For Church Lukas – an architecture, design and management practice – building safety and sustainability are both key areas of focus.
We spoke to Gary Matthews, their Senior Architectural Technologist, to hear how he uses NBS Chorus and NBS Source to maintain high standards and minimise risk to the practice.
Staying one step ahead
As a practice, Church Lukas has broad experience covering refurbishment projects, school facilities, residential schemes and purpose-built student accommodation. Gary sees creating solid specifications in NBS Chorus – a cloud-based specification platform – as the key to ensuring that their designs will perform and to minimising risk to the practice, particularly for higher-risk buildings.
“The purpose-built student accommodation (PBSA) sector is such a tight sector when it comes to all regulations. Therefore, our buildings need to perform to the highest standards; we need to make sure our specifications are robust and aligned to the functional requirements of the Building Regulations.”
The practice is also keen to encourage a culture of high-quality, robust specifications, and believes that this offers a competitive advantage in the PBSA sector. The practice has developed a ‘kit of parts’ strategy, with constantly evolving and improving construction details, which helps the team maintain quality across all their projects. The same philosophy is adopted for material specification, where sustainability, performance and quality of product testing are driving the creation of a quality-controlled materials library, supported by NBS clauses.
“One of our focuses is to continue to develop and maintain a robust specification for PBSA projects using NBS Chorus, that provides a benchmark we can be confident delivers compliance, is competitive and sustainable.”
Balancing planet and profit
Church Lukas takes a determined approach to ensuring that their designs not only deliver commercial and social value, but also consider the environment. The team and their clients are increasingly motivated by reducing embodied and operational carbon.
“We're trying as much as possible to design sustainably and to do that, you need to choose the right materials and methods.”
Gary has been working with the product information platform, NBS Source, to choose more sustainable materials and add them to his specifications. The platform provides immediate access to critical product data in what he calls a “fantastic addition” to his workflow.
“It’s such a smooth process. A good thing about NBS Source is being able to scroll down to the literature section of a product to see if it carries an EPD [Environmental Product Declaration], which is one of the first things we would consider for a product, alongside fire testing data and BBA [British Board of Agrément] certifications. This can save time approaching a manufacturer or supplier directly for the same information. With NBS Source, it’s live, and you can also see straight away when the product or system was last verified by the manufacturer.”
Working more efficiently
Beyond enhancing safety and sustainability, Gary and Church Lukas use NBS Chorus and NBS Source because they greatly improve the efficiency of writing specifications.
“In my career, I’ve experienced having to pick up specifications written manually without NBS Chorus and continue in that fashion, and it did take up a lot of time. So, I know first-hand how valuable a tool it is for getting a spec done in a fraction of the time.”
The ability to use building information modelling (BIM) objects directly from NBS Source has also proven to be incredibly useful for the Church Lukas team. When pushed for time, Gary can rapidly and confidently make changes to specifications, ensuring that the selected products meet both regulatory standards and design requirements.
“When there’s a BIM object in NBS Source for a particular product or system, it’s fantastic – I used one only yesterday for a roof system! It’s a very good process and means we can change a specification at the drop of a hat, as long as it’s within the NBS library. It’s a really good tool to have.”
For Church Lukas, this increased efficiency is another important way of staying ahead of their competition and ensuring that every project is delivered with performance, value and sustainability in mind.
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