Integrate and sustain

Your company emphasizes a multi-disciplinary approach to your work. How do you manage to bring all these different strands together into a coherent whole?

It all stems from Ove Arup's basic principle of 'total architecture', which involves bringing together a team of people with all the necessary skills to design a building or carry out the civil engineering work. In the early days, we mainly did structural engineering but by the 60s we were implementing mechanical and electrical engineering for buildings and we established multi-disciplinary groups to work with outside architects, in a very co-ordinated way. Later on, we founded a practice called Arup Associates which had fully multi-disciplinary teams, including architects and quantity surveyors and structural, mechanical and electrical engineers, to produce total building design. The multi-disciplinary design process produces results which are distinctly different from a series of separate firms designing the architecture, the structure and the services independently. That method of designing is generally quite expensive because you have to involve all the different people in the team, all the way through the process, from inception right through to working with the details. But it's worthwhile on buildings that are very complex in their servicing or their architecture. In the early 70s, Ove Arup and the partners at the time effectively gave the firm to the employees and set up a trust that owns the company, so we don't have any shareholders other than ourselves. The reason for doing that was that Ove philosophically believed that people working in a professional firm should decide which way it goes and not be subject to any outside control, and that the profit should go back to the people who created it. That's led to us being one of the first in the world to recognize the importance of 'sustainable development'. If you look at the United States for instance, the number of resources used by the modern American lifestyle, actually requires the whole of North and South America, to sustain it. Europe is quite similar. We recognize the need to change this situation so that each population lives with what can be replaced within the environment in which they live. That leads to looking at issues such as the amount of energy we use and how that is created and how we deal with waste, use water and limit carbon dioxide emissions and so on.

How have you been applying these principles to the projects you've worked on in Poland and elsewhere?

We devised a special system called SPeAR [Sustainable Project Appraisal Routine], which is a way of measuring the sustainability of a project or a business and it's probably the first method being developed to try and objectively measure all the things that make a project sustainable or unsustainable. Some major companies, like Jaguar for instance, have employed us to do sustainability audits on their operations. So if they're going to build a new factory, we can actually do this SPeAR analysis of their proposal and highlight areas where they might be able to change the way they do things. Maybe they should be using a different site, different methods or a different type of building. By doing this sort of audit of the different stages of the project, you can actually steer it so that it becomes more sustainable, by highlighting those areas that need to be improved. We have applied the SPeAR analysis to the Złote Tarasy project at the scheme design, design development and later, the tender design stage. We've tried to help the client identify ways in which the development can be made more sustainable.

So have you worked on what are called 'eco-buildings'?

Yes, we were involved in the BedZed [Beddington Zero energy development] scheme in London, which is almost self-sufficient in terms of energy use. If you design buildings cleverly, you minimize the amount of heat lost but maximize it in terms of what you gain from the sunshine and you can build residential developments that don't require any outside energy at all. There are many aspects to the BedZed development but it uses very little energy and generates some of its own energy. The concept involves integrating where people live with where they work and avoiding the need to waste energy when travelling from home to work, for instance. It's an attempt at defining a new sort of urban living and working building environment, which is a marker for the future, to show that you can actually design buildings which are sustainable in modern cities.

Will the 'eco-building' become a growing phenomenon in Poland?

I think so but the push has to come from the public sector, rather than the private sector, because at the moment there's no incentive for any private developer to invest in a building to make it more energy efficient. It could also come from PPP projects. In the UK we've been doing a lot of PFI (Private Finance Initiatives) projects such as, hospitals, prisons and universities. In a PFI project, the consortium that designs and constructs the building, enters into a deal with the user of the building, which might be the local authority, for instance, which says we will provide for this facility for the next twenty to twenty five years and you'll pay us so much, say, per bed per year or whatever: there's some basic way of paying for the provision of the service. It's in the interest of the people designing and constructing the building to consider sustainability issues, so that it is as cheap as possible to maintain and pay for the energy consumption. That leads to investing more money in the capital cost of the building, to save money over the twenty-five years of the agreement. I think that when you start looking at the design of what you call eco-buildings, the integrated design approach that Arup has always believed in, becomes more and more important. The basic arrangement of the form of the building, where you have glazing and shading, and its orientation and shape, are influenced by the calculations of solar gain and heat loss. Then there are all the issues of air movement within the building to allow natural ventilation, so you're not using a lot of mechanical ventilation and air conditioning and so on. I think architects in Poland are very good and well-trained and they can find forms of buildings which are potentially energy-efficient, but it really needs the engineering input to analyze that technically and put some figures to it and to optimize that efficiency. So working in the traditional Polish way, where the architect determines the form and shape and orientation of the building, the structural engineer fits a structure into it, then the mechanical engineer comes along and threads ducts and pipes through the building and the electrical engineer will put in his lighting and power and so on, will never lead to a truly eco-building, because it needs all those disciplines to work together at the conceptual stage of the design.

Is that difficult to achieve?

It probably depends on the client and whether he/she is committed to achieving that sort of building. Some just want the same sort of building that we've been producing for the last forty years, which are very energy inefficient, not very flexible and not very enterprising architecturally, because a lot of expensive finishes are invariably used to cover up the structure. In an eco-building, however, you want to expose the structure to the room, so that you mobilize the thermal mass of the structure, in terms of maintaining more constant temperatures, through day and night. So, there are a lot of issues where there is a need for interaction between the architecture, the structure and services. Finding solutions to those requires the different parties to work together in the way we've always believed in.