A holistic approach to sustainable buildings

Buildings have major economic, environmental and social impacts on our community and the planet.  Between and quarter and a half of all greenhouse emssions result from our use of buildings.

Vision

The Sustainable Buildings Research Centre (SBRC) will be a multi-disciplinary facility that brings together a wide range of researchers to holistically address the challenges of making our buildings sustainable and effective places in which to live and work.

Our mission is to assist in the rapid decarbonization of our built environment. Thus, a major focus of the SBRC is the retrofitting of existing buildings, since replacement of existing building stock occurs at between only 1 or 2% p.a. The SBRC brings together researchers, students and industry to:

• Develop, prototype and test sustainable building technologies and designs for residential and commercial applications;
• Perform in-depth experimental and theoretical analysis of the thermal design of buildings;
• Develop architectural and structural design tools to facilitate the inclusion of ecological costing throughout the design phase of buildings (e.g. water, embodied energy, carbon);
• Investigate day-to-day behaviour of building occupants to improve our effectiveness of building use and design and improve the uptake of environmentally sustaianble technologies;
• Develop novel control systems and sensor technology for improving building performance; and
• Develop novel modelling tools to aid sustainable design.

The development of the SBRC has been made possible through generous grants from the Australian Commonwealth Governement under the Education Investment Fund (EIF) and NSW Trade & Investment under the Science Levaraging Fund (SLF).