Architect Gone Rogue - Zinc Week 7

For myself, friends, family, former colleagues, future colleagues, clients, collaborators, acquaintances, investors, interested bystanders picked up on the way and other generally nosey people...

This is the journey of an Architect gone rogue and trying something different.

The Funding Landscape

It goes without saying, but is equally worth regularly reminding ourselves, that the Zinc Venture Builder programme is designed to create venture capital-backed businesses, not lifestyle businesses. Understanding the funding landscape and the nature of VC is key to understanding the expectations of scale and ambition that will fall upon the businesses that ultimately pitch for and receive investment ??

Alex Cheswick and Hannah Abdel-Hadi reminded the cohort of this in a talk about the funding landscape and how VC funds operate in terms of expected returns and fund cycles. To supplement this, upon the recommendations of Jonathan Lipton I've been reading Secrets of Sandhill Road and Venture Deals. Day to day, the Sifted email newsletter and their climate-tech focussed variation keeps my contextual reading list filled up ??

National Building Database

The Department for Energy Security and Net Zero has commissioned the Building Stock Lab at the UCL Energy Institute and partners to create a new National Building Database to 'understand buildings and their energy consumption in the UK'.

What exactly the database will be, how it will be used and what effect it will have when the research project concludes in 2025 still sounds ambiguous, but at concept level it sounds like something that should exist.

Health Monitoring in Buildings

Aside from energy consumption, for all of the rhetoric and PR around 'creating healthy buildings', evidenced in a number of industry annual reports - naming no names - this week stayce cavanaugh and I learnt that beyond vague sounding 'air quality sensors', seemingly very little exists in the area of building intelligence and reporting on the healthiness of internal environments and the potential effects these have on human health.

As healthcare systems appear to be moving towards or are at least aware that interoperability is important, 'smart building' systems, driven by ESG reporting on TCFD requirements, seem to be mainly focussed on the energy efficiency of building services systems, without focussing on the energy efficiency of the fabric of buildings themselves - hence why Architects always argue for a fabric-first approach rather than bolt on tech solutions for energy generation / supply.

The one question that springs to mind is why there is no 'H' (health) in ESG. There is little regard currently for the effect that a wide range of indoor environmental factors have on health. Most 'smart' buildings aren't actually that smart, and they're not really about the buildings either.

Real estate is the world’s biggest asset class at a value of $379.7 trillion in 2022 according to Savills. As an Architect, I am aware that beyond the rarely considered RIBA Stage 7 Post Occupancy Evaluation, which might incorporate a range of one off expensive and dated in-situ tests, which most building owners or occupiers do not do, we have no effective real-time way of measuring the physical condition of our building stock or the effect of indoor environments on human health. Given the level of attention paid to other asset classes, this seems like Victorian medicine. To be continued...

The Human Exposome

During an impromptu meeting in the hallway, which seems to be fairly typical of the free flowing conversations that spring up around the Zinc office, Dr Abhinav Bhansali introduced me to the concept of the Exposome, which as illustrated below, is the concept of health viewed as a result of all environmental exposures since conception. In future, as AI takes over and digital twins pop up everywhere from buildings to people, the conversation led us to ponder whether or not it was science fiction or technologically not that far off to devise a human health passport informed by the sum of one's measured exposures aka the Exposome.

Wastemen

This week the self-named wastemen of the Zinc cohort explored currently available localised waste to energy systems including those utilised by BioFactory and Heru.

Thanks to Eleanor Akers of Innovative Energy Consultants for a valuable conversation around the science, industry and routes to market.

Next week we plan to discuss with commercial building operators the types, volumes and costs of commercial waste in order to understand where potential opportunities for circular systems might exist in commercial buildings.

Committing

Week 7 saw the first batch of the Zinc Venture Builder 7 cohort 'matches'. The Love Island part of the programme is in full flow. Pairs are forming and honing in on subject areas to dig deeper into. No pressure...

Thanks

Cyrus Ordoobadi + Joss Rogers and Mehrnaz Ghojeh for great P2P talks on carbon credits and opportunities at city & ocean scale ??

stayce cavanaugh for finally forcing me into The Standard and for fun Founders Questions ??

Guy Naor , Natalia Baltazar , Mehrnaz Ghojeh , Oliver Knight , Cyrus Ordoobadi for Christmas party planning ????????

Vicki Havercroft Dixon for linking me up with Southampton University Hospital Waste Department to explore circular waste systems ???

Thought of the Week

It is hard to tick all of the boxes