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Business English: How office air conditioning lost its cool

Architects are pursuing energy-conserving design innovations including 'smart' lighting and heating systems, whilst sustainable architecture is increasingly being seen as a good investment. von Mario Alemi

It is commonly accepted in Dubai that the hotter it is outside, the more you will freeze indoors because of the air conditioning - and the higher will be the electricity bill. In an era of energy greediness, technology has been blamed for excessive consumption. Now, however, the trend is changing: architects and builders are reporting a growing demand for sustainable construction techniques and technology. "At the beginning, (those of us) who believed in sustainability were like preachers, but now it is different," says Stefan Behling, senior partner at Foster & Partners, the London-based architecture practice. Further, sustainable architecture can improve the health and productivity of the workforce. In many new offices, Mr Behling points out, the air conditioning automatically switches off when a window is opened, reducing energy costs and raising productivity by offering staff greater control over their working environment. "Companies are coming to understand that sustainable office buildings are a good investment," says Mr Behling. "At the Commerzbank in Frankfurt, the highest tower in Europe, we found that most of the time the windows are open and the air conditioning off." Ivan Harbour, design director of Richard Rogers and Partners, the London-based architecture firm, underlines the importance of human behaviour in energy consumption. "Sometimes your brain wants a room temperature of 22 degrees Celsius, but your body would be happy with 20." The latest systems, therefore, gauge the optimum temperature for the workplace and use the settings made by employees as indicators rather than exact measures. Where possible, sustainable architecture makes use of natural resources. In the National Assembly for Wales building in Cardiff, designed by the Rogers partnership, there are 27 geothermal heat pumps that draw heat from the soil in winter and expel it in summer. In any building, hundreds of factors determine the amount of energy wasted. "Orientation, dimension, geometry, exposition, choice of material, type and dimension of openings," says Thomas Herzog of Herzog and Partners, Munich, a pioneer of sustainable architecture in Europe. He believes "sustainability is an ethical task". Yet for many companies it is the economic motive that is steadily pushing forward environmentally friendly technology. Philips, the Dutch electronics company, reckons that lighting in three out of four offices in Europe "remains energy inefficient compared to new technology and does not comply with the European light quality guidelines". New lighting systems, Philips says, can save up to 75 per cent on energy, installation and maintenance costs. An example is a lighting installation at Buckingham Palace, set up last April for Queen Elizabeth's 80th birthday, that uses only light-emitting diodes, the cutting edge in low-energy lighting technology. New technologies are useful in old buildings too, where thin window glass often fails to provide sufficient insulation, yet regulations prohibit changes to the frames. To address the problem, Nippon Sheet Glass, a Japanese glass manufacturer, has introduced Spacia, a new kind of double glazing in which two thin glass sheets are separated by a few millimetres of vacuum. The result is a single glass sheet of traditional thickness that maximises thermal insulation. The idea required 10 years of research and development at the University of Sydney. Science, architecture and the market are providing the means to reduce energy consumption. The cultural change is on the way.

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