BUILDING PERFORMANCE AWARDS | SHORTLIST RESPONDING TO AN EMERGENCY The 2020 Building Performance Awards shortlist showcases the people and companies that are doing the most to head off a climate emergency by delivering safe and comfortable low-energy buildings. Alex Smith reports T here was a sense of urgency among the judges for the 2020 CIBSE Building Performance Awards. Heightened public awareness of climate change and the damage being done to the planet has put the onus on engineers to do everything they can to reduce the impact of buildings on the environment. Increasingly extreme flooding, heatwaves and wildfires means climate change is rarely out of the headlines, and the issue has become a key battleground in the UK General Election. At least 40 building services engineering companies have declared a climate emergency and pledged to move towards zero carbon buildings. This years CIBSE Building Performance Awards shortlist offers an insight into what the industry is doing in response to this man-made emergency. Reducing the impact on the environment of existing buildings is one of the construction industrys biggest challenges. Nearly two-thirds of the worlds buildings will still exist in 2050 so, if we are to meet CO2 reduction targets and respond to the ongoing emergency, buildings must be made fit, safe and resilient for future generations. The new Retrofit Project of the Year category is designed to uncover current best practice in the refurbishment of existing building stock. Judges said the best entries in this category demonstrated good, solid engineering that had led to significant energy savings, and a better performing building. Were not looking for snazzy, said one judge. Were looking for quality. The best entries had generated a culture of performance, learning and feedback, said the judges, who noted the standard of entries proved that even listed buildings could improve performance with a sensitive, quality retrofit. In the hotly contested categories of the Building Performance Consultancy awards, the judges said the entries showed that the profession wasnt about design and walk away any more. In particular, the judges felt a real buzz from the entries in the 51-300 employees category, and a sense of pride about the work that was being done. In the Building Consultancy of the Year (up to 50 employees) the judges said the shortlist was an encouraging mix of niche companies doing well and consultants with bestpractice processes. The judges said it was sometimes difficult to quantify the outcome. Some entries had more evidence, but we didnt know if it meant it was a better building, one remarked. Another said he would have liked to have learned more about processes, rather than just reading about what engineers did. One set of judges said the definition of what constituted environmental performance could have been wider. They saw a lot of focus on indoor air quality and daylighting, but less on other areas of health such as social wellbeing and biophilia. In the category for Building Performance Consultant (over 300 employees), the judges said all three shortlisted firms had a culture of Aecom has been shortlisted in the Project of the Year Commercial/ Industrial category for the Institute of Physics 18 December 2019 www.cibsejournal.com CIBSE Dec19 pp18-19 Shortlist awards.indd 18 22/11/2019 15:16