Building Vitality
Vitality: To permeate with life, health, energy, and activity.What is Building Vitality?
Building vitality is the meeting of two circumstances: existing buildings and sustainable practices. Both share a mutual passion for helping people to thrive in and feel connected to their surrounding environments. What exists today in the built environment is so important to the social and cultural sustainability of our lives, while our responsibility towards conserving energy, water, and materials is critical for the protection of our natural environment. Our building stock makes up the majority of energy use, waste, and omissions, leaving a critical gap in the path towards a more sustainable future.
Why is building vitality so important to us?
Socio-cultural benefits:
- Safekeeping of memories, heritage, and community identity,
- Enhance community spaces, and
- Provide educational opportunities and leadership by example for future practices.
Economic benefits:
- Promote lifecycle costing,
- Develop skilled jobs and craftsmanship, and
- Support local and regional communities and businesses.
Environmental benefits:
- Inherent sustainability of traditional construction theories and methods,
- Optimize energy and water,
- Reuse and recycle materials, and conserve embodied energy and carbon,
- Reduce waste, and
- Protect natural environmental resources for future generations.
“We cannot build our way to sustainability, we must conserve our way to it.” Carl Elefante
Our vision for SableARC’s ‘Building Vitality’ division is to create a sustainable built environment while fostering resilient communities. We wholeheartedly believe that breathing new life and energy into our buildings contributes to the activity and longevity of a place. We understand the potential of architecture to generate an energy between the physical materials of building construction and the occupants that inhabit it.
Our buildings should strengthen our everyday lives through health and happiness. By revitalising the current building stock, we liberate pressures from the social, economic, and environmental influences around us. But our buildings cannot do this on their own and need a little help from us to breathe new life, health, energy, and activity.
How can we help revitalize your building?
Evaluate
Evaluate and understand the building: its construction and materials, and significance of its history, context, and/or heritage. It is also critical to understand its current condition and where the building is underperforming.
Develop
2
Develop a vision and understand goals for the future of the building, based on stakeholder consultation and feedback.
Devise
3
Devise a plan to instill vitality in the building that is sensitive to cultural, economic, and environmental influences.
Implement
4
Implement ideas and best practices through documentation and drawings.
Protect
5
Ensure resiliency into the future by establishing proper maintenance protocols.
