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.
Sustainability
NBS Guide: Embodied Carbon Calculations
Learn how to align your carbon assessments with BIM workflows. This guide to Embodied Carbon Calculations, developed by NBS and Circular Ecology, sets out a practical, standardised approach to calculating the embodied carbon of building materials and products, and how to apply this data to BIM objects.
Must Reads
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The hidden cost of compliance: why architects are demanding a new era of product transparency
Few pieces of legislation have reshaped the UK construction industry as significantly as the Building Safety Act 2022 (BSA). Introduced to improve accountability, traceability and safety standards ...
Design and Specification
Brick slip cladding systems – the need for robust specification
This article from the NBS technical team outlines specification for brick slip technology, including history, technology, design, safety and testing.
video
When product data creates risk, AluK delivers the clarity and support architects need
The need to build more homes, more quickly, has not changed. If anything, the pressure has intensified. However, the conversation around Modern Methods of Construction has evolved.
Facade Retention
Facade retention – the removal and renewal of a building's innards, walls, columns and floors while retaining its original front or outer walls – plays an important role in preserving the ...
Design and SpecificationConstruction Products
Reduce embodied carbon from the start
Measure, compare and reduce upfront embodied carbon using trusted UK data and pre-built assemblies.
Our guests – Giles Meredith from the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) and James Ritchie from the Association of Project Safety (APS) – discuss the role of CDM coordinators, including how and when they should be appointed, how one judges competency, and how existing risks such as lead paint should (and should not) be handled.
VideoHealth and Safety
BIM and construction law
One of the many undoubted benefits of BIM is its inherent ability to reduce the potential for disputes arising from clashing programmes and design details. However, by highlighting a landmark case in ...
Digital TransformationVideo
Acoustic treatment in offices
An understanding of how sound behaves in modern offices, and how to control excessive airborne sound, or noise as it then becomes known, is essential. Through the use of computer modelling, noise ...
Design and SpecificationConstruction Products
Secured by Design
Following the release of Oscar Newman's book "Defensible Space: Crime Prevention through Urban Design" in 1972, the idea that architecture could be used to limit criminal activity became popular. ...
Design and SpecificationVideo
Intelligent proprietary specification
As part of the series of BITESized talks at the RIBA Village auditorium at Ecobuild 2013, Clair Hillier of RIBA Enterprises discusses intelligent proprietary specification.
Design and SpecificationVideo
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Mark Bew on the NBS National BIM Library
On Wednesday 21 March, NBS officially launched the National BIM Library at Ecobuild.
Digital TransformationVideo
University of Nottingham Jubilee Campus expansion
The University of Nottingham's distinctive Jubilee Campus is a development that is intended to demonstrate the University's commitment to exemplary standards of energy efficiency in its buildings.
Design and SpecificationVideo
A guide to structural inspection
Understanding buildings – why they stand up and why some fall down – can be a never-ending and fascinating study, as well as a valuable professional skill.
Construction ProductsVideo
The Construction Act
The provisions of the 2009 Act mean that a construction contract will pertain not only to written contracts but also to contracts entered into orally or contracts that are partly oral and partly ...
VideoContracts and Law
Solar power and the Feed In Tariff
The government encouraged domestic property owners to: "invest in small-scale low-carbon electricity in return for a guaranteed payment for the electricity they generate and use... as well as a ...
SustainabilityVideo
The truth about rot
Given that dry rot is one type of rot - Serpula lacrymans - and all the others are white rots, our contributors explain why increasingly fungal rots are being classified as either brown or white.