Two CIBSE building performance award wins

Buro Happold has been honoured with two Chartered Institute of Building Services Engineers (CIBSE) awards.

Now in their twelfth year, the CIBSE awards recognise the teams, products, innovations, initiatives and projects that demonstrate engineering excellence in the built environment. On the evening of 12 February, over 750 industry professionals attended an awards dinner in central London to discover who would triumph across 14 keenly contested categories.

Buro Happold retained the coveted title of “Building Performance Consultancy of the Year (over 300 employees)”. We were also delighted to pick up “Project of the Year – Public Use” for the Newcastle University Urban Sciences Building. Designed with Hawkins\Brown architects, the building was also shortlisted for the “Collaborative Working Partnership” award.

Elsewhere we twice made the shortlist in the “International Project of the Year” category. The projects recognised here were Hillman Hall – a research and teaching building at Washington University in St Louis, USA – and UC Santa Barbara San Joaquin Villages, California, USA. Mark Dowson, an associate in our sustainability team, was shortlisted for the “Building Performance Engineer of the Year”.

Dr Sarah Prichard, Buro Happold’s UK Buildings Managing Director, delivered the night’s keynote speech on the importance of building performance.

Building Performance Consultancy (over 300 employees)
Winner: Buro Happold

A repeat victory in this category acknowledges the great work that all of our people do throughout every one of our projects. This is a fantastic achievement for the business.

Buro Happold continues to impress by continuously seeking to advance what we can offer our clients. To improve building performance, we have developed and applied a number of innovative tools and techniques across the project life cycle. We are also developing a global dashboard for capturing modelled, predicted and measured data.

As an industry we have neglected the measurement of how buildings actually perform (in terms of energy, wellbeing and environmental control). We have invested heavily in developing an analytics platform so that actual performance can be captured on simple integrated dashboards turning data to insights that change user behaviour.

We are extremely proud to have been recognised for the second year running as leaders in this field.

Andy Keelin, Partner and Global Commercial Sector Leader , Buro Happold

This promises to be an exciting year for the practice. We are signing up as a partner to the Better Building Partnership’s “Design for Performance” initiative, which requires building performance targets to be set on all projects. Illustrating our commitment to ‘walk the talk’ with clients, we have integrated all of our UK office energy data onto the Fabriq third-party management platform. We will also be launching our Asset Performance & Diagnostics offering, which focuses upon delivering scalable, portfolio-wide building performance assessments and healthy building studies.

The way we design and predict  performance continues to evolve as computational tools become ever more sophisticated. At the same time the industry is also waking up to the actual measurement of that performance in terms of energy, wellbeing and environmental control. We have invested heavily in analytics so that actual performance can be captured on simple integrated dashboards  in a way that changes behaviour. We are extremely proud to have been recognised for the second year running as leaders in this field.

Andy Keelin, Partner and Global Commercial Sector Leader, Buro Happold

Project of the Year – Public Use
Winner: Urban Sciences Building, Newcastle University – Buro Happold

The Urban Sciences Building at Newcastle University is a state-of-the-art teaching facility that sets a new benchmark for campus design by achieving a balance of sustainability, space flexibility and operational efficiency.