Sustainability and Low Carbon Design
The climate emergency demands that we rethink how buildings are conceived, delivered, and used. Our Sustainability Strategy provides a clear framework for this response, shaping our design process and embedding environmental responsibility across all areas of our work.
Reiach and Hall’s commitment to sustainable practice is well established. Since the early 1990s, when we became one of the first practices to have our projects BREEAM assessed, we have actively tested, refined, and advanced our approach. As expectations, standards, and knowledge have developed, we have evolved alongside them — ensuring our work remains rigorous, relevant, and forward-looking.
We understand sustainability is an integrated and multi-layered challenge. Alongside reducing environmental impact and addressing climate change, we place equal importance on creating environments that support human health, comfort, and wellbeing. This perspective has informed our work for over fifty years. Through close collaboration with clients, we develop tailored design responses that are both operationally effective and environmentally responsible.
Our in-house expertise takes a holistic approach and draws on in-house and external expertise in Passivhaus design, carbon assessment, environmental modelling, workplace design, landscape design and environmental and structural engineering. Working collaboratively with our design team colleagues, these specialists establish project-specific sustainability objectives and performance benchmarks from the outset. We remain involved through design, construction, and occupation, enabling us to evaluate real-world performance and continually improve outcomes. In doing so, we aim to deliver architecture that is resilient, responsible, and beneficial to both people and the wider environment.
It is often quoted that 80% of the buildings that will be around in the year 2050 have already been built. This makes it imperative that we pursue strategies which adapt existing buildings to new uses, whilst simultaneously improving their energy efficiency. Retrofit and adaptive re-use projects bring significant benefits to both the environment and the local communities where they exist, as well as helping to reduce the burden on scarce resources.
For a building to be truly sustainable, it should have a long and varied life, it must be designed very specifically for its location; be a pleasure to occupy and visit; be easy to use and maintain; be inherently flexible in its occupation patterns and contribute positively to its place.
This is a high agenda, beyond counting the carbon emissions of the buildings we design. In all our projects we strive to engage this agenda at a meaningful level to ensure we are creating places and buildings of enduring value.
The word sustainability has become so overused in our public and political discourse that its meaning has been devalued. It has become shorthand for a vague set of very real concerns about our relationships to each other and the natural world around us. The most widely accepted definition of sustainability as ‘meetng the needs of the present, without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’ is perhaps the closest thing we have, to a common global mission statement. However, if we are honest with ourselves, we rarely confront the most difficult question - are we living and designing within the hard edges of our environmental boundaries? What currently passes for ‘sustainable’ design is quite often a less bad version of business as usual.
Our goal is to change this.
Collectively we need to find ways to act and begin to answer these difficult questions.
The global climate emergency has rightly focussed attention on the need to minimise both the operational and embodied carbon emissions of buildings, however our approach includes wider sustainability concerns in order to avoid carbon ‘tunnel vision’. Issues such as biodiversity, wellbeing, material scarcity, energy equality and circular design strategies are given equal weighting to carbon reduction strategies.
