Sustainability has been at the heart of van Heyningen and Haward’s thinking for a long time. What started out as an awareness of energy efficiency and low energy design has developed into a holistic understanding of sustainability that runs throughout all our projects. We are interested in mitigating the environmental impact of construction, which begins with a consideration of whether one can reuse or adapt an existing building and considering the orientation, form and construction of the building.

We firmly believe that cost effective and simple solutions can deliver high quality sustainable environments, places that people enjoy and thrive in. They require hard work to arrive at, but this is our aim. The big wins in environmental performance are determined by the early decisions, such as location, massing and orientation. Providing generalised spaces of different sizes, avoiding inessential specialisation and ensuring the buildings are adaptable and of durable construction will future proof them as well as reducing the environmental footprint. We are familiar with the BREEAM methodology as an easily understandable target to evaluate environmental performance, but % renewables and carbon targets can also be used.

A crucial aspect of sustainability is that the environment created is pleasant for those in the building, and the intangibles such as how much control users have over the environment and the quality of the spaces can have significant effect on the perceptions of users and thus, very directly, the life span of the building.