Interview with Andrew Whalley, Design Showcase 2022 Speaker
Andrew Whalley OBE, Chairman of Grimshaw, delivered his lecture ZERO at the Design Showcase 2022. Known for designing net-zero-carbon buildings and considerations of the building life cycle performance in their designs, Grimshaw committed itself to operating as a net zero company. This commitment is reflected in Whalley’s approach to sustainable design and in many of his award-winning projects, including the International Terminal at Waterloo, the Eden Project in Cornwall, the redevelopment of the historic Paddington Station in London, the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center in Troy, New York, and The Sustainability Pavilion for the World Expo 2020 Dubai, to name a few.
Following the Design Showcase, we had the privilege of asking Whalley a few questions about his broader vision for architecture in an interview for the HCAD newsletter. Read the interview below.
Hillier College: Sustainable design is the core theme of this year’s Design Showcase. What is at the core of Grimshaw's sustainability practice?
Andrew Whalley: Since the Practice was established in 1980, we have had a keen focus on the impact of the built environment and the fragility and finite resources of our planet. Throughout Europe a number of architects started to actively research and develop new design solutions that minimized the energy use of buildings with active and passive solutions. This has always been at the core of our thinking. We realized that flexibility in buildings taking a systems approach allowed for a building to have a longer and more useful life, which ultimately saves on resources. Herman Miller Factory in Bath is a great example: its facade and services are totally flexible so it can be rearranged to suit production needs of the building, which have been adapted many times over the last forty years. This inherent flexibility allowed us to completely reconfigure the building as a School of Art and Design, and hopefully it will continue it’s productive life for decades to come. Ingenuity in thinking is just as important as the application of technology. Do you need to have all of the functions of a building fully conditioned? Which natural and readily available resources can be harnessed? An early example is the British Pavilion at the 1992 Seville World Expo. The building is layered, with only the core exhibits fully air conditioned. The building’s roof was shaded with an array of photo-voltaic panels, one of the earliest applications of PVs in buildings. They harvested the energy that was used for pumping water over its glass facade to keep the building cool. Our thinking continues to evolve and we have developed this approach over a wide range of projects, most recently for the Sustainability Pavilion at the Dubai 2020 World Expo. Thirty years on we are now able to design and construct a building that is totally self-sustaining, generating all of its power needs, cooling, water and recycling and cleansing waste.
HC: Looking at your portfolio, you've been in charge of projects in diverse sectors (education, performing arts, transportation...). How do you apply sustainability concepts in such a diverse portfolio?
AW: It is of course not just different sectors but also the different environmental demands depending on geographic location. By their nature different building typologies have very differing requirements, which naturally demand appropriate responses, but fundamentally the starting point is the same. Think about the design approach from first principles. As an example, we have just completed two buildings in the education sector. The first is Monash University Woodside Building for Design and Technology. The climate is reasonably temperate, so we created a series of different teaching spaces and some large circulation spaces all contained within a very high-performance envelope, designed to Passive Haus standards, its actually the largest passive Haus building in the Southern Hemisphere. We took a very different approach in Arizona, a very hot dry climate, for the Rob and Melani Walton Centre for Planetary Health. We realized that what would normally be an enclosed central atrium could be left open and just sheltered from the sun. Indeed, the entire ground plane could be left as a natural landscape including the existing canal which now runs through the building, massively lowering the volume of space that needs to be conditioned and at the same time connecting all the occupants with the surrounding landscape and nature.
HC: Why are sustainable and smart buildings relevant for cities and their citizens?
AW: We are rapidly changing to an urban based civilization and that has an impact on our planetary environment. In 1950, 30% of the global population lived in cities. In nearly 70 years, this has risen to 55%. Our population growth continues unabated and is currently growing at 83 million people each year. With this level of growth, it is predicted that in 30 years the global population will reach 9.8 billion, and at this point 68% of the world’s population will live in cities. In simple terms our urban population footprint will increase by 50% in just three decades. Looking at this over sixty years, which is only two generations away, the building stock will double. Currently, the UN predicts that cities consume 75% of the world’s energy and emit 80% of the world’s total greenhouse gases including the indirect emissions generated by urban inhabitants. Buildings consume vast amounts of energy, not just for their initial construction but in their ongoing operational lifespan. Yet these cities, and in particular the opportunity for new optimized models, are the opportunity for change, as they also generate 75% of a country’s Gross Domestic Product, which translates into the wealth that could fund investment and change. The UN has categorically stated that the only option is a rapid deployment of energy-efficient and low-carbon building design. Along with intelligent operational systems, construction will need to be optimized. We have committed that all of our design work will be net zero carbon ready by 2025 and we have set the ambitious target of regenerative design by 2030.
HC: Does computational design make for a changed creative process?
AW: The various computational design tools allow us to explore and test much wider range of design solutions in shorter time period. Taking this beyond the design process we are currently working on a research program that will allow far more efficient design and fabrication solutions for more economic and higher-performing buildings. When CAD was first adopted thirty years ago, it was merely a digital drawing board. For me the first big advance was when we designed the Eden project twenty-five years ago as it was the first time we could work totally with a 3D model and topographic models of the site and then test the solutions with sophisticated Computational Fluid Dynamic Analysis. Matters have accelerated in recent years so that our Computational Deign Group performs an instrumental part of the design process, at all scales. For Urban Design we have developed a number of software programs that allow us to harness data from a city to performance of building clusters. The tool I have found the most useful is our ability to link the Revit BIM Model live to our Virtual Reality Model so we can explore design decisions in an immersive full-scale experience, it changes decisions you might have taken when you only had scaled representations of your design. All the software we have written over the last few years we share as an opensource resource. We are now working on tools that will help our deign decisions to develop net zero carbon buildings.
HC: What are the great opportunities in architecture at this moment?
AW: The most exciting opportunities are the need to create new urban conurbations which allows us to challenge the models we have developed during the 19th and 20th Centuries. Cities that are fragmented into different zones based on function such as industry and commerce, work with economic segregation, usually divided by transport systems, roads and rail. I have always thought this destroyed the beauty and opportunity of cities where people were subjugated as servants of commerce. Looking forward we can now create cities that will be healthier, connected to nature, and a joy to live in. A blend of work, live and play in denser and more accessible patterns.
HC: Few words about digital architecture and your design commission for the platform pax.world?
AW: The emerging virtual world—the metaverse—provides us an opportunity to extend and expand this thinking, and the invitation to design a metaserai within pax.world is an opportunity for us to further understand the perception of spaces in architecture and their life beyond the physical world. It will be our knowledge and development of building physics, design, engineering, adaptability, environment, and construction that will enable us to consider the qualities of space without these material constraints. Over the course of the pandemic, we have all learned the critical importance of continued connectivity using digital platforms, however we also suffered from the lack of social exchange that the traditional workplace offers. We see the metaverse as offering an incredible opportunity to build on the global connectivity of digital platforms while reintroducing the social sense of connectivity from a shared environment. We look forward to developing with pax.world, within the context of today's social, economic and environmental disparities, a commitment to fundamentally addressing where our physical, real, and precious nature-based future could be.