s generally understood that changing material specification can help reduce embodied carbon and create a more sustainable design and build process.What is often not mentioned is that we can also achieve reduced embodied carbon and capital cost through optimisation and reducing the volume of building, and the earlier this is considered the bigger the carbon savings.. Bryden Wood have demonstrated that through optimising architectural layouts, we can produce higher net to gross ratio space.
We do this by enhancing circulation and ancillary spaces and providing more useful, flexible space.With the reduction in internal floor area, there is less space to be conditioned with expensive MEP systems, less structure and less external envelope.This sustainable design process is incredibly effective..
Lean design encourages optimised material usage within the building.This might be improving the optimisation factor of steel, reducing the thickness of concrete slabs, or balancing insulation thicknesses of walls, floors and roofs with operational energy savings.
A reduced quantity of building materials reduces a building’s weight.
This in turn reduces the load on the foundations, allowing a further reduction in materials used in the substructure.This leads to wide-ranging benefits: cost-savings, increases in speed, quality and safety, and the creation of more sustainable buildings with projects delivering greater social value.. Social value in architecture, focusing on process.
In 2019, our project with GSK in Parma, Italy, won a ‘Facility of the Year Award’ for social impact from the International Society for Pharmaceutical Engineering (ISPE).The project delivered a finished and operational facility in just 15 months, as opposed to the usual three to four years.
The purpose of the facility was to ensure continuity of supply of a vital HIV treatment, and therefore the social value of the project was huge.The focus was not the building and its aesthetic value, but the process it allowed for, and the lifesaving drug it produced.