Building Performance Champion
Buro Happold was named overall winner at the CIBSE Building Performance Awards, after claiming three of the 14 award categories.
Winner: Buro Happold
The engineering consultancy – which won Consultancy of the Year (over 300 employees) – was praised by the judges for taking ‘a holistic view of building performance that draws back into wider sustainability views’, and for going ‘beyond the standard engineering offer’.
This was evident in The House at Cornell Tech, which won Project of the Year – Public Use for Buro Happold. The judges called it an exemplar for future-proofed multifamily residential design, and were impressed with how future-proofing was built into the fabric of the building, not just its technology.
The 26-storey House was the world’s tallest and largest Passivhaus-certified project at the time of its construction, and – according to the BPA judges – it ‘delivers Passivhaus on a large scale, which ties in social aspects and lessons learned from the building performance to educate occupants’.
Such learning from projects and knowledge transfer are further reasons Buro Happold carried off so many BPA accolades. Its staff training and continual development were described as comprehensive by the judges, who were also impressed by the consultancy’s numerous collaborations.
One such effort, working with University College London (UCL) on its post-project review guidelines, helped Buro Happold win the Learning and Development Award.
This client-led collaboration aims to help demonstrate UCL’s buildings perform as intended and shows clear impact and tangible outcomes. The judges were also impressed by the initiative’s well thought through approach to post-occupancy evaluation, and the standardisation and clear application of a difficult process.
In short, the BPA judges felt that Buro Happold’s willingness to champion sustainability, work with others and learn from projects makes it a worthy overall winner, and a ‘company that our industry should be aspiring to be’.
Buro Happold have shown clear leadership and demonstrated how to both deliver low carbon buildings at scale and reduce the impact of existing buildings, which remains a huge challenge across the building stock.