Laying the foundations for buildings to stay cool in extreme heat.
Impact at a glance:
- Measured excessively hot summer conditions in UK hospitals from 2007–19 and developed proposals to boost resilience in hot summers.
- Adaptation solutions were designed for 248 National Health Service (NHS) England Acute Hospitals (12.4 million m2).
- Methodology was extended to China, covering 9 billion m2 of building stock with a population of 550 million people.
- Developed the NHS Energy Efficiency Fund (EEF) to mitigate climate change effects by improving energy efficiency across the NHS estate.
- Redrafted the primary NHS guidance on energy efficiency, promoting EEF findings and advocating refurbishment as often the superior option to newbuild.
“We’re paying you to think the unthinkable.” It was 2008 and Alan Short, Professor of Architecture at the University of Cambridge was meeting with the Director of Estates and Facilities of the Department of Health.
“I’d been tasked with designing a hospital that could self-regulate its temperature,” recalls Alan Short. “On the whole, architecture practices tend to steer clear of hospitals as they’re thought to be incredibly complex and technically demanding. Innovation is dangerous because you’re risking people’s lives.” But the reality was that lives were already at risk. “Sadly, mortality increases with hot weather both at home and in hospitals – the very elderly and very young patients with compromised health are particularly vulnerable,” says Short. “One of the biggest problems of climate change is infrastructure like hospitals haven’t been built to cope with the temperatures we are experiencing. This tragedy of in-hospital deaths from heat will only increase if preventative measures are not put in place.”
“The architectural fashion for the last 70 years or so has been to make very lightweight glassy buildings,” explains Short. “They are the worst possible kind of building for a warming climate.”
Conventional air conditioning which, explains Short, “eats about three times as much energy as heating,” perpetuates the very problem our warming world is up against. The answer he says is to “think about configuring buildings in a fundamentally different way.”
Short has been interested in environmental architecture since he was a student and went on to design a number of self-regulating buildings, including the University Library in Coventry. “The building was completely naturally ventilated and cooled. The design was very simple but worked a real treat. It was fantastically successful at temperature regulation.”
"The chief architect of the Department of Health phoned me up and asked: “Could you make a hospital like that?” I said, “I don’t see why not." Professor Alan Short, Department of Architecture
Short drew up designs for a self-regulating hospital and went on to be appointed, along with collaborators at Loughborough University, the Open University and the Cambridge Engineering Design Centre (EDC), to assess the NHS’s vast estate and make recommendations to increase its resilience to the changing climate, reduce carbon emissions and improve comfort.
The research project was known as the Design and Delivery of Robust Hospital Environments in a Changing Climate (DeDeRHECC) and would span more than a decade – running from 2007 to 2019 – resulting in a set of proposals to boost resilience in hot summers.
Read the full University of Cambridge article.
Image credit: Jimmy Chan