A property company which owns and manages more than six-million square feet of business space across the UK has teamed up with a Midlands’ university to develop a new generation of eco-friendly office buildings.
The collaboration — between family-owned Bruntwood and the University of Salford — will explore how future commercial buildings can be made more energy efficient and environmentally sustainable. Researchers will also study the work habits of office staff to see how the design and running of their workspace affects health and wellbeing.
As well as funding various projects, Bruntwood will directly benefit from their findings. The university team’s first undertaking will be to determine how an occupier’s behaviour impacts on the energy performance of various types of buildings, with the results guiding the company’s ongoing retrofit programme.
Uniquely, the programme will span almost a century of settings and technology. One group of researchers will develop cutting-edge augmented reality and 3D software while a second will make use of the university’s Energy House, a 1920s Salford terraced property reconstructed within a fully environmentally controllable chamber, allowing climatic conditions to be varied, repeated and monitored.
Bruntwood, which invested more than £31m in refurbishing and converting nearly 430,000sq ft of property last year alone, owns or manages 109 office buildings. Its director of building and construction is John Marland. “At Bruntwood we are always challenging ourselves to improve the way that we develop and manage our buildings,” he explained.
“Our partnership with the University of Salford supports this by providing us with a platform to share best practice, research ideas and validate new technologies. Both organisations recognise there is a lot we can learn from each other, which in the long term will benefit the businesses taking space in our buildings.”
Nigel Mellors, the university’s pro-vice chancellor for research and enterprise, commented: “We are very excited to build on our relationship with Bruntwood on a more strategic level, and we are at the beginning of what we hope will be a long term research relationship.
“Our two organisations focus on positively impacting our local communities and economy and the partnership is a fantastic opportunity for us to deliver applied research within the commercial sector of the built environment on a truly cross-disciplinary basis,” he added.
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