■ Use minimised.

This means that all industries, including construction – estimated to produce around 40% of total UK carbon emissions – will need to make a big effort to reduce their environmental impact.Due to the many benefits offered by adaptive reuse architecture, the practice should be embraced as part of the industry’s shift towards more sustainable design.. Over the last few years, the construction industry has focused on the improvement of Building Regulations (including planned changes in Part-L in 2022 and 2025) and the adoption of more ambitious standards and carbon targets for new construction, following initiatives from LETI, RIBA and UKGBC.

The impact of existing buildings, however, has been left unattended.New initiatives, however, are highlighting the importance of adaptive reuse, which focuses on the refurbishment.of existing buildings (retrofitting) in order to help the UK meet its carbon targets.. To give a sense of the scale of the importance of adaptive reuse: according to LETI’s analysis, 80% of residential buildings that will exist in 2050 have already been built; and most of the buildings currently under construction will need to be partially or totally retrofitted before 2050.. A substantial proportion of the carbon emissions from existing buildings can be reduced by adopting simple retrofit measures, which could potentially be subsidised by the government.

These would include: adding thermal insulation, upgrading windows or exchanging gas boilers for electric heaters and air source heat pumps..There are multiple benefits to promoting a national-scale retrofit of existing buildings.

The advantages of adaptive reuse architecture include:.

the reduction of embodied carbon from the reuse of existing buildings.Raj Goel agrees when talking about the outpatient rooms.

‘There’s a clinic area next to each room,’ he says, ‘which is very good and that doesn’t always happen in other places.’.Maswiken comments upon the ample sizes of the recovery spaces.

He, Highton and Goel remark upon the particular spaciousness of the theatres, with Goel commenting that this is a ‘major attraction’ of Circle and highlighting the fact that the anesthetic rooms are also very spacious.. ‘This facility had a particularly large percentage of orthopedic surgeons,’ says Wood, ‘and orthopedic surgeons needed a very particular form of operating theatre...more instruments tend to be involved in the operations.Therefore, we actually simulated in three dimensions, in a virtual environment, how they were going to use their equipment...we were able to position the components within the operating theatre more accurately, so that the efficiency of the operations could be greater than within a typical, general purpose operating theatre.’.