Sustainable School Design
The current NSW Government’s commitment to rebuilding and refurbishing schools across the State presents and extraordinary opportunity to improve the how and the where our children learn. While the $6 billion investment is obviously great news for New South Wales, who’s paying attention to the impact will this massive infrastructure roll-out have on our environment?
In 2018 the Government Architect published the Environmental Design in Schools manual emphasizing the critical importance of good environmental design. This design manual, in its own words “…. aims to provide school principals and school communities with a holistic understanding of environmental design. It presents strategies for passive design as opportunities for making positive, sustainable change in the building or running of a school.” Whilst this initiative is successful in shining a spotlight on sustainability in schools, it focuses primarily on the universal principles of environmental design and pointers for reducing direct emissions from buildings once built.
It’s easy to convince ourselves that we’re doing a good job when sustainable design principles and practices are visible in our new and existing school buildings. We can see and measure the impact of solar panels, thermal efficiency and rainwater tanks. But are these more obvious solutions fooling us into thinking we’re really making a difference, and more importantly is it blinding us to the real issues and the real impact of infrastructure roll out?
It is grossly underestimated fact that the highest % of omissions are created in the construction of buildings, NOT in running them.
The built environment in Australia accounts for 25% of our countries CO2 emissions and emissions during construction are responsible for anywhere between 10% and 97% of the whole of building lifecycle.
Tackling the Issue - Head On
The benefits of refocusing our attention on reducing embodied emissions when building and re-furbishing schools are twofold. Firstly, tackling embodied emissions is not dependent on ongoing building user behaviour, which, in schools is mainly dependent on the already overloaded teaching and leadership team. Secondly, savings made during the design and construction stage are delivered today, and so are more impactful. Data shows that a kilogram of carbon dioxide saved over the next five years has a far greater environmental value that a kilogram saved in 10 or more years’ time.
Busting the Dollar Myth
How often do we hear that building sustainably is expensive? Or worse, that sustainable design measures included in a project are the first to be abandoned under the guise of ‘value engineering’? In the UK, the Government and construction industry have joined forces with the aim not only to halve emissions in the built environment over the next eight years, but also to reduce the cost of construction by one third by 2025. This flagship deal will see the Government invest £170m over three years, with £250m coming from industry, to commercialise technologies capable of building energy-efficient, cost-effective public buildings and infrastructure.
This forward-thinking approach and real commitment to industry wide creativity has led to not only real gains in the reduction of emissions but also new business opportunities to further reduce impact, and cost, and create differentiation.
Schools as Exemplar Sustainable Buildings
A school building is arguably the largest and most visible physical artifact of school sustainability, and as such serves as a measure of our commitment to protecting the environment for our children. It is for all of us, whether architects, policy makers, project or delivery managers, to give more than just lip service in creating sustainable school environments for our children.
Systems and professionals need to start promoting, actioning and delivering sustainable design in a way that those paying for school building projects understand its value.
So, What to Do?
As a profession architects must be front runners in driving change. Good cost effective and environmentally sound design can be the catalyst that inspires change. We need to demonstrate the business case for reducing embodied carbon and the cost advantage as well as the benefit to the environment to our clients.
Sustainable design takes a proactive approach with clearly defined and measurable objectives and outcomes. Robust sustainable design is scientific. The key is to employ tools that measure the effectiveness of the environmental design strategy and calculate the cost of your project viewed through a long-whole of life lens.
As Winston Churchill famously said, “We our shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us”.
He also said, “It is no use saying, ‘We are doing our best.’ you have to succeed in doing what is necessary. “
The protection of the environment and the importance of school buildings leading the way is the responsibility of us all. We need to stop paying lip service to sustainable design, we must be accountable and action the changes required to value our children’s future and the future of the world we leave for them.