How monitoring can inform and support the retrofit of traditional buildings

Author's Biography

Caroline Rye has a background in both practical building and academic research. She completed one of the UK’s first practice-based PhDs at Napier University in 2000 and went on to work as a research fellow at the University of Bristol developing practice-as-research methodologies. In 2010 she undertook an MSc in historic building conservation and then, in collaboration with Cameron Scott, was able to combine her two interests in buildings and research through the formation of ArchiMetrics Ltd. Caroline is the author of a number of research papers and reports including The Responsible Retrofit for Traditional Buildings Report for the Sustainable Traditional Buildings Alliance (STBA) and was part of the team that delivered the STBA Retrofit Guidance Wheel. She is a technical consultant on behalf of the STBA and sits on the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings’ (SPAB) Technical Panel, for which, along with Cameron Scott, she has also undertaken research published as The SPAB Building Performance Research Reports. She has chaired the UK Centre for Moisture in Buildings Technical Working Group for monitoring and currently sits on the drafting panel for British Standards Committee CB/401-0-/01 – Building Performance Evaluation.

Cameron Scott has been working in the field of sustainable architecture for the past 30 years, establishing the design studio Cameron Scott Limited in 2002. The building research element of Cameron’s work has grown out of a desire to understand how completed projects function in reality so as to further inform the performancebased design process to optimise building quality and shorten the learning feedback loop. The aim is a functional architecture that provides a wellmoderated internal environment for the minimum of inputs while keeping constructability and low building maintenance at the front of design considerations. Archimetrics Ltd has grown out of a mutual collaboration with Caroline Rye with a shared interest in sustainable architecture. Cameron is primarily responsible for developing the research questions, methodologies, protocols and analytics used by ArchiMetrics, along with designing and building the bespoke monitoring equipment required to answer the specific questions in hand. The principles of performance-based design, construction methodology and the importance of detail underpin Cameron’s work in the fields of architecture, design and research.