Integrated building performance evaluation at Burntwood School 17.02.22

A group of academics including AHMM’s head of sustainability Dr Craig Robertson has won the CIBSE Barker Silver Medal for a paper on an integrated building performance evaluation of Burntwood School. The Barker Silver Medal is awarded for the most cited and impactful paper published in the Building Services Research and Technology (BSER&T) Journal each year.

Titled ‘Balancing energy and indoor environmental quality in a UK school’, the paper was published in BSER&T in 2020. It was authored by a multi-disciplinary team of researchers in energy, thermal comfort, indoor air quality, lighting, and acoustics at UCL’s Institute for Environmental Design and Engineering: Dr Nishesh Jain (lead author), Dr Esfand Burman, Dr Craig Robertson, Dr Samuel Stamp, Dr Clive Shrubsole, Dr Francesco Aletta, Dr Edward Barrett, Dr Tin Oberman, Prof Jian Kang, Prof Peter Raynham, Prof Dejan Mumovic and Prof Mike Davies.

The paper reported on a holistic building performance evaluation of Burntwood as a recently built school campus in London. It assessed the performance issues and inter-relationships between energy and Indoor Environment Quality (IEQ). Analysing metering and monitoring data along with feedback from the stakeholders, the study showed that if building design focuses primarily on energy, it may lead to unintended consequences for IEQ. An integrated design approach to energy and environmental performance is required to balance the intricate, and sometimes conflicting, relation between these performance objectives.

Burntwood School won the RIBA Stirling Prize in 2015. Working with UCL to understand the performance of such an important building has proved to be invaluable; the work has provided AHMM with lessons that can be applied across all future projects in design, construction and use, as well as the basis for future research.