BUILDING PERFORMANCE EVALUATION IN THE UK
So many false dawns
Introduction
In the 1960s, the imperative to move architecture on to a more scientific footing led to an interest in evaluating the performance of buildings in use and feeding back the results. In the 1970s, this early promise became severely eroded. Since then, there have been several cycles during which interest and capabilities have grown and then faded away. Why has it been so difficult for the industry, its clients and government to adopt routine building performance evaluation (BPE) and feedback, and what can be done about it?
Some developments in the UK from 1960 to 2002
The history of post-occupancy evaluation (POE) in North America is outlined in Chapter 14. In the UK, POE also emerged in the 1960s, as part of a policy to move architecture on to a more scientific footing. A review of architectural practice for RIBA, the Royal Institute of British Architects (Derbyshire and Austin-Smith 1962) led on to its Plan of Work for design team operation (RIBA 1963). This included Stage M – Feedback, where architects would return to their projects after a year or so to review their performance in use.
In 1967, the Building Performance Research Unit (BPRU) was set up at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, to undertake feedback, bring together research, teaching, and design on building performance, and publish the results. In 1968, BPRU started a major project, sponsored by the Ministry of Public Building and Works, the RIBA, the Architects’ Journal, and 20 architectural and engineering practices. This focused on newly built comprehensive schools, for ages 11–18. The results were published in the book Building Performance (Markus et al. 1972). Today its findings still ring true, for example an obsession with first cost; repeated mistakes; poor strategic fits between buildings and the activities inside them; and single issues – particularly daylight factors – dominating the design and preventing effective integration, whilst often not being achieved themselves.
Building Performance should have been required reading for participants in the UK’s recent ‘Building Schools for the Future programme’, where eye-catching architectural design (and sometimes banal contractor design) has too often trumped functionality, with poor environmental performance (Partnerships for Schools 2011) and high capital and running costs. Yet again these have exposed the differences between the views of architectural critics, and what physical measurements and occupant surveys reveal. A former student at one award-winning school summed it up (Anon. 2012): ‘the architecture showed next to no sense. It leaked in the rain and was intolerably hot in sunlight. Pretty perhaps, sustainable maybe, but practical it is not.’ The comment was supported by POE results. In this chapter we use BPE to designate the general activity of building performance evaluation and POE for BPE undertaken in the first two or three years after a building’s occupation, where the findings can influence those who commissioned and undertook the design and building work.
Building Performance included a plea for architects to get more involved in BPE and feedback, and provided strong arguments why. Unfortunately, this did not happen – the first false dawn. In 1972, the very year it was published, RIBA took Stage M out of its Architects Appointment document, reportedly because clients were not willing to pay for feedback as an additional service; and RIBA did not want to create the impression that architects would do it for nothing. While Stage M remained in the Plan of Work, architects did very little routine feedback subsequently, as has been reviewed by Duffy in this volume. Fortunately, the latest version of the Plan of Work (RIBA 2013) does include more about activities beyond physical completion, in Stage 6 (“Handover and Closeout”) and a new Stage 7 (“In Use”). However the contents of these stages are not yet well defined, particularly Stage 7.
The publication of Building Performance also marked the end of BPRU’s government/industry/academe/publisher collaboration, not the first step on a journey to BPE as a discipline, connecting research, practice and clients. A statement in the book may reveal why: ‘BPRU was more interested in research than in developing devices, however practical, without a sound theoretical framework.’ Developing theory at the expense of practical opportunities for improvement may fit the priorities of academe, but may well have distanced BPRU from the designers, clients, operators and users it had originally aimed to serve. Time and again we find a mismatch between the priorities and practices of academe, the criteria for research funding, and the interests of building professionals and their clients. It has been particularly difficult to obtain funding for multi-disciplinary research into the combined effects of people, processes, techniques and technologies; and for broad-based case studies that concentrate on outcomes.
For the remainder of the 1970s, Britain’s economic difficulties, exacerbated by energy crises in 1973 and 1979, suppressed the amount of new building and the appetite of clients and government for BPE, in spite of the constant lessons that better feedback from building performance in use promised to make future buildings both cheaper and better. However, one aspect of building performance – energy use – began to receive considerable attention, leading to developments in regulation (mostly for insulation), energy management (including benchmarking and subsidized energy surveys), and new techniques and technologies (with grants for demonstration projects). In 1974 the UK set up the Department of Energy (DEn) to deal with both the supply side (in particular North Sea oil) and to some extent the demand side. In 1977, demand management obtained a similar status. The UK’s energy efficiency policies from 1973 to 2013 are reviewed by Mallaburn and Eyre (2013).
In 1974 DEn set up the Energy Technology Support Unit (ETSU) at the Harwell national laboratory to provide technical and research support. In 1976, the Department of Industry added a programme for industry, coordinated by the National Physical Laboratory. In 1978, the Department of the Environment (DoE) established a companion unit (BRECSU) in its Building Research Establishment (BRE). In 1983, DEn set up the EEO, the Energy Efficiency Office, to help coordinate these three streams of demand-side work and present the results.
The 1980s
In the early 1980s, interesting low-energy buildings had been constructed and useful feedback was being obtained. Another false dawn. Later in the decade, progress slackened, owing to falling fuel prices, a political belief in the efficiency of the marketplace, plans to privatize the gas and electricity industries, and a shift in emphasis from conservation to efficiency. As a result, many opportunities for improving building performance remained unrecognized or undeveloped. A generic problem also emerged: a preference to celebrate and often over-play successes (or supposed successes), but not to publish the findings from failures, so allowing mistakes to be repeated indefinitely.
In the late 1980s, DEn’s prime focus was to privatize the gas and electricity industries and then to extinguish itself. In the process, EEO, the Energy Efficiency Office, was scaled down, its energy demonstration and survey schemes replaced by the Energy Efficiency Best Practice programme, EEBBp. This had four interrelated elements: Energy Consumption Guides, with benchmarks and action items; Good Practice guides and case studies to help stimulate adoption of energy-saving techniques and technologies; New Practice guides, case studies, events and visits; and Future Practice. R&D under the New and Future banners was more about liaising and disseminating results than funding research itself.
In 1992, DEn was abolished and the EEO moved to DoE, the Department of the Environment, which was responsible for many aspects of buildings including regulation, the government estate, construction industry sponsorship and BRE. In spite of this convergence, BRECSU’s support to the EEO programme was only weakly connected to BRE’s work as a national laboratory.
In the 1980s, there was also some private sector interest in BPE, in particular to support the energy-related work, the growth of facilities management, and in a few design practices. For example, in 1979, four architectural firms got together to help create Building Use Studies Ltd (BUS), largely to work on briefing/programming, human factors and occupant surveys. In the event, the vast majority of BUS’s commissions were not from architects but for research projects, construction clients and building managers. One major commission, the Office Environment Survey (Wilson and Hedge 1986), analysed responses to a 20-page questionnaire on occupant health, comfort and productivity from a total of 5,000 respondents in 50 office buildings. This provided a foundation for further work in the 1990s and beyond, including Raw (1992) and the Probe studies (Building Research & Information 2001).
Following the Bruntland Report (World Commission on Environment and Development 1987), climate change came to the fore in UK government policy. Key milestones were Margaret Thatcher’s speeches to the Royal Society in 1988 and to the United Nations on the global environment in November 1989. From then on, the UK took a leading role in climate issues internationally, though the rhetoric tended to run well ahead of the action. Under the UK’s present government (2010–15), both the leadership and the action are collapsing.
The 1990s
Recognition of climate change at the highest policy level, together with other developments including the launch of BREEAM, the BRE Environmental Assessment Method (Baldwin et al. 1990), boded well for improving the performance of buildings in use. Good progress was made in the early 1990s, with energy joining other work on building and environmental performance at DoE and BRE, supplemented by a new Energy-Related Environmental Issues programme EnREI. More projects evaluated building performance from multiple perspectives – human, technical and environmental, for example Bordass et al. (1994).
In 1995, DoE started a new programme – Partners in Technology (PiT) – into which anyone could bid. PiT (later called Partners in Innovation, PiI), supported some multi-disciplinary work on building performance, including Probe – Post-occupancy review of buildings and their engineering – which undertook and published 20 POEs of recently completed buildings between 1995 and 2002. The work was initiated by the editorial board of Building Services – the CIBSE Journal. The EEBBp then funded a review of the first 16 Probe studies, the Probe process and the strategic and tactical lessons: these were summarized in a special issue of Building Research & Information