The case for Centres of Excellence in sustainable building design

Centres of Excellence
For the last six years The Royal Academy of Engineering has been operating a
highly successful scheme placing Visiting Professors in Building Engineering
Physics into some of the UKs top universities for architecture and engineering.
This scheme, summarised in Engineering a Low Carbon Built Environment [King,
2010], has helped host universities develop a new degree course in architectural
engineering; deliver enhanced teaching in design and environmental science
and engage a significant cohort of students with practitioners from the
construction industry.
The success of the Visiting Professors in Building Engineering Physics
demonstrates what could be achieved on a national scale if a network of Centres
of Excellence in Building Engineering Physics or Low Carbon Sustainable Design
were to be established. The goal is to create a continuous upwards spiral of
teaching, research, industrial practice and regulation leading towards genuine
low carbon performance in the built environment.
The primary purpose of a Centre of Excellence will be to educate graduate
engineers to apply the science of building engineering physics, together with
integrated systems design, to designing buildings that conserve energy by
maximising their use of passive design principles. These engineering graduates
could be described as ‘carbon literate’, as they will have the analytical skills and
rigour to design, direct and coordinate low carbon design across a number of
specialisms. A Centre of Excellence will also, through the use of interdisciplinary
teaching, generate additional ‘carbon aware’ graduates, who may be architects,
planners or project managers. Together, these graduates will form the basis of a
new workforce equipped to deliver the most cost effective measures for carbon
abatement through energy conservation.
To achieve these goals a Centre of Excellence needs to be much more than a
typical university research centre. The primary aim of the proposed Centres of
Excellence is to enhance the undergraduate education of building designers so
that they are equipped to deliver the low carbon built environment using the
most economic and advantageous techniques.
Thus, a Centre of Excellence can only exist through the satisfaction of three
requisites; the establishment of a body of knowledge, research to improve the
body of knowledge and education and training to test the body of knowledge
and disseminate it to industry (Figure 6).
Figure 6. The fundamental
requirements of a Centre of
Excellence
32 The Royal Academy of Engineering