Endless corridors, dingy waiting rooms and basement treatment rooms will be a thing of the past at Guy’s new Cancer Centre when it opens in 2016. Liza Young finds out how innovative service design has helped to create a blueprint for modern cancer care buildings
Author: rfelix
On a mission
Portakabin is using CIBSE’s TM54 tool to help predict energy use at a new Cambridge base for the East Anglian Air Ambulance. Peter Rankin explains why the modular builder is taking an ‘honest approach’ to energy efficiency
In it for the honey
Urban beekeeping has the potential to revive ailing bee populations and provide city dwellers with a welcome taste of the wild. Cundall invited 30,000 honeybees onto the terrace of its London office, and controlled hive temperature and humidity to ensure a bumper harvest for its staff. Harry Barnes and Kavita Kumari report
What do we mean by ‘carbon’?
Designing and building sustainably can be a challenge when faced with so many definitions of the term ‘carbon’. Blaise Kelly, from the Austrian Institute of Technology, questions what we actually mean by it
Our buildings, our data… maybe not
Energy data is essential to monitor the performance of buildings and will underpin the move to smart constructions. But who owns the data? Robert Klaschka warns of the dangers of allowing building data to fall into the hands of third-party operators
Kick up the arts
Festivals are known as much for the waste and squalor they create as for the quality of entertainment on offer, but some former music execs are now showing the arts world how to save resources. Liza Young goes for a spin with Julie’s Bicycle
The power of three
New CIBSE President Nick Mead joins fellow presidents Andy Sneyd and Stephen Hodder to discuss how institutions can encourage the professions to break out of their silos and become involved in collaboration. Ewen Rose senses a cultural change at the first presidential debate in Westminster Central Hall
Guide A – CIBSE’s essential guide to environmental design explained
Our three-part series highlights the most important changes to CIBSE Guide A. Tim Dwyer explains the changes on a chapter-by-chapter basis. Part one looks at design stages, use of data and thermal comfort
Exposing the underground
The mass of underground services buried beneath our streets is a major hurdle to creating smart, resilient cities, say Nicole Metje and Dexter Hunt, who consider sustainable methods of managing 4 million km of buried infrastructure in the UK
Street smart
Local electrical power networks have the potential to slash household energy bills by half, but are being held in check by regulations on domestic energy management. A pilot project in Wiltshire is showing how modern controls, clever algorithms and more enlightened legislation could transform UK energy supply. Encraft’s Matthew Rhodes and Paula Quintela, of e2E Services, explain