UCL-Energy seminar: 'Heat loss or heat gain: are we inviting overheating problems in new housing?', Richard Partington, Richard Partington Architects

UCL-Energy seminar: 'Heat loss or heat gain: Are we inviting overheating problems in new housing? A designers perspective on common trends in low energy housing design and the problems we may encounter in the near future'.

Speaker: Richard Partington, Richard Partington Architects

There is increasing concern amongst housing providers that the homes we are building today do not function well in sustained periods of warm weather and, looking forward, that homes will be even less capable of dealing with the effects of a warming climate. The industry has made great strides in the last decade in improving the thermal performance of new homes. However, there is a danger that the techniques employed to conserve heat in winter - good insulation and high levels of airtightness, mechanical ventilation may inadvertently be creating a problem in summer.

The talk will examine these issues from a designer's perspective through built examples. It will also consider whether the prediction and modelling tools available  are suitable and whether we the industry needs to do more work on a robust definition of overheating that can be applied to domestic building.

About the speaker:

Richard Partington is a co-founder and director of Richards Partington Architects, a multi-disciplinary practice working in housing, urbanism and regeneration.  Richard has expertise in low-energy design through research projects, urban planning and architecture.  Recent work includes the widely-published Derwenthorpe project in York for the Joseph Rowntree Housing Trust; a headquarters and housing centre for newly formed Greenfields Community Housing; and a series of best practice guides for the NHBC Foundation.  Richard is architect advisor to the Zero Carbon Hub and is co-chairing the Design vs As Built steering group set up by ZCH to investigate the potential performance gap between predicted and actual performance in new housing.  Richard is a sustainability expert to the Ministerial Advisory Group in Northern Ireland and is a Design Council CABE enabler.  He has been a visiting teacher at Cambridge University, UCL and University of Wales, Cardiff and has written articles for RIBA, CIBSE and Architect's Journals.

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