Climate Strike ‘One Year On’

Date posted: October 13, 2020

Thank you to everyone who attended our recent Climate Strike ‘One Year On’ event. It was a good opportunity to refocus on tackling and adapting to the climate crisis.

In September 2019 we facilitated a multi-disciplinary ‘climate strike’ workshop to debate the issues and work towards agreeing some priority actions we can take to tackle the climate crisis as professionals within the construction industry. Participants on the day included council members and officers, landscape and sustainability consultants, local climate activists, project managers and contractors. It felt like an exciting time, after years of austerity had put sustainability low on our client’s list of priorities, tackling the climate emergency was back on the agenda.

However one year on the world’s attention has been diverted to dealing with the impact of Covid-19. The ArchitecturePLB team have been working hard to maintain our focus on sustainable design. We believe in a collaborative approach and we wanted to bring together some of last year’s participants to share and learn from each other’s progress over the last year. We had 5 interesting speakers:

Paul Phasey, Director and Passivhaus Designer at ArchitecturePLB
Kay Lung-Kendall – Technical Director at fabrik landscape
Simon Gill – Associate Director at Arup
Paul Ciniglio – BM3e, Boulter Mossman
Adrian Fox – Strategic Planning Manager – Winchester City Council

ArchitecturePLB Director, Paul Phasey reported on the work ArchitecturepPLB have been doing in the year since the 2019 event. We have continued to upskill all of our team through focused CPD on all aspects of sustainable design from the early design stages through to design specification and completion on site, considering embodied and operational carbon. Our Sustainability Group members have been actively involved in Architects Climate Action Network and LETI ( the London Energy Transformation Initiative) contributing to working groups and publications. We have also reached out to a wide range of potential and existing clients to offer them seminars on Passivhaus and Zero Carbon. We understand that we must bring our clients along on this journey with us so we are happy to come and share our knowledge to help our clients understand how they can best tackle the climate emergency when procuring construction projects.

Paul also reported on an exciting pilot project that we are currently designing to Passivhaus Plus standards. The residential project will provide affordable homes for Winchester City Council and will be a case study Pioneer Project for the London Energy Transformation Initiative. Paul illustrated some of the challenges successfully resolved by the project team including balancing energy with placemaking, reducing embodied carbon and managing overheating.

A full write up of event can be found here.