Building performance and Soft Landings

Building performance leaders

Total of 2 people

Tom McNeil

MEng MSc CEng
Principal Building Performance Consultant
Partner

Hero Bennett

MSci MPhil MCIOB CEnv
Director, Sustainability
Partner

About building performance

Often complementing the work done by our mechanical, electrical and public health (MEP) engineers and sustainability and Passivhaus consultants, our building performance consultants help make sure that the performance gap between the building ‘as designed’ and the building ‘in use’ is as small as possible, that the building works as intended, and that the performance can be clearly proved and demonstrated.

An integral part of maximising a building’s performance, the ‘Soft Landings’ approach that we helped develop is the opposite of simply handing over the keys and walking away. Working closely with building managers and occupiers at brief setting, design, handover, and in-use stages, we:

Help set building performance targets (energy use, carbon emissions)
Facilitate design reviews that consider the management and maintenance of the building after completion
Keep contractors involved and engaged throughout construction stages
Create engaging and easy-to-understand, highly visual user guides which explain how the building works.

Once the building is occupied, we make regular visits as part of an Aftercare service. We review the operation of the systems and assist in fine tuning, thereby improving comfort and often drastically reducing carbon emissions and running costs.

We offer Post Occupancy Evaluation (POE) services which involve going back and looking at the performance of a building once it’s been occupied for a period of time. This means getting feedback from the occupants and reviewing the energy performance, while highlighting lessons learnt and helping improve the ongoing operation. We do this both on buildings where we’ve carried out the MEP design and other consultancy services, but also on buildings we’ve had no prior involvement in. We endeavour to carry out some form of POE on all our projects, with a commitment to collect yearly operational energy data at the very least. This contributes to our rich database of buildings’ actual energy performance, which is essential to our in-depth and ever-growing understanding of how to design – and deliver – a net zero carbon building.

Designing low energy, comfortable buildings that are a pleasure to be in has always been our goal as a practice, and it’s the reason why our multiple CIBSE Building Performance Award winners are some of our proudest achievements.

Case studies

Total of 4 projects

St John's College Library and Study Centre, University of Oxford

Two people sitting on a sofa in a well-lit space

The new Library and Study Centre at St John’s College, Oxford, is focused on promoting energy efficiency in the most elegant manner. We provided Aftercare services and post-occupancy evaluation for two years post-handover. This involved quarterly analysis of energy meter readings, quarterly assessment of the internal environment conditions from data gathered and stored in the Building Management System (BMS), and the analysis and review of feedback from the Library's staff and student users. We found that the energy performance of the building was very good: significantly below industry benchmarks and closely aligned with RIBA and LETI targets.

Catalyst Building, Staffordshire University

Hotdesking workspaces inside Staffordshire University New Catalyst building.

Max Fordham was appointed Soft Landings consultant on Staffordshire University’s Catalyst project, from early stage briefing to ongoing post-occupancy evaluation, where helped to analyse and optimise the in-use performance as part of 24 months ‘Aftercare’ where the building’s performance and operation can be fine-tuned. We produced an accessible, highly visual user guide to enable the occupants to use their building as efficiently as possible, and monitored performance via a BUS occupant survey carried out towards the second full year of occupation. Despite operating 24 hours a day, seven days a week, Catalyst is performing is now out-performing design-stage estimates.

Nightingale Primary School

Children playing in room with wooden floors and high celling

The Soft Landings approach adopted on the Nightingale Primary School and residential scheme included two years of post-occupancy evaluation (POE). This provided regular reviews of the energy consumption and internal environmental conditions. Improvement strategies were decided upon by the Aftercare team, which included fine tuning controls, seasonal commissioning tweaks and management and teacher education sessions. The school is passionate about ensuring that their carbon emissions and energy bills are kept as low as possible, with their energy consumption aligning with the "low" target set during the design stage, meaning that the performance is significantly better than industry benchmarks.

Ravelin Sports Centre, University of Portsmouth

A large indoor swimming pool. Four large rectangle roof lights let daylight in from above..

A collaborative Soft Landings strategy also ensured the University’s management and operations teams had a good understanding of the building and its systems at handover and into occupation. Intensive post-occupancy monitoring and user feedback have been used to fine-tune systems and controls for optimum comfort and energy efficiency. In the first six months since opening, the data has shown that the building’s operational energy consumption is less than 100 kWh/m²/yr, which is around one-tenth of the energy demand of an equivalent typical UK sports centre.

Related journal entries

View all journal entries

Technical explainer: Building performance

9 May 2023

All services

All buildings should be comfortable and a pleasure to be in: warm, well-lit, well-ventilated, well-used, and well-loved. Our mechanical and electrical engineering, vertical transportation, acoustics, daylight, and lighting design services can help ensure just that. We maximise passive measures such as natural ventilation and daylighting, seamlessly dovetailing our designs with the building’s own form and architecture to result in simple, low-energy, and low-cost building services.
In the face of an increasingly urgent climate emergency, it’s crucial that buildings consume as little energy as possible in their operation. Low energy, low carbon, and low operational costs are our watchwords when it comes to designing new buildings or retrofitting existing ones. We help our clients build sustainability goals into masterplans or early-stage feasibility studies, decarbonise existing estates, and optimise how a building performs against its targets for sustainability and user comfort.
Meeting net zero carbon targets and minimising a building’s impact on the environment means reducing embodied carbon – the carbon tied up in the materials like steel, concrete, and plastic that go into a building’s construction and services design – as much as operational carbon (the carbon a building produces in its heating, cooling, and lighting). We facilitate material reuse with circular economy strategies, steer low embodied carbon design from the earliest project stages with whole life carbon assessments, and offer advice on planning and compliance, all helping to reduce the carbon footprint of construction.