Designing low-energy buildings

Architects and designers are uniquely placed to take a central role in addressing the performance gap and delivering low-energy buildings. However, currently there are only a limited number of practices that have the expertise and are participating in post occupancy evaluation (POE) of their own projects. A recent survey suggested that only 3% of architecture practices undertake POE on their own housing projects. 29 Therefore the profession is not able to feed back and build virtuous circles of learning. 30 This chapter outlines why architects and designers are well placed to take this lead, and how they can develop their own processes of design and feedback.