Keeping fit with less energy: Ravelin Sports Centre

Designers behind the Ravelin Sports Centre have crunched its energy-use numbers down to an impressive 87kWh·m-2 per year, less than half that required to achieve a DEC ‘A’ rating. Andy Pearson discovers how an innovative mix of passive and active technologies produced a sector-leading building that won a CIBSE Building Performance Award

The big picture: embodied energy at 100 Gray’s Inn Road

With a new development at 100 Gray’s Inn Road, in central London, set to become the UK’s largest full-timber, net zero carbon office building, Phil Lattimore finds out how the building’s whole life-cycle carbon impact has been assessed

Clear decisions: whole life carbon for façades

By applying the CWCT embodied carbon calculation methodology to a Croydon office, Patrick Ryan Associates estimated whether selecting a new high-performing façade is better for reducing whole life carbon than retaining elements of the original. Anri Doda and Jill Wang explain

Circular route: New Street station lighting retrofit

To minimise embodied carbon in the retrofitting of nearly 900 luminaires at Birmingham’s New Street station, Q Sustain used CIBSE TM65 to calculate the potential savings of reusing existing luminaires. The firm’s Lovely Chavan and Yara Bekdache explain how it saved more than 163 tonnes of embodied carbon

Facing up to embodied carbon in façades

Façades account for up to 30% of a building’s embodied carbon, which is why the Centre for Window and Cladding Technology is working to produce a new methodology to bring consistency to life-cycle assessments. Buro Happold’s Teni Ladipo reports

Buildings for the future

Future structures will be carbon negative, climate resilient and integrated into the local community, according to engineers and sustainability experts at Buro Happold. They tell Andy Pearson why the next generation of buildings must be designed today

Calculating whole life carbon in heating and cooling systems

To minimise carbon emissions from heating and cooling, the whole life of a system must be taken into account. Hoare Lea’s Will Belfield and Mathew Stark compare three common cooling and heating systems to see which has the lowest impact over a 60-year lifetime