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Building Performance Evaluation for Sustainable Architecture
Building Performance Evaluation for Sustainable Architecture
The BuPESA project combines academic and action research components. Its outcomes are multiple and focused for different audiences. The action research outcomes include interim reports, interim and final feedback meetings and workshops tailored to all the main stakeholders of the evaluated housing developments. The academic outcomes are two new research tools expanding the existing portfolio of Building Performance Evaluation techniques as well as a framework for BPE implementation in Poland. These are being published in academic journals and presented at conferences addressed to both academic and wider audiences.
Project Aim
Project Aim
The principle aim of this EU Marie Curie Intra European Fellowship project, BuPESA, has been to develop and test new methods for comparing the original design intentions of housing regeneration and development with the actual outcomes of the construction process and performance of the final design product in use. This included detailed evaluation of the usability of the buildings and user control elements (heating, ventilation, lighting, acoustics, internal appliances) in relation to the well-being and behaviour of the occupants, with key recommendations for future design work in relation to these factors. A secondary aim has been to train an experienced academic from Poland in the full range of building performance and transfer these skills and a bespoke process to Poland where building performance evaluation is less established.
Selected housing projects
Selected housing projects
The two selected urban housing projects are LILAC - the UK’s first ecological affordable co-housing project, which uses a highly innovative straw/timber construction process, and Saxton – a national award winning regeneration of social housing apartments. Both projects are in Leeds and both benefit from a state of the art evaluation of building performance to help clients monitor and improve current performance, fine tune the buildings and feedback lessons learnt into future procurement, design and maintenance processes.
The new methods include the social learning tool: a framework of information needed to enable a community understand better potential for lowering energy and water use through comparison of consumption within the development. A unique usability tool has also been developed to help evaluate the effectiveness of each interface that people come into direct contact with – the ‘touch-points’ of the home.
This tool involves multi-modal analysis including video, photography, environment-behaviour observation, ethnographic walk-throughs and interviews, combined in a single matrix. This will help to deal with the increasing problem of complexity in environmental controls for housing as new technologies are deployed, and to identify how controls can be improved in terms of design.
This project ran from March 2013 - June 2015.
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