Timber Buildings: Designing for Performance

Join us to hear why we need to design buildings that perform. What that performance needs to be. How to specify and deliver timber buildings to the Passive house standard so that they are people and planet friendly.

This evening’s event is the eighth in a series of webinars that will run alongside the Timber Development UK’s University Design Challenge to inform participants and the wider industry. They are recorded and uploaded to our YouTube channel.

These webinars are open to students, graduates, professionals and the industry.

Timings

Timber Buildings: Designing for Performance

Thursday 10 February 18.30 to 20.00

18.30 – TDChallenge22 – Yogini Patel, Passivhaus Trust

18.35 – Anna Carton, PH Homes: Passivhaus & the design tools

18.50 - Florence Collier, humblebee: Details: Airtightness/ Thermal bridging/ Services

19.05 - Polly Upton, Architype: Timber and Passivhaus - case studies

19.20 - Panel round up of essentials when designing for Passivhaus with timber

19.30 - 20 min Q&A

Meet our speakers

Anna Carton

Designer and chartered architectural technologist at Passivhaus Homes Ltd, Anna started her career in interior design before moving to low energy retrofit and Passivhaus over a decade ago. Her cross disciplinary experience shapes her belief that how a building looks is inseparable from how a building performs and each are equally important to good design.

Anna sees the Passivhaus standard and the use of natural materials as the only currently proven means for providing healthy, affordable, zero carbon homes. She has contributed to numerous successful Passivhaus schemes in the UK and has presented at the Passivhaus Conference and UCL on low-energy housing.

Connect with Anna on LinkedIn and follow PH Homes on Twitter

Florence Collier

Florence is a mechanical services engineer by training, during her time at Arup she advised architects and clients on how to reduce energy demand in buildings and at a larger scale masterplan level, how to use energy efficiently in the buildings themselves (all sectors) and renewable technologies, as well as broader aspects of sustainability, such as wellbeing, social value, acoustics, water conservation and green infrastructure, for example – whether through recognized protocols such as LEED, BREEAM and WELL, or using a holistic design approach.

She is deeply passionate about closing the “performance gap”, the difference between the actual performance of a building in operation compared with the designer’s intended modus operandi, as has been highlighted through Post Occupancy Evaluations on many of our past projects.

Which is why she is also a certified Passivhaus designer, the only comfort and energy standard with a proven track record of reducing energy consumption in buildings by 70-90%. She is also keen to implement circular economy principles and generally to make construction a more pleasant environment to work in.

She left a large company environment because she wanted to have a more immediate an impact on the quality of home and workspace building locally.

And set up my own consultancy in order to be truly agile, to balance work and home life more effectively, and to work with a more diverse group of people, through connecting with other SMEs and community groups.

She is an active member of my Transition Town volunteer group (carrying out thermal imaging surveys locally among other community activities) and a STEM ambassador. She’s volunteered for the Prince’s Trust and local Real Junk Food Project.

And is part of The Positive+ Collective – a collaboration between changebuilding, humblebee and Perpendicular Architecture.

Connect with Florence on LinkedIn or visit her at humblebee or Twitter

Polly Upton

is a senior architect with a passion for sustainable design. Since joining Architype in 2007, she has developed a specialism in renovation and ecological retrofit of complex heritage environments.

Her work spans a wide variety of commissions at differing scales including small one-off houses, large multi-unit housing projects to schools, hotels, archives, museums and visitor centres. As a member of Architype’s PERFORM+ environmental consultancy team, she brings a focus on evidence-led design, understanding the requirements of a high-performing building implicitly.

Polly completed an MSc in Sustainable Building Conservation in 2018 which has led to her leading a series of renovation and environmentally-conscious projects across Grade 1 and 2 listed buildings, as well as world-heritage and sensitive historic sites around the UK. She has also recently completed her own self-build Passivhaus, exploring natural materials including a timber frame and concrete-free foundations.

Connect with Polly on Linkedin or at Architype

Yogini Patel

Head of campaigns and comms at the Passivhaus Trust

The Competition | Southside Hereford: University Design Challenge

This challenge is open to multidisciplinary teams of between 4-8 who are studying a Built Environment course at a UK university or who graduated in 2021. Register as an individual participant and either form your own team or we will help you to create and join a team. Details here.

“Hereford aspires to be one of the greenest and fairest cities in the country, with fantastic opportunities and quality of life for people of all ages. Deeply rooted in our unique rural heritage, we’re blossoming into a richly creative, digital, connected, and highly-skilled place to live, work study, invest, and visit.”

The stakeholders, your clients in this competition, have set out their requirements and needs for Southside Hereford which is to be a physical building to provide a vibrant, inspiring and inclusive sports, food and skills community focal point for the people of South Wye. Via the Stronger Towns Fund they have secured capital to build a community centre.

Participating teams must produce designs that sites the community centre within the local context and landscape, integrating the client's and community's interests.

The detailed designs must be ‘net zero’, creatively employing sustainable building materials and construction methods, and be energy and resource efficient, focusing on the health and well-being of people, the community, and our planet. Designed for longevity, adaptability, circularity and a warming climate and producing more energy than it requires, MMC and DfMA should be explored.

The main material focus and specification for the centre will be timber and timber hybrid systems. Your team's detailed design for the building will meet the Passivhaus Standard and exceed the RIBA 2030 Climate Challenge targets and LETI Climate Emergency Design Guide metrics.

To aid our participants each team will be provided with software from our supporters – AECB CO2 Calculator, desighPH and PHPP from iPHA and Trimble SketchUp

Sponsors:

We would like to extend our thanks to our supporters and sponsors

Transforming Timber | PEFC UK | TDCA | Stora Enso | Passivhaus Homes | Accoya | Wood for Good | Rothoblaas | Ufi VocTech Trust

Timber Development UK is organising the University Challenge in partnership with Edinburgh Napier University, New Model Institute of Technology and Engineering (NMITE), and the Passivhaus Trust.