The podcast discusses how the COVID-19 pandemic has influenced building design, particularly around ventilation and air quality.
A lot of the briefs the students are given involve getting different parts of society to live and work together.At the moment, they are working on an existing building in Hulme that hasn’t been used in quite a few years.
They’ve got to retain part of the facade and completely build a new building inside it.It needs to have a cafe and offices — it’s a mixed use type building aimed at supporting the community.I do group work with them and help them work out how to incorporate all the M&E services into their building, but also give them a focus on sustainable design.
Mostly, it’s trying to get them to think about getting adequate daylight in, which is quite interesting with the facade they’ve got because they have to reuse it, so they don’t have many options to make the windows bigger.They’ve got to think of a more interesting way of doing it.
I’ve given them some homework and this time they are going to be presenting their daylighting to me.
They all have fully glazed facades on the south facing, so it’s trying to get them to think about the fact it’s going to overheat and they have to look at solar shading and passive design measures.As a result of the Infrastructure Projects Authority and the National Infrastructure Pipeline, we now have more clarity surrounding the issue of what needs to be delivered, for who, and the timescales.
Although that’s been available for some time, the conversations around commonality are a significant shift.The Construction Innovation Hub’s work last year with the Defining the Need Report looked at the specific pipelines of infrastructure delivery (particularly social infrastructure), and analyzed what specification requirements were already in place, their maturity, and how much common ground existed..
The level of significant overlap was surprising.Over fifty percent of the estates were not unique in any way.