Low Carbon Built Environment (LCBE) team wins Building Performance Champion at 2023 CIBSE Awards

Welsh School of Architecture’s Low Carbon Built Environment (LCBE) team took the most prestigious award of the evening, as well as two further awards for Best Collaboration and Domestic Project of the Year, beating submissions by multinational engineering consultancies and fellow top-ranked Universities.

Since its inception, the Welsh School of Architecture has been no stranger to receiving praise and accolades for it’s exceptional work in design at every level; from Readers and Fellows to current students.

However, the bestowing of Chartered Institution of Building Services Engineers (CIBSE) honours is especially significant, even for WSA, as awards are made not only for performance specifications or for exquisite conceptualisation of a design, but for measured performance markers indicating demonstrable impact.

The LCBE project, led by Professor Jo Patterson, looks to reduce carbon in the built environment through the delivery of low carbon planning, design,  implementation and monitoring of whole house energy systems. This not only accelerates progress to Net Zero, but also significantly improves housing conditions and energy costs for residents.

Judges called the 2023 Building Performance Champion ‘an exemplar project, demonstrating true collaboration with multiple stakeholders on a challenging retrofit’. The LCBE Team at the Welsh School of Architecture has been collaborating with Wales and West Housing (WWH) for several years, and has developed deep retrofits on more than 30  Welsh homes using whole-house energy systems.

Each home was occupied and used differently by residents with varying levels of maintenance and heating systems. An initial period of monitoring helped the project team to understand each home’s use and diagnose existing performance issues. To maximise performance of the proposed systems, the team collaborated with the residents throughout the design and installation stages.

The whole-house energy systems approach aims to reduce energy consumption, fuel bills and carbon, by combining energy-reduction measures such as building insulation with technologies such as photovoltaics, heat pumps and batteries. Systems have been designed for a diverse range of homes of all ages, including hard-to-treat solid wall construction and modern cavity wall homes, with building monitoring continuing post-retrofit to evaluate the performance. Local supply chains were used wherever possible.

The LCBE team’s vision is to to provide evidence to inspire whole house retrofitting across the UK and beyond.

So impressed were the judges by the partnership between the LCBE team and WWH, which used extensive monitoring to improve later retrofits, that they named the partnership 'Best Collaboration’ and Building Performance Champion. Judges praised how the team responded to the individual needs of each home and its residents, using first-class data analysis to improve the homes and ensure high-quality commissioning and diagnosis of any performance gaps. The project was commended for its effective use of the skills of the participating academics from the University.

Championing design that is future-facing and human-centred combined with sharing knowledge with local housing providers and the supply chain to successfully deliver multiple demonstration projects, is precisely why WSA has exceeded their competition to receive this award, even ahead of multi-national industry consultancies and top-ranked University departments and consortia.

Entries for the CIBSE Awards are open to any organisation, both within the UK and internationally, that is responsible for the design, commissioning, construction, installation and operation of low carbon buildings and the manufacturers whose products enable efficient energy consumption.

Congratulations are extended to the staff involved in this project, whose willingness to meet the challenges of compassionate, impactful and adaptable building ensure that Cardiff’s WSA will continue to lead the industry from the front into a resilient, low-carbon future.

The LCBE project is part of SPECIFIC Innovation and Knowledge Centre, which is led by Swansea University and part-funded by the European Regional Development Fund through the Welsh Government, and EPSRC.