This week we're going by Joseph Little , Head of Construction & Building Performance in the School of Architecture, Building and Environment at TU Dublin. He joined us to talk about the journey he's been on leading the MSc in Building Performance over the last seven years, but we got into a lot more. Joseph has been deeply involved in the promotion of better building standards by measuring the performance of buildings for years. Not least with the five Breaking the Mould articles he wrote th...
Jun 04, 2024•1 hr 23 min•Ep. 154
This week we're thinking about retrofit differently with Dan Hill from Dark Matter Labs (DML). Or rather, we're talking about retrofit's potential to become a movement for social change. In reality, retrofit is about much more than fabric and economics, it's about people and how they live. With that in mind we should be thinking much more about engagement. This is itself a massive challenge because thinking about people properly, as the users of a building, requires a massive shift in how retrof...
May 27, 2024•1 hr 13 min•Ep. 153
This week we're joined by Iva Merheim Eyre from SMARTER4EU to talk about her recently published report the Catalogue of Good Practices , a document that details a variety of place-based hybrid finance models that have been used to rebuild and renovate homes in locations as wide-ranging as the postwar Balkan states to London's own Westminster. This is all part of a concerted effort to use finance to drive better building standards across the world, not just the EU, and there's a lot we can all le...
May 20, 2024•1 hr 11 min•Ep. 152
Jeff and Dan are joined by Dr. Peter Rickaby again. We were due a catch up so we recorded the conversation because he's always interesting. Peter should need little introduction, so we'll just say he's our favourite retrofit expert (sorry everyone else) and our most frequent guest on the show. He's only returned to the pod, not to the UK. In principle he's migrated to South Africa and is supposed to be retiring, but that's not exactly worked out so far. He has made it to Johannesburg though. Bu,...
May 13, 2024•1 hr 21 min•Ep. 151
This week we're joined by Nesta's Deputy Mission Director, Andrew Sissons, to discuss his take on why the UK has such a weird relationship with heat pumps. It was inspired by an excellent Twitter thread on the subject that gained quite a bit of attention the other week. We talk through it all so you might as well listen, or just take a look at the thread, either way it should be interesting. Notes from the show Andrew Sissons on LinkedIn Nesta's website The Twitter thread: Why have heat pumps be...
May 06, 2024•1 hr 21 min•Ep. 150
The other week we had a chance to have a conversation with Cypren Edmunds, President of the European Straw Building Association about building with straw, experiences in retrofit, and the meandering path that led him to the green building trade. For us, it was a really interesting chat because we got to talk about how he got into greed building via sport, the music industry, and playing an active role in his community. The wasn't a built environment professional embarking on a curious diversion ...
Apr 29, 2024•1 hr 17 min•Ep. 149
The Recast Energy Performance of Buildings Directive is now enshrined in EU law, which has big implications for the built environment everywhere. Even the South East of England. To mark the occasion and get the lowdown on what this all means, we invited friend of the show Ciarán Cuffe back on to talk about it. For those who might not remember, he's the Irish Green Party MEP and Rapporteur to the EU who has been deeply involved in driving it through. And, as a qualified planner and architect he's...
Apr 22, 2024•51 min•Ep. 148
Kate Crawford is a building nerd who is obsessed with measuring performance. She's currently, Technical Director at KLH Sustainability , a multidisciplinary consultancy working in the built environment. Kate has a very interesting background in terms of her experience and she's now working on a very fascinating project in which she's researching and developing a "Smart Meter Enabled Thermal Energy Rating (SMETER)" system that uses a new approach to measuring building performance and a different ...
Apr 15, 2024•1 hr 17 min•Ep. 147
This week we're talking about modular construction and Natural Building Systems with MD Chloe Donovan . Chloe is a really interesting character with a fascinating product that she's bringing to market. Unusually, she's a farmer who got into building and then found herself as an entrepreneur in the febrile world of modular building and MMC. We talk about all sorts, from the challenges of propagating a biogenic supply chain to the ever-contentious subject of calculating embodied carbon, and a litt...
Apr 08, 2024•1 hr 13 min•Ep. 146
Up next we're speaking with Falk Bleyl , CTO at Utopi , about their sensor-based data platform technology. He describes it as an ESG platform which is true but it massively underplays the true value of what their product offers. Heads up, normally, we'll at least try to couch the conversation within a broader context but in this episode, we've barely bothered. We were content just to talk about the product, how it's deployed, and its impact precisely because the value it offers addresses things ...
Apr 01, 2024•1 hr 20 min•Ep. 145
Lloyd has been in Paris. He came back very enthused and excited by his experience there and wanted to communicate why to our listeners. “In the face of the climate emergency, a swift transition of the buildings sector is a direct requirement to achieve the goals set by the Paris Agreement”. Approximately, 1,400 people from 70 countries gathered in Paris for the Buildings and Climate Global Forum and the Declaration de Chaillot was the result Lloyd Alter , Will Arnold , and Kelly Alvarez Doran we...
Mar 26, 2024•1 hr 16 min•Ep. 144
This week we got into an area of retrofit that feels neglected: commercial space. It's a subject we definitely touch upon but never really get into , so in order to remedy that we're getting stuck in. First up is a conversation with architects Harry Browne and Séamus Guidera of RKD Dublin who came recommended to us by friend of the show Richard O'Hegarty . In a sector less driven by traditional sustainability issues, and more driven by hardcore commercial issues, it seemed right to start by spea...
Mar 19, 2024•1 hr 20 min•Ep. 143
We are delighted to bring you a conversation with Professor Emeritus Susan Roaf , of Heriot-Watt University this week to talk about a bunch of fundamental problems in building design and the management of thermal comfort. She is a wonderful guest and we're looking forward to having her back. Originally, we planned to talk about her article COP 28: Net zero buildings by 2050? You have got to be joking! a well-judged critique of the outcomes at the most recent COP but we meandered a bit more than ...
Mar 12, 2024•1 hr 33 min•Ep. 142
This week we're joined by Nigel Banks , Technical Director - Zero Bills & Low Carbon Homes at Octopus Energy . Nigel joined us to discuss his recent article: Fabric Fifth , a slightly polemical riposte to fabric-first dogma, and an interesting philosophy for retrofit. As it turned out, it’s an apposite follow-up to last week's episode with Fionn Stevenson. Fabric Fifth - Nigel Banks ASHPs ASAP Get Smart Measure & get comfy Solar & Storage Fabric Fifth We also touch on Octopus's zero-...
Mar 05, 2024•1 hr 10 min•Ep. 141
We were blessed to enjoy a great conversation about retrofit and what we should consider our priorities, with the vastly experienced retrofit firebrand Fionn Stevenson . It was a challenging, surprising, and free-wheeling conversation spurred by a call to action she made on LinkedIn some time ago, in which she decried fabric-first approaches and declared: "We need to tackle low hanging fruit first". That post we're referring to : "This is why " fabric first" as a blanket approach to retrofit is ...
Feb 27, 2024•1 hr 28 min•Ep. 140
We enjoyed the company of Ecomerchant’s Will Kirkm an a business that's specialised in sustainable and natural building materials for the building trade and consumers. We mainly rambled our way around the culture of building in the UK, how embodied carbon has always been on the Ecomerchant agenda and the impact that sustainable and natural building materials have on the buildings they make and the people who occupy them. Notes from the show Will on LinkedIn The Ecomerchant website The We Build E...
Feb 20, 2024•1 hr 16 min•Ep. 139
This week is all about the challenges of low-impact building in the sphere of self build with Tara Fraser , a chartered civil and structural engineer, and a director of Build Collective in Bristol. On the recommendation of former guest (and Tara's colleague) Beth Williams , we recently had a chat with her about a self-build project she worked on that should find itself into the pages of Passive House Plus magazine, and we thought it’d be interesting to explore it, and a few broader themes, for t...
Feb 13, 2024•1 hr•Ep. 138
Part two of our series on shading, this time with a return appearance from Tom Dollard of Pollard Thomas Edwards who joined us in January 2023 to talk about lazy thinking . Ostensibly, this time we met to talk about the Good Homes Alliance design guide for shading, as a follow-up to December's episode with Zoe De Grussa . On reflection we realised that the guide does a good enough job without us disecting it, so we spent more time discussing why such a guide is necessary, how the industry needs ...
Feb 06, 2024•1 hr 29 min•Ep. 137
With us this week is new friend, Kelly Alvarez Doran, via an introduction from Lloyd to talk about his experiences at COP28 and his carbon reduction consultancy Ha/f Climate Design that's challenged itself to reduce Canadian construction's emissions by half. We get sidetracked almost immediately while we talk about Kelly's background as an architect, working in mining, and the big changes to philosophy on building after working in Rwanda. In spite of the early diversion, we spent the whole conve...
Jan 30, 2024•1 hr 22 min•Ep. 136
This one is about conservation-led retrofit and the retrofit of commercial (or institutional) building stock. We were invited to see a recent Iarnród Éireann (Irish Railway) retrofit project and meet with Heidi Hopper-Duffy (Environmental & Sustainability Manager) and its architect David Hughes (Senior Conservation Architect & Energy Specialist). Ostensibly, we're talking about energy efficiency and conservation of built heritage. The project was led by David, a retrofit of a historic bu...
Jan 23, 2024•58 min•Ep. 135
The first of our Dublin field recordings is with Archie O'Donnell a long-time face green building in Ireland, a fella who Jeff has a lot of time for, and someone Alex and I hadn't met yet. It was a good call. Originally trained as an architect, Archie has worked his way through the industry, recently joining Danish/Irish consultancy KOSMOS , so there was plenty of scope for the conversation to meander from observations on how the green building industry has changed and is changing, to costing su...
Jan 16, 2024•58 min•Ep. 134
This week we have Lloyd's latest Passive House Plus Revisited, a conversation with passive house heads Alan Clarke and Nick Grant about the passive house archive project that left Lloyd so smitten when he visited it last summer. That we’re discussing archive systems shouldn’t put folk off - the point is about thinking differently, about what the challenge really is, recognising the reality of systems, the elevation of simplicity, and reclaiming the phrase “value engineering”. Notes from the show...
Jan 10, 2024•56 min•Ep. 133
Happy new year! This week's episode brings you a conversation with Ethan Wadsworth of DiscreteHeat the manufacturers of our new favourite energy efficient (non-radiator and non underfloor) based heating system ThermaSkirt . We're not there to bang on about a product we like, what we found interesting about this one is that it’s an overnight, award-winning success that took fifteen years to bring to fruition. This means that our conversation is mainly about what’s changed in the heating and build...
Jan 02, 2024•1 hr 9 min•Ep. 132
Happy post-Christmas day, hope you made it through OK. Today we have part two of the latest Passive House Plus revisited, looking at Lloyd Alter's favourite article of 2021: Seeing the wood for the trees - Placing ecology at the heart of construction . Again, we're joined by authors Lenny Antonelli and Andy Simmonds talking about mass timber, embodied carbon, why we should just use less and, unexpectedly, the place of AI. It turned out to be an extra long one but it felt deserving of the space, ...
Dec 26, 2023•59 min•Ep. 131
Merry Christmas! This week we have a Passive House Plus revisited two-parter for you, led by our occasional co-host Lloyd Alter, looking at his favourite article of 2021: Seeing the wood for the trees - Placing ecology at the heart of construction . We're joined by authors Lenny Antonelli and Andy Simmonds and the conversation wheels around, covering the place of mass timber as a solution to construction's problems, embodied carbon, why we should just use less, and why it's so hard to use less, ...
Dec 25, 2023•1 hr 5 min•Ep. 130
It's all about shading, overheating, and solar gain with Zoe De Grussa this week. She's the author of that infamous Camden overheating case study that Jeff always references and, at the time of writing, is technical and sustainability consultant at the British Blind and Shutter Association (BBSA). We cover Camden, but perhaps more interesting is the conversation around the difficulties in modeling shading, and the consequent difficulty in communicating its value to a project. Despite shading mea...
Dec 19, 2023•1 hr 17 min•Ep. 129
We are joined by Loreana Padron to talk about what it is that a Head of Sustainability does and, more broadly, the value of post-occupancy evaluation (POE) to all the stakeholders in a retrofit project. Loreana tells us about the path she's taken to becoming Head of Sustainability at Architecture firm ECD , a leading sustainability-focused practice, and we take some time to revisit the Wilmcote House project which we featured way back in 2021. This time, we're more focused on the POE aspect, in ...
Dec 12, 2023•1 hr 18 min•Ep. 128
Today we're talking about standards. In short, it's about how standards are written and why retrofit shouldn’t just be about products or carbon. It's never short with us though, is it? We're sure that all of our listeners will have complained about PAS2035/2030 at some point, admiring its ambition while lamenting its restrictions. We've all certainly wondered how they come to be like that too. So, we thought we'd have a go at humanising the UK's most prominent retrofit specification and guidance...
Dec 05, 2023•1 hr 19 min•Ep. 127
We invited Tania Jennings back. Most folk in the retrofit or social housing space will probably be aware of Tania from LinkedIn and the myriad jobs she has. If you don’t know her yet, check her LinkedIn . Anyway, she wrote a thing for Architect’s Journal about fuel poverty, Covid, and inevitably retrofit and it was excellent. It sparked a conversation about why we’re barely making a dent in resolving the massive pile of retrofit problems in front of us, one that seemed ripe for the podcast, so w...
Nov 28, 2023•1 hr 21 min•Ep. 126
If you fancy, you can settle in for a long one this week, in which Jeff and Dan speak with award-winning Canadian architect and passive house designer Cedric Burgers . We cover all sorts because he has led a pretty interesting life and he has a lot to say about sustainable building design, particularly his love for passive house as a philosophy, the drivers of change in favour of sustainable design, and the experiences and people that have influenced him. It's long but there's a lot in there and...
Nov 21, 2023•1 hr 20 min•Ep. 125
