A wide range of interesting articles that help you make informed decisions and deliver the best projects for your clients authored by our team of NBS subject specialists and construction industry contributors.
Explore the current state of sustainability in the UK construction industry based on the results from a comprehensive survey conducted by NBS.
The construction industry faces growing challenges when building on increasingly complex brownfield sites. Alongside the need for effective waterproofing, developers and contractors must now address ...
While the new building safety regime hasn’t fundamentally changed what requirements higher-risk buildings (HRBs) must meet to comply with the Building Regulations, it has significantly increased the ...
For architects and specifiers, flooring details can have a significant impact on the safety, accessibility, durability and overall performance of a building. Yet the technical considerations ...
Uniclass is set to change, including Table J – the Common Arrangement of Works Sections (CAWS). Here John Gelder, Head of content development and sustainability, outlines the replacement for CAWS.
Measure, compare and reduce upfront embodied carbon using trusted UK data and pre-built assemblies.
In this article, John Gelder explores substitution, the use of 'or equal' and its ilk, and 'deemed-to-comply' specifications, and makes a few suggestions.
Though most fabric and services systems and products can be used in facilities of all types, some are specific to a particular facility. So where does a specifier go for neutral authoritative ...
Advice on specifying has a long history, beginning perhaps with 'On Architecture' by the Roman architect Vitruvius (24 BC). However, it has usually only been covered incidentally in works on other ...
Following our article on specification, or lack of it, at Ian McGlinn's Maison d'Or 'Yes! We have no specifications', John Gelder looks at what the case tells us about inspection.
Like Nero's Domus Aurea, little remains of Ian McGlinn's Maison d'Or – though a legal (rather than archaeological) legacy lives on. John Gelder looks at what this legacy tells us about specification.
Many countries have classification systems for construction work. These are reviewed regularly, occasionally resulting in a radical reclassification – the February ICIS Newsletter described new ...
We have recently had a couple of queries about materials blacklists, which we had thought were a thing of the past. Clearly this is not the case, so John Gelder, Content development manager, revisits ...
The visible electromagnetic spectrum ranges between about 400 nm (violet) and 700 nm (red). In building, colours are rarely pure spectral colours (like the yellow from low pressure sodium vapour ...
A lot of teaching goes on in lecture theatres, but how much learning? A 1999 study by David Fleming, now at Northumbria University, and John Storr, at Sheffield Hallam University, explored how ...
Adaptable housing is a subset of the open building philosophy (1) which focuses on designing housing so it is flexible enough to accommodate future special needs users. This ties into the concept of ...