Performance Case Studies

PERFORMANCE

Recorded by Sofie Pelsmakers, images by Essi Nisonen

KEY READINGS 

• Understanding your design: what others want and think about it? / Pelsmakers, S., Hilberth, T., The 6th International Conference on Architecture and Built Environment S.Arch : Conference Proceedings. 2019.

• Energy, People Buildings: Making Sustainable Architecture Work, Kimpian, J., Hartman, H., Pelsmakers, S., RIBA Publishing

INSPIRATIONAL BUILT EXAMPLES

• Architype, Wilkinson primary school, UK

• AART, Musholm Sports centre, UK

PERFORMANCE CASE STUDIES

Finding out about users’ needs and expectations and responding to this in your project, means that your project is more likely to meet their expectations and your design intentions in reality. This is why we need to ask people about their needs and expectations and involve them at the beginning of the design process in the first place.  So, map who the key users and stakeholders are in your own project. User engagement early on should not be neglected in favour of post-completion feedback or quantitative building monitoring only. Placing user-centric and feedback processes at the heart of design processes will require a culture change in most architectural practices (and in architecture education). During different stages you can include feedback processes, but even where a full integration or post-competition evaluation is not possible, collecting less extensive feedback is still of value. For example, it can be focused on specific issues that you want to understand.

Knowledge gained from these processes must be used to respond to in your project, and to fix things if they do not work to ensure design intentions and values are met.

Open sharing and publishing of lessons learned is crucial: the urgency of the climate and biodiversity crises require us to not waste time and instead to share and collaborate to ensure we all create truly sustainable buldings that perform in reality.