We are delighted to announce that the Active Office has won ‘Most Innovative Building Project’ and ‘Most Innovative Public Sector Project’ at the 2021 Building Innovation Awards.
The Building Innovation Awards (BI Awards) celebrate the most innovative products, services and technologies reshaping the UK’s construction sector.
The UK government is aiming to move away from an over-reliance on traditional methods of construction in public sector projects. New funding frameworks have emphasised the need for a more diverse supply chain, digitalisation and Modern Methods of Construction. The BI Awards therefore wanted to hear about projects that are already putting these principles into practice to deliver better public spaces faster, cheaper and more sustainably than ever before.
The Active Office certainly embraced innovative procurement and construction methods. By using a collaborative procurement framework and modular deisgn built by Wernick, the project achieved its 8 month delivery timescale. Significantly, the Active Office is also designed to generate more energy than it uses. Its success points the way to a new generation of low-carbon buildings, supporting the UK Government’s mission “to halve the emissions of new buildings by 2030.”
The Active Office was funded by Innovate UK and sponsored by Tata Steel and Cisco, and is the latest of SPECIFIC’s demonstrator buildings. These buildings aim to test and prove the ‘Active Buildings’ concept in a range of uses. We also hope to challenge traditional construction methods and support the wider uptake of low-carbon buildings. To this end, our Design Manager Joanna Clarke has developed an ‘Active Building toolkit‘ to share our principles and learnings.
SPECIFIC’s Design Manager, Joanna Clarke, said:
“I am thrilled that we have won this award. It truly recognises the collaborative working methods we adopted for this project. These ranged from using a collaborative procurement route, to working with partner organisations to integrate innovative low-carbon technologies, which we can test in real-world situations. The Active Office shows what can be achieved when project design and delivery teams work closely together with their supply chain partners, enabling building projects to be developed effectively in shorter timeframes.
“Through the Active Office, we have shown how we can significantly reduce our energy consumption in buildings. By using energy monitoring data, we can improve building performance, optimise building energy systems and make operational carbon savings throughout the life of a building. Awards like this highlight the art of the possible, as we seek solutions to meet our net zero carbon targets.”
