Have you ever wondered why cracks occur? Often unsightly, anyone involved in owning, occupying, designing, constructing or maintaining buildings have dealt with buildings cracks. In most artefacts a crack indicates that the item has failed – or will do so shortly, no matter whether that item is a turbine blade or a teacup handle – and that … Continue reading “The science behind cracks in buildings”
Transport is both a problem and a solution for some of society’s biggest challenges including climate change, rising chronic diseases and growing healthcare expenditure. It was implicated in 3.7 million deaths from ambient air pollution in 2012 and annually results in 1.3 million deaths from road crashes.(1,2) Transportation infrastructure is also a major contributor to … Continue reading “Healthy places through urban transport”
False alarms have been reported to cost the country up to £1 billion per year, due largely to the disruption and loss of productivity in businesses. There is no single organisation responsible for the investigation of false alarms or providing guidance on reducing them. This lack of objective data has meant little analysis has been … Continue reading “Live investigations of false fire alarms”
The global trend of urbanisation poses opportunities and challenges for city leaders. Rapidly growing cities will need to build infrastructure and services which support people to access jobs and education. Leading cities will provide a good quality of life to residents and achieve success in the global marketplace by creating resilient, sustainable and healthy urban … Continue reading “Growing Cities Sustainably”
I almost guarantee that if you are reading this, you are in some form of built environment setting. This is quite a safe assumption as the buildings we work and live in, landscaped outdoor environments we spend our time in and even the methods of transport we use, all count as elements of the built … Continue reading “Qualitative Research and the Built Environment”
A review of the Building 16 project at BRE by Andrew Williams (BRE), Al-Azhar Lalani (University of Hertfordshire), Emilio Mistretta (University of Hertfordshire) and Johann Siau (University of Hertfordshire) Introduction Background – The future of electricity The B16 project System control Summary Acknowledgements References 1.0 Introduction This paper provides a brief overview of an experimental … Continue reading “Developing System Intelligence for Optimising Building Electricity Networks”
Right team, we are starting a really exciting project wouldn’t it be great to get some feedback from potential users of our product? I know, let’s do a survey! Oh look, Wikihow, how to create a survey in 14 steps…with pictures?! Jackpot! Bish, bash, bosh, survey created and sent. Recognise the above? We do! This … Continue reading “BRE Social Research Team – Getting the value from your questionnaire”
A great video from the archives, provided by Keith Snook of BRE (and CPIC Committee member). The video comes from CPIC, who started as the Building Project Information Committee (BPIC) in 1987 led by RIBA, RICS, ACE, CIBSE and ICE. BPIC succeeded the Co-ordinating Committee for Project Information (CCPI) which had been established to provide … Continue reading “#ThrowbackThursday: #BIM and Better Project Information”
The Home Quality Mark is the new national quality mark for sustainable homes being developed by BRE and a group of industry partners. Part of the development of the new scheme involved a series of consumer research projects, designed to understand whether consumers cared about living in a more sustainable home. In the first of … Continue reading “Do consumers want a more sustainable home?”
Report from Andrew Williams on the Future of Electricity in Domestic Buildings Almost every day we hear about the lights going out in the next few winters; what’s actually going on with electricity? There is little doubt that over the next five years scenarios prepared by National Grid indicate that the headroom between supply and … Continue reading “Report from Andrew Williams on the Future of Electricity in Domestic Buildings Electricity, what is all the fuss about?”
