While digital visualisation offers incredible speed and detail, it is crucial to ensure early-stage designs remain flexible and collaborative, rather than overly polished.. 5.
Of course, technology has pushed these boundaries to some degree and there are now large process plants like refineries or mega-factories..The railway system of the world is scaled around the size of a horse and cart as that was the predominant transport technology when they came into existence.. Moving down in scale, we scale craft and industrial laboratory equipment so that humans can interact with it using their hands.. Evolution is an excellent process to improve and adapt size and function to meet the demands of survival.
Its downside for humans is that in the context of the human lifespan it is very slow.We do not have the luxury of a million years to size our factories.However, neither should we now be constrained by the size of a human, a building or by the relatively recent economic dogma..
I don’t think we can credibly argue that capitalism has not been a key enabler in the rapid technological advancements of the last two to three hundred years.And when we talk about capitalism, we cannot ignore the name Adam Smith.
The problem I have with the way we’ve taken Smith’s thoughts and works is that it is piecemeal and skewed – we’ve latched onto some of his insights without exploring them more widely.
He was one of the first theorists to develop the idea of the economy of scale.In order to enable timber to be continuously reused, the building should be designed for deconstruction.
Most Passivhaus buildings have not been designed for deconstruction in part due the complexity of junctions and the need to achieve the required overlapping and airtightness.This is however possible with the implementation of DfMA which can design assemblies that meet the stringent envelope performance requirements and can also be disassembled..
Passivhaus is a sustainable building certification standard that reduces operational energy and carbon emissions with minimum performance gap and achieves high levels of thermal comfort and air quality.. Bryden Wood’s P-DfMA approach to building design offers multiple synergies with Passivhaus since it is able to reduce construction programme, cost and design/construction complexity, and labour skills which are some of the inherent challenges of adopting Passivhaus.. Whilst the Passivhaus approach is focused on operational energy/carbon, there has been a keen interest in the industry to understand if this standard favours or penalises embodied carbon.Bryden Wood’s analysis shows that the impact of the adoption of a Passivhaus system has a minimum impact in terms of embodied carbon.. To learn more about our Design to Value approach to design and construction, sign up for our monthly newsletter here:.
(Editor: Popular Adapters)