Episode 230 - Soft Landings

So let's start with the basics.

What do we mean when we refer to the term soft landings? Soft landings is, at its core, a strategy for closing the gap between how a building was designed to perform and how it actually performs once people are using it.

That gap, often called the performance gap, has been a persistent, well-documented problem in construction, whereby buildings get designed to a set of environmental, operational, and energy targets, but nobody goes back to check whether the building is actually delivering what it was designed to deliver.

As a result, post-occupancy evaluations, when they have been carried out, have repeatedly shown that buildings underperform against their design intentions, sometimes very significantly.

So this is where soft landings come in to prevent that.

The idea is that the transition from construction into occupation should be planned from the very beginning of a project, not bolted on at handover.

But it requires the client to commit to a soft landings approach early so that budget is allocated for it, and so that appointment documents and briefing information include the right requirements from day one for it.

So things like the information needed for commissioning, training, and facilities management are usually required to feed into it.

So the soft landings framework was developed by the BSRIA, which is the Building Services Research and Information Association, and its roots go back to the work of architect Mark Way, who researched the concept in the 2000s with support from an industry group and Cambridge University's Estates Department.

So BSRIA published the first soft landings framework in 2009, working with the Usable Buildings Trust.

It has been revised since a number of times, with the most notable one in 2018, when the framework moved from five stages to six phases.

So the BSRIA deliberately moved away from the word stage to phases because soft landings isn't tied to a particular plan of work.

It's about clusters of activity that happen at certain points in a project, regardless of which procurement route or work plan you're using.

So these six phases are inception and briefing, design, construction, pre-handover, initial aftercare, and extended aftercare and post-occupancy evaluation.