Sustainability & Building Physics

There was a very low number of staff on site, typically just twenty people, with over 140 staff working in the factory. This means that factory processes which manage quality in construction, reduce waste, increase health and safety are all able to influence most of the construction effort. With 70% of the project value completed in the factory this means that the majority of the project is delivered more quickly, to higher quality standards than is possible with traditional construction.

The building achieves a BREAM Excellent rating under BREEAM New Construction 2011. Elements of the standard where the building scored highly include energy reduction and CO2 emissions due to the efficient gas-fired Combined Heat and Power system. The building will save 30.45% of CO2 emissions compared to a notional Building Regulations 2013 building. This amounts to a saving of 244 tonnes per annum. It is worth highlighting that there are numerous benefits of using modular construction including reusability and waste reduction contributed towards meeting this target and achieving a low life-cycle environmental impact.

The project team have worked together on a number of projects and now use volumetric construction as the default methodology. Apex the fourth project in the Wembley Regeneration Area to be delivered by the developer with HTA as architects, planning and sustainability consultants and landscape architects. Because the building is student housing we know that the speed of construction makes a business case for prefabrication as it enables us to design and construct the building up to a year faster than traditional methods. This enables us to hand over the project a year earlier to the operator and it starts to make a return in its investment more quickly than projects constructed traditionally.