“Anatomy of a disaster” to reopen

Leave a reply

I note that the Clissold Leisure Centre is to re-open next month .  It was described, when it closed in 2003, a year after it opened as a ‘landmark Millennium project’, as the wrong building in the wrong place at the wrong time.

The building became a case study in bad practice, in focusing on the building rather than the users needs, (on the 1, rather than the 5, or 200, if you follow the 1:5:200 concept), It has been used by many quality and technical managers across the country as a lessons learnt case study, and to reinforce the 1:5:200 thinking of relationships between design, construction, fm and (business) costs.

The project attracted a huge amount of industry,political and local – social – attention, including one of the early reports in the Guardian by Jonathan Clancy – Anatomy of Disaster:

Clissold leisure centre’s catalogue of problems is a frightening read. A local activist group, called Not the Clissold Leisure Centre, lists no fewer than 59 defects on its website. These include a “changing village”, which Orthodox Jews and Muslim women would be unable to use. The children’s changing areas, moreover, were located next to two-metre deep water. Shower drains have blocked. Dirty water from showers flowed into the pools. Tiles around these were slippery.

Yet these are relatively minor complaints compared with defects number 32, “roof leaking across whole centre”, 33, “roof sweating with condensation”, 34, “glass walls around pools retain fetid water”, 40, “inadequate ventilation to both pool areas”, 56, “significant cracking in squash-court walls” and, last and by no means least, 59, “water damage to sports-hall floor causing warping and lifting at less than 12 months, with injuries sustained by users.”

And, now ….

It reopens with a new toddler pool, improved disability access, reception area and new office space. Contractor Wates has installed a new roof, with a vapour control layer to prevent condensation, and new pool floors. The total cost of the centre, originally budgeted at £21 million, has risen to £45 million. bd online website

Ouch.

Events in lancashire

Leave a reply

The events page is now updated for events in the North West . For members of the Lancashire Best Practice Club a reminder that the AGM is next Tuesday at 5pm. If you know of more events in the north west – let us know.

the Code …from denial to despair?

Leave a reply

The cost of achieving carbon neutral or zero homes to the Code keeps raising its head, as Phil over at Sustainability Blog points out.

I didnt catch the UCT speakers name on the US Greenbuild365 live webcast testerday, I was listening rather than watching, but a sound bite delivered with typical American style caught my ear…“The building sector is over-estimating the cost and under-estimating the impact of climate change issues”

How true, when we think about the moaning around the cost of the new Code for Sustainable Housing, which will be seen as a smokescreen for reluctance in doing anything at all.

Jonathan Porrit writing in his blog and in BD… makes the point well… why put a price on the importance of carbon free homes?

Government policy is being applied to decarbonising both new and existing housing, with Building Regulations and the Code driving that transformation. An industry that has lived for far too long in a feather-bed world, where nobody gave a tinker’s cuss about energy and resource efficiency, is being incentivised to change, and is marketing to rapidly rising consumer expectations. So why would anybody suppose that the combined genius of architects, designers, engineers, builders, surveyors and planners isn’t going to be able to come up with the zero-carbon goods?

I live in weird world these days. Having spent most of my life described as a prophet of doom, I now find myself having to shake people out of a fatalistic “can’t be done” mind-set! We seem to have moved from denial to despair in one effortless leap. So let’s get our creative act together here. After all, we don’t have a choice about this. Either we rise to this challenge, or the mealy-mouthed, risk-averse mediocrity that dominates this particular industry will take us all down with it.

The costs arising from inefficiencies through waste, poor project management, incorrect procurement, lack of working together, poor design, legal fees to check contract documentation and all the well documented historical ills of our sector etc far far outweighs the cost of achieving the Code… surely?

Acheiving the code needs a different mindset, as Einstein said… we cannot solve todays issues with the same mind set that created them in the first place...

By rearranging the debate towards opportunity we can can move from despair to exciting.

Clinton @ Greenbuild365

1 Reply

I caught the live broadcast (webcast) of Bill Clintons speech at Greenbuild365* yesterday, and a few things stuck in my mind.

One was Clintons reference to this being an opportunity, a challenge but an opportunity, and that the transition from a  carbon economy to a green economy will produce as many new jobs, skills and professions as the carbon industries loose.

he saw that the greenbuild sector was the place to be to really address climate change issues. “The sale has been made,” he said. “Otherwise Al Gore wouldn’t have got the Nobel Prize.  Now what we have to do is to prove that this is not a bottle of castor oil that we’re being asked to drink”.

Secondly,  Clintons call the need for an industry benchmark to keep score, and his pledge, I assume from his foundation, to create a tool for the AEC Industries – (Architecture, Engineering and Construction).

Watch this space…

In fact Clinton could be one to watch.  The worldchanging writer and founder Alex Steffen ran a story on Clinton’s speech  to US Mayors in Seattle recently and described it as …quite simply, the best speech on climate given by an American politician (other than Al Gore) I’ve ever heard — it’s the sort of speech I wish a sitting president would stand up and deliver before Congress and the nation

* As to Greenbuild, I understand7000 saw Clintons speech, 20,000 will attend over three days and most of the key speeches are webcast around the world. (An idea for the UK  Think 2008 maybe Phil?)  I just get a feeling something big is happening there, despite the rhetoric in American politics and leadership.

MIT, Gehry and more questions

1 Reply

Blogs and the Media are awash with news and comments of MIT sueing Gehry for an ‘unbuildable design’ at the MIT Stata Center in Cambridge, Boston. (The Guardian, Building etc)
I find this fascinating and a reminder of the failures and flaws in the more traditional (or historical – traditional sounds too craft, and heritage-like), un-collaborative,  approach to construction.  The best reporting is in the Boston Globe,  which provides the contractors (Skanksa) view as well.  (Boston being an old home of mine, I try to keep informed through the Globe)  And its very illuminating.

“This is not a construction issue, never has been,” said Paul Hewins, executive vice president and area general manager of Skanska USA. He said Gehry rejected Skanska’s formal request to create a design that included soft joints and a drainage system in the amphitheater, and “we were told to proceed with the original design.”

After the amphitheater began cracking and flooding, Skanska spent “a few hundred thousand dollars” trying to resolve the problems, but, he said, “it was difficult to make the original design work.”

It also delves deeper, citing  former Boston University president John Silber, who said “It really is a disaster,” and sharply criticizes the Stata Center’s design in a new book, “Architecture of the Absurd: How ‘Genius’ Disfigured a Practical Art.”  A book that questions why the Guggenheim is always covered in scaffolding? Why the random slashes on the exterior of Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum, supposed to represent Berlin locations where pre-war Jews flourished, reappear, for no apparent reason, on his Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto? Or why Frank Gehry’s Strata Center, designed for MIT’s top-secret Cryptography Unit, has transparent glass walls? Not to mention why, for $442 per square foot, it doesn’t keep out the rain?

Ouch.

He goes on … and asks all the questions that critics dare not. He challenges architects to derive creative satisfaction from meeting their clients’ practical needs. He appeals to the reasonable public to stop supporting overpriced architecture. And most of all, he calls for responsible clients to tell the emperors of our skylines that their pretensions cannot hide the naked absurdity of their designs

Time to order a copy !

Terminator meets Flushed Away

Leave a reply

Noted on the USA Building Design + Construction Network website recently:

Governor Schwarzenegger recently signed into law Assembly Bill (AB) No. 715, supported by the Plumbing Manufacturers Institute (PMI), that encourages and provides for the gradual conversion to higher efficiency toilets and urinals in California.

Many existing toilets average 1.6 gallons per flush.  High efficiency toilets only use 1.28 gallons per flush, or less; while high efficiency urinals use one-half gallon per flush, or less.  Under the new law, plumbing manufacturers have committed to producing at least half of their toilet models sold in California to be high efficiency by 2010.  By 2014, all toilets and urinals sold in the state will be high efficiency models.  The new high efficiency toilet and urinals will use less water, helping alleviate demands on water agencies in California.

This illustrates the increasingly acute water problems in many areas of the world.

New Preston landmark office building revealed…

Leave a reply

 From the BD website,  (the Architects Website)

Moxon Architects has won an RIBA competition to design a £6 million landmark office building in Preston, Lancashire.

The firm beat CJ Lim’s Studio 8 Architects, Maxwan, Piercy Conner, New York-based Stephen Yablon Architects, and Hamburg’s LH Architekten in the contest.

The winning scheme, Moxon’s biggest win to date, will be four storeys high with a two-storey atrium, and will provide around 4,000sq m of office space.

Director Ben Addy said the unnamed client did not want to release design details until it had gone through pre-planning consultation, but added: “It’s quite bold, it’s got a pronounced expression to it. It’s got unusual cladding and we’re looking to use a material that retains colour as it weathers.

The contest had 50 entrants and was judged by a panel including Urban Splash’s Nick Johnson and architect Ian Simpson.

A quick surf of Moxon Architects website revealed very little about the organisation other than a hard to view portfolio. In fact the news / press section was more than a year out of date.  Something about form and function?

Now thats got Prestonians guessing who, where, what, when ?

Carbon Offsetting not possible in the UK – is this correct?

Leave a reply

Noticed this on the SD Commissions website today –

… However, it is not currently possible to do carbon offsetting in the UK, as this would lead to the double-counting of any reduction in emissions (as all reductions are already claimed by Government in helping to meet our international obligations)…

Is this correct?  This needs to be read in the context of the SD Commission’s view on Carbon Offsetting and Neutrality, but having read the web page a few times I assume this means that the offset projects cannot be UK based?

So planting trees in Scotland or anywhere else in the UK, to absorb/sequester carbon dioxide, or any of the other main greenhouse gases is not available to construction projects looking to offset.  Well there go a few I know off…

Anyone care to clarify or offer an explanation of this?

Construction Carbon Calculator – 3

Leave a reply

National fame for isite

– the isite post on the Environment Agency calculator has been picked up by Building.

Mixed Media Messages

Leave a reply

A mixed bag in the media over the weekend and today…

The Sunday Times launched a four week series on what promises answers to the global warming problems, which seems to be to

wait for Rogers to complete cities of the future,
capture carbons from the air,
geo-engineer solutions in the oceans,
sprinkling iron ocean surfaces , oh,
and build homes of the future that resemble Lost In Space visions of the future 1970’s style

    Meanwhile the Observer investigated 5 carbon calculators – and revealed that a personal footprint can vary from 2.3 tonnes to 28 tonnes – no surprises there!

    And then today in the Guardian – a Guardian survey shows only 48 of the top 100 companies trading on the UK stock exchange have published a plan to address and reduce their carbon emissions and a significant minority refuse even to reveal their carbon footprint. This report contains and interesting comment form Tesco’s Leahy -who predicts that by working with consumers, “we can turn the green movement into a mass movement”.

    Are we about to see a Tescos branded green movement?