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Beware of bats this Halloween as over the winter months bats hibernate to stay out of the cold weather and residential buildings, in particular, present an ideal warm roosting site for female bats to rear their young.

Leading property consultancy Galbraith reports that bats in buildings are an ever-increasing problem when it comes to undertaking renovation works.

Scotland is home to nine species of bats and all have European protection. As such, special consideration has to be given to them when undertaking building projects where bats have taken up home, as not only do bats have strong legal protection, their roosts do too.

Bats are woodland animals, but many species have come to use roosting sites in buildings as the availability of natural roosting sites in trees has fallen. They have well established traditions and tend to return to the same sites year after year. Bats use buildings such as houses, churches, bridges and schools.

Galbraith has advised a number of clients on how to deal with bats and other protected species whilst undertaking building projects, particularly in the rural sector where bats thrive. Special measures have to be implemented to adhere to ecological legislation and project design has to be carefully considered where bats have been found to be occupying a building.  Failure to comply with legislation can lead to criminal prosecutions.

In many cases a series of ecology surveys will be required to be carried out by specialist ecologists, over a period from May to August when bats are out of hibernation. Before works can commence work may need to be licenced by Scottish Natural Heritage.

James Taylor, of the Galbraith building surveying team, said: “When planning any project that creates a risk of disturbance to bats, or indeed any other protected species during their breeding cycle, it is vital to start preparations early and plan ahead.

“There are a range of measures that can be undertaken including the timing of the work to avoid the breeding season, installation of bat boxes to re-house any bats found during the work and specifying the installation of lead slates in new roofs to maintain access for bats in future.

“The use of under slate breathable membranes can be problematic where bats are present as bats can become entangled in the membrane. Therefore, the design of the roof has to be carefully considered and the introduction of alternative roof felts and roof ventilation factored in, depending on the roof structure and design.”

 

Ecologist, Sabina Ostalowska of Bowland Ecology, said: “We have worked with Galbraith on building projects where protected species, most commonly bats, have been found to be roosting. The understanding of wildlife legislation and responsibilities with regard to protected species is an essential component of managing projects. The awareness of bat conservation issues by property firms along with the ‘can do attitude’ not only ensures that the project is completed on time and on budget but also helps to conserve this important protected species.

“Bats are quite commonly found in houses, both new and old and it is very rare for bats to cause any damage to properties. In most cases, people don’t even know that they share the house with bats. However, maintenance and alteration work to buildings can adversely affect bats and their roosts.

“Bats and their roosts are protected by law, which means that it is illegal to disturb, kill or injure them or to damage, destroy or obstruct access to a bat roost. Having bats does not mean that work to buildings cannot take place, but expert advice will be needed on how to proceed. Early engagement with a licensed bat ecologist is essential to avoid extra delays and costs to the project.”

The Galbraith building surveying team has recently advised on:

 

• Domestic property extension project in Perthshire –Acting as project manager and working alongside the client’s architect, Galbraith helped ensure collaboration between the findings of ecologist report and the architects designs to deliver roost disturbance mitigation requirements of the bat licence. During the project bats were observed with the ecologist engaged to handle to bats and relocate them into earlier positioned bat boxes. The final design of the building incorporated slate vents to maintain access to potential roosts in the future.

 

• Category B listed chapel re-roofing project in Midlothian – this involved the replacement of the defective roof covering with new Burlington Blue/Grey slates. In this instance the client of Galbraith appointed its architect to obtain Listed Building Consent and Planning Permission with Galbraith project managing the procurement of the works and management whilst on site. Galbraith worked closely with the ecologist as they prepared the mitigation plan, licence application and oversaw all works on site. No bats were uncovered during the work however new access slates were provided to retain access to the likely roost locations.

 

• Cawder Golf Club, Bishopbriggs – Category A listed building which required an extensive programme of external fabric repairs in 2017. Bats were found to be roosting in the external features of the building associated with roof including under slates, behind lead flashings and in cervices within stonework at the wallheads. Before work on this project could commence, a full mitigation plan was required which included an ecological survey conducted by Bowland Ecology and SLR Consulting. Disturbance was kept to a minimum during works; there was no loss of roosting opportunities in the area and there was no detriment to the favourable local conservation status of bats. Bat boxes, suitable for the species identified on site, were erected in advance of works in mature trees to compensate the loss of roosting sites. The works were carried out under European Protected Species Licence issued by Scottish Natural Heritage.

 

• A demolition project of a dilapidated farm steading in the Scottish Borders – the steading was not suitable for modern farming and had deteriorated to such an extent that it had become unsafe. As part of the instruction, Galbraith organised for bat surveys to be undertaken and ensured that the correct mitigating action was taken to rehouse the bats to bat boxes prior to the demolition.

GAILBRAITH

The Government has made a commitment to more new homes being built in England using modern methods of construction (MMC).

A centre for excellence is to be created for MMC across the North of England and Homes England is providing £38.2 million to help build 2,000 new homes in the sector.

According to Housing Minister Esther McVey the region has the potential to become a world leader in the creation of modern, high-quality homes using MMC. During a visit to Factory 2050, part of the University of Sheffield Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre, she met with major developers, small businesses and academics.

The funding from the Government’s housing agency will be spread across six local authorities to speed up the construction of 2,072 homes across the country.

 

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The deals are the latest to be awarded through the government’s £350 million Local Authority Accelerated Construction programme, which was launched to accelerate the delivery of local authority housing schemes and encourages the use of MMC.

‘We must invest in this new technology. It’s as simple as that. The benefits are clear. Some modular homes can be built in a factory over a week. And assembled on site in a day.
Industry has told us some homes built using modern methods can have 80% fewer defects and heating bills up to 70% lower,’ McVey said.

‘Homes built using modern methods can be of higher quality, greener and built to last.
I want to see a housing green revolution. In the north of England where the first industrial revolution began,’ she explained.

‘With our emphasis on safety, quality and beauty, we could be the global leaders in housing standards. And if we get it right, once the industry matures it could be worth an estimated £40 billion to this country. A new post-Brexit industry,’ she pointed out.

‘To build all these new homes we will need a brand-new workforce to make these homes offsite. Skilled, high quality jobs, for life. The north of England has the potential to be the construction capital of the country for this new technology, and we need to fully embrace this,’ she added.

She also pointed out that it could see the creation of a ‘construction corridor’ and that in order to ensure that the industry has the skills it needs to keep up with advances in technology coming down the line, the Government will encourage business to link up with academics across the North – sharing expertise and working together.

According to Nick Walkley, chief executive of Homes England, there are enormous benefits to MMC from allowing high quality homes to be built more quickly to addressing labour and skills shortages and improving energy efficiency.

‘It is vital that there is continued investment in it. The Local Authority Accelerated Construction programme supports local authorities to prepare sites for the construction of much-needed new homes and prioritises the use of modern methods of construction to increase the build pace by an average of 40%,’ he said.

Mark Farmer, chair of the MMC Working Group, believes that the UK has a fantastic opportunity to become a true world leader in the advanced manufacturing of new homes. ‘We urgently need to better assure building safety, improve quality, reduce carbon and offer much more consumer choice and protections,’ he said.

‘These improvements will only be achieved if we fundamentally readdress the way we design and deliver new homes. As part of achieving this aim, the establishment of a centre of excellence for modern methods of construction in the North of England will leverage what is already a growing part of the regional economy,’ he explained.

‘I am pleased that Government is driving this important initiative and I look forward to helping make this a success in coordination with all key stakeholders,’ he added.

Modular construction, home-sharing platforms and rental tools could be the answer to housing challenges in the US, believes Nate Loewentheil of venture capital firm Camber Creek.

At a time when macroeconomic and political forces are aggravating the challenges of affordable housing in the US, a new set of technologies, including modular construction, digitally enabled home-sharing and new financial tools for renters, are helping reduce housing costs and expand housing access.

There are a number of reasons why city policy-makers should encourage these new companies by inviting them to pilot new technologies, using city contracting power and reducing regulatory burdens.

 

Worsening problem

According to Harvard’s Joint Centre for Housing Studies, approximately one-third of US households are cost-burdened by housing, and more than a quarter of US renters spend more than half their income on housing. Current trend lines suggest the problem is getting worse.

According to an analysis of home prices by the National Association of Realtors, every single major metropolitan area grew less affordable between 2017 and 2018 (the latest year for which the housing affordability index is available).

Depending on your perspective, you can ascribe the challenges in the housing market to general economic conditions, to local regulations, or to federal policy. The market for new housing is shaped in large part by the costs of construction, especially wages. During a booming economy, construction wages increase sharply.

 According to the Federal Reserve of St Louis, hourly construction wages have risen more than 20 per cent since 2012, from $25.50 to $30.75. At a broader level, wages for millions of working Americans are simply too low to meet the prevailing costs of safe, adequate housing.

Starting during the New Deal, the Federal government stepped in to fill this gap and subsidise housing for lower-income Americans. For the past few decades, however, federal policies have generally shifted against low-income renters, aggravating the affordability crisis.

Just in the past few years, according to the Urban Institute, the share of low-income renters with housing needs receiving federal assistance dropped from 24 per cent in 2005 to 21 per cent in 2015.

 

Local regulations can severely aggravate (or ameliorate) the challenge. For example, San Francisco has some of the most restrictive zoning policies in the country, which has led to a crisis of affordability. To afford to buy the median home in San Francisco, a family has to be making $198,000 per year.

 

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Lessons from history

Across time and geographies, technology has served as a counter-weight, consistently driving down housing costs, improving quality and expanding access.

As historian Kenneth Jackson explains in the book Crabgrass Frontier, balloon framing, a new construction method developed in the 1830s, allowed amateur carpenters to use standard schematic models, standard wood products and mass-manufactured nails to quickly build long-lasting, stable homes, dramatically reducing housing construction costs during the middle decades of the 19th century.

After World War Two, builders like Levitt & Sons applied new industrial techniques of mass manufacturing to home production, with each worker taking responsibility for a single task and working across multiple building sites, like an assembly line in reverse, again driving down costs.

Other technological innovations – like steel and reinforced concrete – made it possible to build larger and taller apartment buildings, bringing down per-unit costs.

Today, new technologies promise similar benefits for homeowners and renters, especially modular construction and home-sharing platforms. New financial tools are also helping more individuals access quality rental homes and build financial stability.

As the New York Times recently reported, in high-end markets, building a unit of low-income housing can cost as much $500,000. One alternative is modular housing, where standardised panels, rooms or apartments are built offsite. Modular housing can reduce the costs of quality control and inspection, avoid weather-related slowdowns and provide certainty for developers concerned about the timing of project completion.

 

Chicago-based construction company Skender, for example, is deploying modular homes for developers around the Windy City. They are one example among literally dozens, including Blokable, Factory OS, Boxabl and Indwelligent.

City and county governments can encourage modular construction by ensuring that building codes allow for modular buildings and by providing expedited permitting.

 

Relevance of the sharing economy

 

New construction is one part of the puzzle but there is a vast untapped resource: spare rooms in existing homes. Homeowners have been letting rooms for rent since there were homes but historically the transaction costs to rent out a room were high: advertising, screening and collecting rent.

The rise of the sharing economy has reduced those costs. Companies like PadSplit and Nesterly are helping homeowners split up their homes into multiple units or rent out spare bedrooms – of which there are at least 50 million in the US. In the process, they are creating new low-cost rental inventory, often of higher quality and in better locations than the alternatives. Cities can encourage room and home-sharing by updating regulations around rental properties and through tax policies.

For low-income renters, the biggest challenge may be accessing housing in the first place – and keeping a home once it is rented. A new set of companies are helping low-income families navigate the rental landscape at every step of the journey. OneApp provides renters with a list of apartments that will accept their credit and criminal background status, helping avoid costly application fees.

RentLogic gives renters new tools to evaluate buildings before they rent, avoiding absentee or derelict landlords. Jetty offers landlords a surety bond that allows potential renters to pay a one-time fee instead of a security deposit, helping lower-income families access a broader range of apartments.

The fee is usually around 20 per cent of the security deposit. Till, a company founded in 2018, provides short-term loans to renters to meet rent and avoid eviction on terms far cheaper than traditional payday loans.

Together these companies and others are offering a new rental roadmap that can meaningfully improve the lives of low-income Americans.

Modular construction, home-sharing platforms and rental tools are only three examples of the technologies that are helping to lower costs, improve quality and expand access to housing in the US.

Even as labour markets continue to tighten and federal support for low-income housing grows scarcer, cities and towns around the US can encourage these new companies and others like them to start making housing more affordable today.

 

Source: Smart Cities World

 

Solstice Arts Centre, Navan, Ireland by Grafton Architects, winners of the 2020 RIBA gold medal. Photograph: ©Ros Kavanagh

The Dublin cooperative, known for brutalist buildings that create generous open spaces, is only the second women-led practice to win the prize.

 

Grafton Architects, the Dublin practice led by Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara, has been named as the recipient of the 2020 RIBA gold medal, the UK’s highest honour for architecture. It marks just the second time in the award’s 172-year history that the prize has been given to a women-led firm, following Zaha Hadid’s win in 2016.

It says a lot about the duo that their practice is named not after themselves, but the street in which they set up their office. For Grafton, place is more important than personality, and making good buildings a higher priority than theory, rhetoric or appearing in magazines.

 

Architecture biennale 2018: all hail the new queens of Venice

If Farrell and McNamara don’t fit the usual celebrity architect mould, their buildings also feel of another era. They are interested in weight, mass, and the play of light on hefty volumes of concrete and stone. They sculpt spaces from great mineral slabs and soaring buttresses, carving out volumes in a manner reminiscent of heroic brutalist buildings of the postwar era. Their structures sometimes have an archaic, primitive quality, providing robust armatures for any number of different uses that might occur within their walls over the coming centuries that they look designed to endure. In a world of lightweight frames and clip-on cladding systems, this is solid architecture that is built to last.

 

Grafton’s medal win follows the award of the inaugural RIBA international prize in 2016 for the “best new building in the world”, which went to their jaw-dropping building for the Universidad de Ingeniería y Tecnología (UTEC) in Lima, Peru. Standing above a motorway like a chunk of a stadium, the muscular concrete structure provides laboratories and classrooms in a vertiginous stack of terraces, connected by open walkways and meandering social spaces, feeling like a true extension of the city, cleft from the hillside.

 

“We like to create spaces you couldn’t design consciously, things that just happen somehow,” McNamara told me at the time. “Rather than thinking of a space and then finding a structure for it, we make a structure and that, in turn, makes a space.” They say they are interested in “the spaces in between, which haven’t been asked for in the brief” and describe their architecture as a kind of “scaffolding”, a non-prescriptive framework on which lives and events can be played out.

 

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Selected to curate the Venice Biennale in 2018, they set the theme as “Freespace”, which they described as “a generosity of spirit and a sense of humanity at the core of architecture’s agenda”. They spoke of the “free and additional spatial gifts” that architecture can offer – a core idea of their own buildings, which often feature generous, open, free-form spaces to be occupied as people see fit. Steps, benches, terraces and broad landings loom large. Current projects in the works for universities, including the London School of Economics, Kingston University and Toulouse, are all conceived as open, inviting forums.

 

Source: The Guardian