The notion of how sustainability influences buildings has rapidly evolved from an energy centric agenda to a multifaceted, integrated design philosophy that considers the interactions of buildings and cities with the people and communities they serve as well as the environment they exist within.
As we grow to understand this, sustainability evolves and worlds best practice thinking, strategies and technologies continue to move forward at a pace that was unimaginable several years ago is now the industry norm.
WSP Built Ecology exists as a catalyst for this and we seek to transform sustainability on every project.
Already, a number of projects have proved the value of this approach.
- 30 The Bond, Sydney, Australia – Demonstrated real world performance over a number of years in line with original predictions.
- CH2, Melbourne, Australia – The first A grade 6 star Green Star rated building with the Green Building Council of Australia, globally recognised.
- Southern Cross Station, Melbourne, Australia – The world's greenest roof and winner of the Lubetkin prize
- NELHA, Hawaii, USA – Hawaii's first LEED Platinum building and impressively, carbon positive.
WSP Built Ecology draw our global leadership from a number of directions:
- Prolific Creativity – Internally we create a culture of creativity with open workshopping of ideas on every project. This process is also used to help the entire project team identify ideas at and beyond the limit of what's possible.
- Research – Our creativity is backed by solid research. This research is used to drive design direction. We are always keen to share this research through participation in global sustainability forums, advocacy and free publication of research papers.Prototyping and Analysis – One of our earliest values was the ideal “if you can't measure it, don’t do it”.
- We have a suite of tools at our disposal to test the performance of our ideas both to prove the concept and optimise performance outcomes. Digital prototyping is critical to every design concept we develop and we have a proven track record of real world performance validating predictions of the prototypes.
- Green Engineering – Dedicated sustainability leadership within the built environment must be backed by leading Green Engineers. Built Ecology are embedded within some of the worlds best recognised Green Engineering businesses including WSP Buildings in the UK, WSP Flack and Kurtz in the USA and WSP Lincolne Scott in Australia.
- Global Networks – Built Ecology participate in a number of global networks and present our work at a number of global events. Our founder, Ché Wall, was also a founder of the Green Building Council of Australia and founding Chair of the World Green Building Council. Most recently we have collaborated with Lend Lease in the development of an emissions trading scheme. The scheme has gained endorsement from the Rand Corporation in the USA and proposed to the Australian Parliament as a Private Members Bill.
- Overall Sustainability – WSP is unique in providing overall sustainability leadership and is able to address the broad range of sustainability issues. This is achieved at a number of levels and includes some of worlds leading experts.