Have You Really Followed Best Practice?
If all we’re doing is sticking to traditional design practices, we’re simply locking the future to the past.
It’s time to think bigger.
The future of building design is performance-driven. In this series of posts, I’ll be diving into the key findings of CIBSE’s Building Performance Reimagined to illustrate the changes we need to make today to create the cities and spaces we’ll need by 2050—spaces that work for us, the environment, and yes, the bottom line.
Building performance isn’t just the future of building services engineering; it’s the foundation of high-value, future-ready real estate.
These are the key pillars of performance design:
⏩ Health and resilience as core value drivers
⏩Connectedness to local infrastructure, context, and community
⏩Emergence of new materials, uses, and ideas
⏩Variety in spaces, uses, and influences
⏩Readiness for changing conditions and threats
In this post, we start with variety—a concept that drives the flexibility and adaptability of spaces, uses, and influences.
Healthy, resilient ecosystems reject sameness, leveraging diversity to their advantage. So, how do we optimize spaces for variety?
The future of building design lies in creating spaces that can adapt and grow, serving multiple functions over time.
Here’s how:
▶ Modular and adaptable services will allow buildings to evolve with changing needs.
▶ Interdisciplinary collaboration between traditional engineering and ecological expertise will be key.
▶ Building designs need to integrate and maintain new technologies while still being flexible.
▶ A growing community of user-centric design specialists will ensure occupants can manually and digitally adapt their spaces.
And why does this matter?
Gentrified, homogeneous luxury spaces might make a short-term financial impact, but they don’t foster long-term value or create places people want to live in.
Single-use buildings with limited functionality simply don’t appreciate over time.
As we move forward, we must innovate in design and performance, equipping buildings—and their users—to thrive in a variety of environments.
"Instead of relying on large-scale, centralized systems, we should consider equipping occupants to adapt their own microenvironments. This may not look like high-tech interventions, but rather the reimagination of traditional techniques in the built environment."
Let’s think bigger. Elevation Carbon is here to lead the way.
