Green Gown Awards – 2014 – Construction and Refurbishment

Construction and Refurbishment

This category recognises new or refurbished buildings or student residences in tertiary education which have good energy and environmental performance. As such buildings sometimes fail to perform to their design specifications, quantitative evidence of actual performance in practice, and ideally of a post occupancy evaluation to identify problems and means of improving them, will be given special weight in judging.

Applications featuring refurbished buildings are especially welcomed, and the difficulties of achieving similar levels of performance to new build will be taken into account in the judging process. Please note that judges will look especially favourably at entries which go beyond regulations or planning conditions which would have to be met anyway.

There is much evidence that the energy and environmental design specifications of buildings are often not achieved in practice. Hence, the judges for this category will put considerable weight on data which shows that this has happened. Please describe the provenance and reliability of data used for this purpose (e.g. actual metered data from X sites within the building). Details and outcomes of any commissioning, quality control and post occupancy evaluation activities which occurred will also be of interest. Information about problems identified, and responses made, will be seen as a positive commitment to improvement rather than being penalised by the judges (provided that they do not undermine the entire rationale of the application!). All data within the application should use metric units wherever feasible. Normalised figures per square metre of gross floor space should be provided for capital and relevant operating costs (e.g. energy consumption). Capital costs should also be broken down as much as possible (e.g. build, fitting-out, plant, and fee costs) to enable detailed comparisons between applications.