Sustainability

The United Kingdom is experiencing increasingly extreme temperatures and the governments building standards are not keeping pace. The minimum standards that contractors and designers use as defaults are not sufficient to mitigate the impact of these extremes on our use of buildings.

At above studio we put environmental design at the heart of our process and integrate sustainable measures into our designs. We believe that this issue needs to be tackled now to avoid creating spaces that could end up unusable in years to come. Our design process involves three categories of environmental design:

1. Building fabric – The first step in trying to tackle climate change is to prevent further heating. We design out carbon intensive building materials and replace them with more environmentally friendly alternatives where possible. We also ensure our designs perform above the minimum requirement thermally.

2. Passive design – The second step is to mitigate temperature extremes with passive design measures that heat and cool our buildings without the need for energy.

3. Active design – The final step is to mitigate temperature extremes with active design that prevent further harm to the environment than commonly used alternatives. For example the use of air source heat pumps or photovoltaic panels.

Quite often the measures that integrate into our designs are cost neutral, or marginally more expensive than conventional building techniques and measures. We consider that when the cost uplift is minimal it makes sense to bear the cost to ensure that the future use of the spaces we design is comfortable for foreseeable future.