Buildings will become safer and more sustainable if building services engineers take a broader approach, said CIBSE President, Fiona Cousins, speaking as a guest on the industry podcast ‘Behind the Built Environment’, hosted by the Building Engineering Services Association (BESA).
During the podcast she challenged the engineering community to lift their ‘eyes to the horizon’ and take more account of social needs, biodiversity, and embodied carbon. She said: “As the electrical grid begins to decarbonise, energy efficiency is becoming less important,” she told the podcast. “We’ve been working in a changing context for a long time, which means we must think hard about the questions we're asking ourselves as engineers.”
She told BESA CEO, David Frise, that engineers were ‘brilliant at solving the problem once the problem is defined…but we spend a lot of time solving the problem that we defined for ourselves…a long time ago’. She added: “Over my career what good looks like has changed quite a lot. If we look back five, six, or seven years, none of our clients were asking for decarbonisation…now they all are.”
Fiona Cousins, a director at global engineering firm Arup, said taking a broader view of engineering challenges would also help address the serious safety issues raised by the Grenfell Tower tragedy. She said the public inquiry report into the fire showed costs were driven down ‘as quickly and as hard as they could be’, because people involved ‘weren't as aware of the outside environment as they should have been’.
She asked: “So, what is the bigger problem we’re trying to solve? Where is the value? Some of those broader criteria, whether it’s safety, or climate change, or society, are all about not solving just the problem that’s in front of you…but how do I make a safe building that contributes to climate change mitigation that is safe in times of climate change adaptation, and that perhaps supports biodiversity?”
Fiona Cousins, Arup’s Americas region chair, and a group board member, urged the industry to move away from a position where ‘cost drives everything’. “The best projects that I've worked on were right at the beginning, the design goals have been set and are affordable, but are also carbon-neutral, deliver a certain programmatic requirement, or are restorative of the natural environment.” She said value should be measured on a ‘whole life’ basis and in terms of its contribution to society.
“Is it about places that the community can gather at?” she asked. “Is it about buildings that face outwards and improve security on the street rather than inwards. Is it about buildings that have different purposes at different times of the day?”
She also believes improving our understanding of how buildings operate, and ensuring that systems are ‘more integrated’, will help the industry ‘move away from its low-cost culture’. “Value engineering works by attacking the line items that look like they're costing more than they otherwise might,” she told the BESA podcast. “If everything is integrated, that the reason you’ve got a heat pump is because you want to have a fully electric building, because actually you want to be zero net carbon over a period of time, then you’ve got a very different set of criteria. You’re not going to suddenly say: ‘Well, the heat pump is more expensive than the chiller would have been.’”
In her inaugural address as CIBSE President, Fiona Cousins – who is also an Arup Fellow and previously served as deputy chair of Arup’s digital executive, called for building performance to be ‘reimagined’, so that the full potential of building services engineers to address social issues like health, well-being, and productivity, could be realised.
During the podcast, she encouraged BESA and CIBSE to collaborate on several issues and activities, including improving the public’s understanding of how building services engineering improves their lives.