Canary Wharf to get green office block

The latest office block currently under construction at London's Canary Wharf will be one of the greenest in the UK, according to the team behind the project.

The new 15-storey building at 5 Churchill Place will become investment bank Bear Stearns’ European headquarters when it is completed in May 2009, and is now expected to attain an "excellent" rating through the BREEAM environmental building ranking.

"We were aiming for a 'very good' rating, but we are now edging towards 'excellent'," said Ed Jackson of Canary Wharf Contractors, the company responsible for the project.

Jackson added that the sustainability of the building had been a major consideration from early in the design phase and that the project had relied heavily on 3D-modelling software to assess the environmental impact of the project before construction began. "To deliver sustainable design you have to consider it very early in the process," he said. "Issues like the building's orientation, which can have a big impact on energy use and CO2 emissions, have to be handled at the feasibility stage of the project."

Robert Studd of HOK said that once the original design was in place, green considerations also influenced the selection of materials. "As part of the drive to get BREEAM certification, we modelled the impact of alternative insulation materials and went for a much thicker version than originally planned," he said. "We've also got a green roof, and we decided that selecting sustainable materials was very important, so all the timber is FSC-certified."

Designing more sustainable buildings is likely to become considerably easier, according to Jon Gordzelewski of architects HOK, as the software modelling tools evolve to include more green metrics as standard. "We used Autodesk's Revit 3D-modelling software and the tools are definitely improving," he said. "As I understand it, the plan is to evolve the tools further to more clearly model a building's energy use and so on."

However, his colleague Miles Walker argued that despite the improvement in design modelling tools, there was still a considerable degree of architectural expertise that contributed to the sustainable credentials of new buildings. "It sometimes sound like you press a Revit button and you get green results," he said. "But it is not as simple as that, you need to think about sustainability right through the design process."

The news comes as a survey from Autodesk and the American Institute of Architects (AIA) revealed 90 per cent of architects now expect to include sustainable elements in their buildings by 2012.

The report found that client demand was the main driver behind this trend as companies commissioning new construction projects increasingly insist upon buildings with green credentials and lower operating costs.

AIA chief executive Christine McEntee said that the results were encouraging, but argued there still needed to be "a greater sense of urgency" if the trade group was to achieve its goal of making "sustainable design the norm in the profession".