Environmental assessment: The Eden project

Non domestic buildings account for about one-sixth of the U.K.'s entire CO2 emissions and one-third of the building related ones 2 . Their proportion of energy consumption, particularly electricity, has also been growing. New buildings are not necessarily better, with energy use often proving to be much higher than their designers anticipated. Annual CO2 emissions of two- and sometimes three- times design expectations are far from unusual, leaving a massive credibility gap. These and other global environmental and human health related concerns have motivated an increasing number of designers, developers and building users to pursue more environmentally sustainable designs and construction strategies. However, these buildings can be difficult to evaluate, since they are large in scale, complex in materials and function and temporally dynamic due to limited service life of building components and changing user requirements. All of these factors make environmental assessment of the buildings challenging. Previous Post Occupancy Review of Buildings and their Engineering (PROBE) building investigations have uncovered serious shortcomings in facilities management, or at least mismatches between a building's management needs and the ability of the occupiers to provide the right level of management. Consequently, large differences between energy performance expectations and outcomes can occur virtually unnoticed, while designers continue to repeat flawed descriptions. This investigation attempts to evaluate the building's operation and to help achieving demonstrable improvements in terms of energy efficiency and occupant satisfaction. The scope of this study is to evaluate the actual environmental performance of a building notable for its advanced design. The Education Resource Centre at the Eden Project was selected to compare design expectations with post occupancy performance. This report contains a small-scale survey of user satisfaction with the chosen building, an analysis of the building's energy use and information about the physical and managerial circumstances operating. The author has attempted to zoom in on specific issues, such as energy performance and lighting consumption. Both successes and failures have been reported, providing owners, designers and end users with valuable, real-world information.