HiPerBuild - sustainable buildings in universities and colleges

The HiPerBuild programme takes forward HEEPI's decade long work on more sustainable buildings in universities and colleges. Its name is an abbreviation of 'high performance building', which is one that meets all functional requirements well.

We prefer this term because it signals that environmental and social issues are often strategic rather than technical, need to be integrated into design from the earliest stages (i.e. shouldn't be delegated to 'green building' specialists), and can be synergistic with other building objectives. See the Overview section for more discussion of this topic.

The HiPerBuild initiative aims to:

• Highlight, and stimulate take-up of, opportunities to minimise the environmental footprint, and maximise the social benefits, associated with new and refurbished buildings in further and higher education;
• Drive improvement through benchmarking; identification and dissemination of good practice; and raising awareness of regulatory, stakeholder and other demands; and
• Provide a specialist knowledge resource for energy intensive facilities such as data centres and laboratories (exploiting synergies with the SusteIT and S-Lab programmes).

Past outputs to support this include our sector-side project management of the BREEAM Higher Education scheme; publications on building energy benchmarking, and the business benefits and practical achievement of high performance buildings; and guides to regulation.

The most relevant of these can be found on other sections of this site. Our legacy site, www.heepi.org.uk also has pre-July 2009 presentations from the many events we have held on the topic, as well as older materials.