Environmental design strategies
Perhaps counterintuitively, one of our most important roles as mechanical and electrical engineers is to reduce the need for mechanical and electrical systems. We achieve this through stakeholder consultation to thoroughly interrogate the brief, and through close collaboration with the wider design team to prioritise ‘passive’ approaches to heating, cooling, ventilating, and lighting buildings; keeping artificial interventions to the absolute minimum.
About environmental design
We work closely with architects to develop options for building form, fabric and façade that will maximise the opportunity for passive conditioning, using controlled daylight and natural ventilation. Thinking critically about the role mechanical, electrical and public health (MEP) systems play in the wider ecosystem of a building, our holistic environmental strategies reduce the need for large, high-powered ‘active’ MEP systems and prioritise instead solutions that seamlessly integrate with, and indeed serve, the architecture. The result is higher comfort, higher wellbeing, lower embodied carbon, lower operational carbon, lower energy, and lower cost.
Underpinning many of these deceptively simple strategies – especially those for complex or specialised buildings such as archives, museums, and galleries – is our in-house expertise in building physics, microclimates, airflow, and computational fluid dynamics (CFD). We use our comprehensive understanding of building physics to establish targets for building thermal performance, glazing areas, orientation, and the placement and control of natural ventilation, and use CFD to predict the movement of air, enhancing human comfort in large spaces. Sometimes something as simple as opening a window to naturally cool and ventilate a building requires a lot of beautiful engineering behind the scenes.
Case studies
Total of 4 projects
All services
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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.
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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.
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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.