Date: 15 June 2016 - 15 June 2016, 1:30 - 4:00

Location: DWF, 1 Scott Place, Manchester, M3 3AA

Email: Thomas.Mills@riba.org

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RIBA: Refurbishing the existing housing stock | Manchester

Date: 15 June 2016 - 15 June 2016, 1:30 - 4:00

Location: DWF, 1 Scott Place, Manchester, M3 3AA

Email: Thomas.Mills@riba.org

There are around 26 million dwellings in the UK and around two million non-domestic buildings, the majority of which will still exist in 2050. At present, these dwellings represent around 27% of the UK’s CO2 emissions and their poorly insulated fabric means they are both difficult and expensive to heat. It has been calculated that this may annually have led to between 25,000 and 30,000 cold-related deaths in the UK. By simply refurbishing to much higher insulation and airtightness standards, this would reduce the operational energy required just to heat our buildings by more than 60%.

This seminar will be split into two parts. During the first part, delegates will be given an overview of the UK housing stock, and drivers for insulating it, including brief case studies of successful low-energy fabric efficiency upgrades. There will then be examples of unintended consequences of fabric upgrades, such as, ‘take back’; buildings becoming overheated; fabric damage; interstitial condensation with internal wall insulation; and, air quality issues (IAQ). The seminar will also look at the principles of phased step-by-step upgrades, taking into account whole building performance, and it will suggest clients’ possible upgrade ‘triggers’ as opportunities, such as the replacing of a kitchen being the ideal time to look at internal wall insulation and water efficient appliances.

The second part consists of individual workshops with a given retrofit case study:

  • Delegates will critique and highlight possible unintended consequences of a case study’s retrofit
  • Delegates will propose alternative strategies for refurbishment
  • Extracts from the STBA’s Responsible Retrofit Guidance Wheel will be used to help assess and propose refurbishment strategies and retrofit checklists from the second edition of The Environmental Design Pocketbook.

Speaker: Sofie Pelsmakers DipArch MScArch MRes ARB RIBA, Architecture for Change (AfC) and doctoral researcher, UCL Energy Institute

Sofie is a RIBA chartered architect and environmental designer with more than a decade of practical experience in designing, building and teaching sustainable architecture. She taught sustainability and environmental design, and led a Master’s programme in Sustainable Design, at the University of East London. Sofie is currently a doctoral researcher at the UCL Energy Institute and is co-founder of Architecture for Change, a not-for profit environmental building organisation. She is author of The Environmental Design Pocketbook (2012, RIBA Publishing), the content of which this seminar draws on.

Core Curriculum topics: 1. Climate 2. Designing and building it 

Book online here

This event is also taking place in Liverpool on 16 June: click here for more information

 

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