Sustainability
Environmental decisions are made in the drawings, early, where they are still cheap to change — not added at the end as a specification.
The greenest building is usually the one that is already standing.
The second greenest is the one nobody needs to rebuild in twenty years. Most of what follows is about those two sentences, applied at the point in a project where the answer still costs nothing to change.
Principles
Material responsibility
What a building is made of is decided early and is expensive to revisit. Material choices are set against embodied impact, provenance and repairability at concept stage, not at specification stage.
Passive design
Orientation, mass, aperture and shading do most of the work before any system is specified. A building that stays comfortable without help is the cheapest one to run and the easiest one to maintain.
Local context
Climate, labour, supply chain and building culture differ by region, and a detail that performs in one place can fail in another. Specification follows what can actually be built and maintained locally.
Energy
Demand is reduced before supply is designed. Fabric performance, airtightness and thermal bridging are resolved in the drawings rather than corrected by plant.
Water
Rainwater, greywater and surface run-off are treated as part of the landscape design rather than as a drainage afterthought.
Adaptive reuse
The most sustainable structure is usually the one already standing. Existing fabric is surveyed and tested for reuse before demolition is considered.
Responsible construction
Waste, noise, dust and site working conditions are a design responsibility. Prefabrication and dry construction are used where they measurably reduce site impact.
Long-term thinking
Buildings outlive their briefs. Structure, servicing and finishes are separated so that each can be changed on its own timescale without dismantling the others.
A note on what is not here
There are no percentages, ratings or certifications on this page. A sustainability claim is only worth making if it can be evidenced, and the studio has not yet supplied that evidence. Placeholder numbers here would be greenwashing with extra steps.