Climate and Sustainable Design

Climate and Sustainable Design at Foster + Partners

Sustainability is a wide-ranging subject with many definitions. Addressing crucial concerns about climate change, we believe our projects must also encompass the health and wellbeing of our communities. This has been a central theme of our work for more than five decades. We work closely with our clients to develop bespoke design solutions that are optimised for their operations and the planet.

We have specialist in-house teams for carbon impact assessments, environmental analysis, materials research, landscape and workplace design, and environmental and structural engineering. Together with the design teams, they develop sustainable frameworks and identify environmental targets for a healthier world. We follow our projects through design and construction and can monitor the building performance while in-use.

 

Retrofit

The built environment is responsible for 40 per cent of global carbon emissions. Retrofitting existing buildings is crucial to meeting our net-zero carbon targets. By sympathetically adapting existing structures, we can enhance building performance and functionality, while reducing embodied carbon content. This includes transforming old office buildings into flexible workspaces, industrial districts into retail destinations, and extending the life of historic buildings.

There is a richness to those cities where buildings of different periods and styles have grown up alongside each other. Foster + Partners has always argued in favour of reuse and renewal of historical buildings, which can be given a new lease of life through sensitive interventions. Modern interventions in historic contexts often facilitate access, allowing more people to use and appreciate the old building in a way that would never have been possible previously. In this sense, they are the ultimate compliment recognising the value of a building, while simultaneously ensuring it is viable for future generations.

Over several decades, Foster + Partners has designed contemporary additions to significant historic structures. These have sensitively extended the buildings, broadening their potential uses, improving readability and the capacity to attract new users.

Carbon Impact

Led by our sustainability team, our aim is to meet the Paris Agreement targets. Even at their highest level, current worldwide sustainability assessment methods do not achieve the agreed maximum of +1.5 degree increase in global temperatures. We have therefore developed our own comprehensive assessment, which includes the evaluation of both embodied and operational carbon, to fully assess our designs for whole life carbon impact. This measures both the construction phase and the subsequent building in-use over sixty years. The results are then analysed using our Sustainability Barometer, which records assessments of all our current projects. This holistic approach is summarised in our Sustainability Manifesto.

Environmental Approach

Led by our environmental engineering team, we assess the environmental performance of our projects and develop innovative, future-proof solutions to mitigate the impact of climate change. Learning lessons from the Covid-19 pandemic, our focus is on resilience, flexibility, health and wellbeing. Our design approach addresses sustainability holistically, from efficient use of natural resources, circular economy strategies and biophilia to thermal comfort and indoor air quality. We seek to leverage the power of design to enhance the lived experience for all.

SustainabilityContactVacancies
Sustainability

Sustainability

The principles of sustainable design have always been integral to the work of the practice.

Applied R+D

Applied R+D

The Applied R+D (Research + Development) team is an integrated multi-disciplinary team of architects and engineers, who are also expert programmers. Our expertise ranges from art, aerospace engineering, and computer science to landscape architecture, structural engineering and applied mathematics...

Materials Research Centre

Materials Research Centre

Providing an information and research service for the practice, the Materials Research Centre and the Information Centre together look at current and new materials, products, companies, technology, innovation, sustainability and technical issues. The Materials Research Centre is an in-house reference that houses over twenty thousand samples of materials and products. The Information Centre is a physical library of product literature including brochures, catalogues and technical information.

Urban Design and Landscape

Urban Design and Landscape

Designing at the urban scale is a complex undertaking, whether it involves a masterplan for a city, a regeneration scheme for a neighbourhood, or planning a new public transport system. Our team includes planners and spatial designers, economists and anthropologists, and landscape architects and mobility engineers, working together to create thriving and resilient environments. In this era of unprecedented social, technological, and environmental change, our approach anticipates the evolutionary changes and rapid transformations shaping our urban environments.

Specialist Modelling Group

Specialist Modelling Group

The Specialist Modelling Group focusses on three core areas, Geometry and Building Physics and Innovation. The Geometry team works on Complex Geometrical Modelling and Fabrication Strategies. The Building Physics team looks at the movement of natural light, air and sound, while focussing on occupant comfort. The Innovation projects include collaborative research with universities and industry partners, exploring far-reaching ideas from bio-inspired engineering to extra-planetary 3D printing.

Architecture

Architecture

We believe the best architecture comes from a synthesis of all the elements that separately comprise and inform the character of a building...

Environmental Engineering

Environmental Engineering

The Environmental Engineering group was conceived by the fundamental belief that environmental systems must be conceptualised in harmony with the architecture to support sustainable development...

Structural Engineering

Structural Engineering

The Structural team works on the design and delivery of projects all around the world. The design ethos of the team is to find the most elegant minimal resolution to the structural challenges of a particular project – to identify the ‘inevitable’ solution, where nothing more can be removed...

Workplace Consultancy

Workplace Consultancy

The Workplace Consultancy team devises strategies to help our clients achieve their long-term goals. In the context of the physical space, the crafting of this plan entails a breadth of expertise and outputs covering four main aspects: an organizational level or people...

Industrial Design

Industrial Design

Carrying out a diverse range of work, the Industrial Design team frequently works as an integral part of the overall studio, designing specific building elements...