The topic of this year’s RIBA Conservation Forum is ‘Dealing with Complexity. The Forum aims to cast aside the contrived effortlessness that dominates architectural communication to clients and magazines alike to take a deeper look into how architects deal with complexity in investigation and decision making with heritage buildings. Problems produce solutions it is argued, however only if one understands that there is a problem, its nature and the parameters available to overcome it. Through relevant investigation and problem-solving this Forum will highlight the importance of both sourcing and citing scientific work to justify your conclusions – or indeed compromises – to clients, conservation officers, building control and under the Building Safety Act 2022, the occupants of the building 30 years hence.

The Forum will be chaired by RIBA Conservation Steering Group Chair Alan Chandler and will have three speakers presenting:
Marion Baeli of the Passivhaus Trust will focus on the complexities of insulating solid wall properties within a whole house retrofit approach; Rachel Owens of the National Retrofit Hub will be talking through some of the research the NRH working groups have been looking at around enabling the local delivery of domestic retrofit at scale; and Caroline Rye of ArchiMetrics will be providing an insight into the use of measurements of building conditions and performance as a means to provide information to architects and others within a design team in order to inform design decisions and reduce or mitigate risks.