While this is positive for building occupants, the lessons learned from COVID have shown that some of the design decisions taken to make buildings healthier, have implications for energy efficiency that can affect the aspiration to deliver low-carbon buildings.. Our response to the challenge is a holistic approach to sustainable design and wellbeing, with a strong focus on the use of passive design measures.

So the ductwork has to be 10 times as big, and the risers 10 times as big to carry the air up and down, and so on.Designing in flexibility presents lots of interesting challenges.. Master planning and MEP Design for a precious metals refinery.

We started working on this precious metals refinery in 2016.They refine five different types of precious metal.The precious metals are obtained in raw form from many sources, but most come from catalytic converters in car exhausts.

The metals, once purified, don’t look like much – a grey powder – but they are hugely expensive..They take a product like a catalytic converter, and the first process is to smelt it.

They start with just 0.3% of valuable metal by volume and after smelting, it's still a very small quantity of metal, but it’s at a size that they can put it in the back of a truck to be taken to the refinery where the valuable metals are extracted.. Their present refinery was built in 1965, and is in need of replacement.

Our first job was to look at all sorts of options about where they might build a new refinery, from the UK to Europe to Asia.However, because we are not seeking to apply a single solution to the entire process, we will not be seeking to change the entire process at the same time.

Once the core parameters and rules are in place and the environment is enabled, the overall project can advance incrementally, demonstrating benefits and value as it goes.. As with many instances of progress, there may be vested interests that might object to aspects of this project from a position of self-interest.We cannot deal with them here.

This project will shine a light on what is possible.. Further applications: the benefits to government and local plans.The solutions may be different, but the principles we are exploring here have very positive ramifications for other areas.. Local/central government: the principle of making information interoperable and shareable, or policies more machine-readable and rules-based, while smoothing flow of information ‘before use’, is applicable in many areas: domestic planning, perhaps, where we could unblock permitted development and focus more on sustainable development; or major infrastructure projects where incompatible information systems breed wasted time and resources.. Local plans: are all based on evidence, which is all based on data.