Speaking as a guest on the industry podcast ‘Behind the Built Environment’, Cousins challenged the engineering community to lift their “eyes to the horizon” and take more account of social needs, biodiversity, and embodied carbon.

“As the electrical grid begins to decarbonise, energy efficiency is becoming less important,” she told the podcast hosted by the Building Engineering Services Association(BESA).  “We've been working in a changing context for a long time [which] means we must think hard about the questions we're asking ourselves as engineers.”

She told BESA chief executive officer David Frise that engineers were “brilliant at solving the problem once the problem is defined…but we spend a lot of time solving the problem that we defined for ourselves…a long time ago”. 

“Over my career what good looks like has changed quite a lot. If we look back five, six or seven years, none of our clients were asking for decarbonisation…now they all are.”

Serious
Cousins, who is a director of the global engineering firm Arup, said taking a broader view of engineering challenges would also help to address the serious safety issues raised by the Grenfell Tower tragedy.

She added that the public inquiry report showed costs were driven down “as quickly and as hard as they could be” [because] people involved “weren't as aware of the outside environment as they should have been”. 

“[So] what is the bigger problem that we're trying to solve? Where is the value? Some of those broader criteria, whether it's safety or climate change or society, are all about not solving just the problem that's in front of you…but how do I make a safe building that contributes to climate change mitigation that is safe in times of climate change adaptation [and] that perhaps supports biodiversity?”

Cousins, who is Arup’s Americas region chair and a group board member, urged the industry to move away from a position where “cost drives everything”.

“The best projects that I've worked on…were right at the beginning, the design goals have been set [and are affordable but are] also carbon neutral, or deliver a certain programmatic requirement, or [are] restorative of the natural environment.”

She said value should be measured on a “whole life” basis and in terms of its contribution to society.

“Is it about places that the community can gather at?” she asked. “Is it about buildings that face outwards and improve security on the street rather than inwards. Is it about buildings that have different purposes at different times of the day?

“If you can bake those things in at the…very beginning of design and say, actually, this project will be successful if it's more than just on time and on budget, then those things begin to permeate all the way through. Then it becomes much more difficult to unravel some of the individual pieces,” added Cousins.

She also believes that improving our understanding of how buildings operate and ensuring systems are more integrated will also help the industry move away from its low-cost culture.

“Value engineering works by attacking the line items that look like they're costing more than they otherwise might,” she told the BESA podcast. “If everything is…integrated, that the reason you've got a heat pump is because you want to have a fully electric building, because actually you want to be zero net carbon over a period of time [then] you've got a very different set of criteria, you're not going to suddenly say, well, the heat pump is more expensive than the chiller would have been.”

This also drives a different approach to skills, according to Cousins, because you are looking for people with a “more conceptual understanding” of how buildings work including their thermal responses which can help address wider problems like overheating.

Optimised
“There's been a tendency to emphasise the skills that are to do with keeping a piece of machinery running as opposed to keeping the whole of the building running and optimised,” she said.

In her inaugural address as CIBSE President, Cousins, who is also an Arup Fellow and previously served as deputy chair of Arup’s digital executive, called for building performance to be “reimagined” so that the full potential of building services engineers to address social issues like health, wellbeing and productivity could be realised. 

During the podcast, she encouraged BESA and CIBSE to collaborate on several issues and activities, including improving the public’s understanding of how building services engineering improves their lives.

“We do need people to understand a little bit more about what it is that enables them to live their best lives while they're sitting in buildings,” she told Frise. “More value needs to be attached to good buildings, things that keep you comfortable. Things that provide the environment for you to do the thing that you want to do. Things that mitigate climate change. Things that allow you to be healthy and well. 

“All those things are in the remit of building services engineers and contractors. Is the building properly ventilated? Is that ventilation safe? Is it comfortable? [These] are things that we should value, but we've spent an awful lot of our time in the past trying to make them disappear.”

The full podcast is available here.