'Housing Retrofit: Necessity & Avoiding Unintended Consequences' Talk by Dr Sofie Pelsmakers

"Refurbishing the Existing Housing Stock: Priorities & unintended consequences" - Talk by Dr Sofie Pelsmakers, Lecturer at Sheffield School of Architecture and Co-Founder of Architecture for Change at 'The Future of Buildings - A Retrofit Showcase' event hosted by the Carbon Neutral University Network on November 9th at the University of Sheffield.

Content:
There are around 26 million dwellings in the UK and around 2 million non-domestic buildings, the majority of which will still exist in 2050. At present, these dwellings represent around 27% of the UK’s CO2 emissions and their poorly insulated fabric means they are difficult and expensive to heat, leading to some 25,000 to 30,000 yearly cold-related excess deaths in the UK. By simply refurbishing to much higher insulation and airtightness standards, this would reduce the operational energy required just to heat our buildings by more than 60%. Dr Sofie Pelsmakers, lecturer in Environmental Design at the Sheffield School of architecture gives a brief overview of retrofit issues in the UK.

Speaker:
Dr Sofie Pelsmakers, Lecturer at Sheffield School of Architecture and Co-Founder of Architecture for Change

Dr Sofie Pelsmakers is a chartered architect with over 15 years of experience in designing, building and teaching sustainable architecture. Sofie authored ‘The Environmental Design Pocketbook’ (RIBA Publishing), a comprehensive publication which distils environmental science, legislation and guidance into one easy to use single source. This publication received commendation by the RIBA for ‘Outstanding Practice-located Research’ (2012) and was ‘Highly Commended’ for the UKGBC/PRP ‘Rising Star award’ 2013. Sofie is part-time lecturer at Sheffield School of Architecture, where she co-leads an MSc in Sustainable Architecture and is Head of Research at ECD Architects. She is currently co-authoring a Performance gap book with Judit Kimpian and Hattie Hartman. Sofie finished her PhD at UCL on the retrofit of the existing Victorian housing stock, in particular in-situ heat-flow measuring of suspended ground floors. She developed in-situ measuring techniques and undertook pilot studies to investigate the effect of insulation interventions and closing of air-bricks on floor heat loss and floor void conditions.