David Cheshire is a director at ArchTam and leads a team of sustainability experts who provide advice on net zero, circular economy, low embodied carbon, building performance, and net positive, regenerative design. His team covers building assessments, including LEED, BREEAM, WELL, SKA, NABERS, embodied carbon assessments, the UK Net Zero Carbon Building Standard, and soft landings. David is the author of Building Revolutions, The Handbook to Building a Circular Economy and the newly released Regenerative by Design, which explores how buildings can have a positive impact on the planet, becoming an active part of the ecosystem. He has also authored the Chartered Institution of Building Services Engineers (CIBSE) guide to sustainability and CIBSE TM54, a widely adopted industry standard for evaluating the operational energy performance of buildings at the design stage. 

Tell us about what inspired you to join the industry.

I grew up in the countryside, surrounded by nature, and I spent much of my time making dens and treehouses from scavenged materials. I think it was my upbringing and the growing awareness of global warming back in the late eighties that inspired me to become an environmentalist. I was also always fascinated by buildings, and so when I went to university all my building design assignments included natural ventilation with thermal mass and openable windows. I even drew red and blue arrows to illustrate the movement of hot and cold air in the design until a lecturer pointed out that drawing arrows didn’t mean the air would flow as I intended! It was a simple yet powerful insight. So, I decided to dive deeper and pursue a master’s degree in Energy and the Built Environment, where I learned all about heat transfer and modelled buildings in Tas — a tool that was then at the forefront of dynamic simulation.

My dream job was to become involved in environmentally conscious buildings and when I started working with Miles Attenborough in 1997, I knew I’d found the right career. Miles is still my boss nearly thirty years later.

What is your favorite ArchTam project that you’ve worked on and why?

My favourite project has been working with the Greater London Authority (GLA) on implementing its circular economy policies. By lucky timing, I published my first book on applying the circular economy to the built environment a year before the GLA published its new draft London Plan.

The GLA introduced new policies on circular economy buildings into the draft London Plan and they asked whether they could include one of the key diagrams from my book. My diagram summarises the circular design principles, including prioritising retention of existing buildings, design for adaptability, and design for disassembly. The GLA adopted these design principles to assess the circular economy design of projects applying for planning permission.

Since then, I’ve had the good fortune to work with the GLA to implement its policies. I helped to pilot the draft circular economy guidance, refining and updating it for publication. I then assembled a team that produced the review templates, proformas and assessment tools to create an enforceable system.

It has been a real privilege to have shaped the implementation of such a ground-breaking policy. Prior to the introduction of the policies, the amount of waste arising from the demolition and construction of buildings remained largely unknown, and retention and refurbishment were not prioritised. When I was writing my book, the term circular economy was very much a niche subject, so it has been brilliant to be part of the rapid change that has happened in London.

The progress in implementing the policies is reported annually by the GLA. The reports demonstrate that applicants are considering how London’s existing buildings can be retained for the future and are delivering best practice and industry leading strategies.

Tell us a story of how your work positively impacted the community.

It has been very rewarding working on several new hospital projects, including Moorfields Eye Hospital, Hillingdon and the Cambridge Cancer Research Hospital. All new hospitals must meet the National Health Service’s Net Zero Carbon Buildings Standard, and my team has been working to ensure that the buildings reduce their impact on the planet while providing essential healthcare services for the community.

In addition to cutting embodied carbon and operational energy use in the designs, we have emphasised the importance of learning from our projects already in operation. To support this, Richard Mann and I launched the EVOL^+VE initiative within ArchTam in 2019. The program encourages our engineers to revisit projects a year or more after completion to gather valuable feedback from the building operators and occupants, and to review the building performance against the design intent. We initially implemented EVOL^+VE on healthcare projects, where it has provided invaluable insights on how to make buildings work better for the people, planet and for the budget.

These valuable lessons learned have influenced new projects, including the use of 3D walkthroughs to demonstrate key building functions to operators and occupants, and designing out complexity to ensure comfort and ease of operation.

I have had the opportunity to apply these learnings as the Government Soft Landings Champion for the Cambridge Cancer Research Hospital project. Soft Landings is all about ensuring a smooth transition from design to operation — fine-tuning the building to perform as intended. This approach includes ongoing support from designers and constructors after completion to resolve any early issues, and actively involves building occupants and operators in the design process to ensure that there is no gap between expectation and reality.

I had always been inspired by the potential for buildings to leave a positive impact on the planet. When I saw the idea of regenerative design start to take root in the UK, I decided to write my third book on the topic. The idea of regenerative design is to create a built environment that becomes an active part of the ecosystem, rather than one that takes from the planet. It recognises that the ecosystem is our life support system — without it we would have no fresh water, edible food and breathable air. Since it was published last year, I have been asked to present at numerous events and directly to many developers and architectural practices. From the feedback I’m getting, it’s proven highly popular and an inspiring topic for the whole design and construction community.

I’m passionate about helping avert the worst impacts of climate change. It’s an impossible task for one person, so I believe it’s essential to set out a vision for progress and encourage others to join in shaping the path forward. I hope my work will inspire at least one person to better align their design for a project with the natural world. We are, after all, all part of nature and utterly dependant on having a healthy ecosystem for our continued existence.

Share a piece of career advice.

Firstly, I think it’s crucial to find a good leader and mentor to work with, who respects you and is keen to develop your career and support you. Then I think you should try and work in an area that you are passionate about. I’ve been incredibly lucky to have found both a great place to work, a great line manager and an area of work that I’m passionate about.

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Back in the halcyon, pre-pandemic days of 2015, I was writing a book on what was then an esoteric subject – applying the circular economy to the built environment. Since then, Extinction Rebellion, Greta Thunberg, supply chain disruption and the race to net zero have pushed circular economy thinking into the mainstream. The Greater London Authority, for example, now requires a Circular Economy Statement for all major developments, and organisations around the world have committed to achieving net zero carbon emission buildings by 2030.

The stakes for the construction industry are high. Not only does the industry use nearly half of the world’s extracted materials, but it also generates around a third of the world’s waste. Resource extraction is responsible for 90 percent of biodiversity loss and half of all greenhouse gas emissions. A rapid transition away from our throw-away linear economy of take, make, dispose is essential if we are to avert the worst impacts of the climate crisis.

But we don’t need to be constantly mining for new materials. Our towns and cities are a goldmine of valuable resources that over the centuries have been gleaned from around the world, processed and turned into useful components. The existing urban fabric could provide all the resources that we need to regenerate the built environment, but we must disrupt and re-design the current systems to wean ourselves off the insatiable appetite.

How can we do that? Here are three ideas:

1. Repurpose and refurbish existing buildings. The operational carbon emissions of a new building are far lower now thanks to a far cleaner, greener electricity grid and efficient building design. This has made the embodied carbon impacts – the emissions associated with pouring concrete, forging steel and extruding aluminium – far more important. Refurbishing could save over half the embodied carbon compared to a new building. In the future, we are likely to see developers actively looking for buildings that are ripe for refurbishment rather than re-development.

2. Start mining the urban environment for precious resources. There are new techniques emerging that will allow us to make new concrete from old, punch the mortar out from between bricks and make new structural timber from salvaged wood. There are brokers, such as GlobeChain, who have created a reuse marketplace that connects corporations to charities, SMEs and people to redistribute unneeded items to those that need them. It has over 10,000 members and has diverted over 6.1 million kilograms of resources from landfill, creating savings of over €4.4 million for charities.

3. Stock up. We need to scale this all up to the point that the stock of materials in the urban environment can be used to store the resources in buildings, becoming materials banks that provide resources for the future.

Applying circular economy principles to the built environment could radically reduce its carbon footprint, slash demand for new materials and turn waste into a resource. With the climate crisis looming, we need all the help we can get.

David Cheshire’s book, Building Revolutions, which discusses circular economy, was published in 2016 by the Royal Institute of British Architects. A much-updated second edition, The Handbook to Building a Circular Economy, was published in September 2021.

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