Sustainable design is integrated design: Ricardo Moreira, XCO2 and Anis Abou-Zaki, Foster + Partners

The UCL Institute for Environmental Design and Engineering’s (IEDE) collaborative ethos has been playing out on a Himalayan mountainside.

The Hemis Monastic School in Ladakh, India, started as a pro-bono project for Ricardo Moreira, Co-founder and Managing Director of engineering and environmental consultancy XCO2. The brief was for a low-tech building robust enough to withstand extreme temperatures.

“As a project, it illustrates collaboration, and environmental thinking integrated into architectural design,” says Moreira.

An architect by background (having studied first at the University of Kansas), he honed his engineering skills during his Master’s degree in Environmental Design and Engineering at the UCL Institute for Environmental Design and Engineering.

“This background gave me an insight into where architects are coming from, and the course provided me with the tools to support them. I learnt how far to push them, what’s a priority for them, and which ways in their design process we could be adding value.”

Testbed for collaboration

Fellow IEDE alumnus, Anis Abou-Zaki (who also first studied architecture, in his case at the American University of Beirut), echoes this. “For the course’s teamwork projects, students with different educational backgrounds were mixed together. That added a layer of richness, and was a small representation of what I’ve been doing on a daily basis ever since graduating.”

Abou-Zaki is a Partner of Environmental Design and Sustainability at Foster + Partners, leading a team of environmental engineers and designers who work alongside architects on integrated sustainable design masterplans and buildings, including Spaceport America in New Mexico, Hankook Tire R+D Centre in Korea and Buenos Aires’ City Hall.

He was driven to pursue a career in sustainability by his belief that, “as an architect or engineer you ought to design aiming to achieve the highest levels of comfort, health and wellbeing for the users, while minimising the impact on the environment and surroundings, and, where possible, contributing positively to it”.

The New Mexico Spaceport Authority Building. Designed to have minimal embodied carbon and few additional energy requirements, the building has achieved LEED Gold accreditation. The low-lying form is dug into the landscape to exploit the thermal mass, which buffers the building from the extremes of the New Mexico climate as well as catching the westerly winds for natural ventilation.

Share the knowledge

Likewise, Moreira’s goal was to move to engineering and have a sustainability focus, and the IEDE course bridged both those. Moreira’s hope for the sector’s future is that “there will be more of an understanding of energy and environmental issues on both sides, because that in turn increases and improves collaboration”.

Abou-Zaki’s prediction is that such collaboration will continue to thrive: “I can see that integrated design is becoming more and more prevalent, because you get so many benefits from sharing knowledge.”

As for what to call yourself these days, for Abou-Zaki, that depends on the context. “I’m sitting in the middle between architecture and engineering; architects consider me to be an engineer and engineers think of me as an architect.”

At XCO2, Moreira feels “more like an environmental and energy consultant, with skills that straddle architecture and engineering. After all, it is engineering that gives a technical base to our environmental strategies.”