Thematic articles

Angel Building - Allford Hall Monaghan Morris

Transfiguration of the Angel Building - an example of BREEAM¹ excellence

The transfiguration of the Angel Building - an example of BREEAM¹ excellence

Rapid changes in the built environment seem to provoke a diversity of architectural responses, from evasive formal explorations to active transformations of an existing situation. It is still tempting to consider architectural practice as the direct consequence of individual thinking, but as the subject of international debates about the environment, personal approaches are now subject to objective criteria set on a national scale. In the UK the Building Environmental Quality Assessment of Buildings (BREEAM) procedure has been established by the Building Research Establishment (BRE).	The rapid changes in our built environment seem to provoke a diversity of architectural responses, from elusive formal explorations to a "hands-on" engagement with the existing situation. We might still consider architectural practice as the direct result of individual thinking, yet, as it becomes ever more subject to international environmental debates, the personal approach has increasingly been submitted to objective evaluation based on national criteria. In UK the BREEAM rating is the Environmental Assessment Method (EAM) initiated by the Building Research Establishment (BRE).

1. BRE, the Building Research Establishment, established the Environmental Assessment Method (EAM) ; a similar relationship is established in France between CSTB - Centre scientifique et technique du bâtiment (Centre scientifique et technique du bâtiment) and the assessment of environmental quality (Haute Qualité Environnementale)	1 The Building Research Establishment (BRE) has produced the Environmental Assessment Method (EAM); a similar relation has been established in France between the CSTB (Centre scientifique et technique du bâtiment) and the evaluation HQE (Haute Qualité Environnementale).