This week's guest is Caroline Ashe Brady of KORE Retrofit in Ireland, one of the objectively successful one-stop-shop retrofit providers to have emerged over the past few years.Caroline is a business leader who we’re a proper fan of, so apologi

The challenging life of a retrofit coordinator: problems with process, products, and performance, with returning champion Lisa Pasquale

20 days ago 1h 13m

Returning champion Lisa Ann Pasquale rejoins us on Zero Ambitions to talk about dogs and retrofit. Mainly retrofit though.Informed by Lisa's experiences as a retrofit coordinator, technical lead at RetrofitWorks, and Technical Manager at The Re

What should we do to get more women into retrofit? Well, we should get behind 'Her Retrofit Space', with Ellora Coupe (Her Own Space and now Her Retrofit Space)

27 days ago 1h 29m

Returning champion Ellora Coupe joins us to talk about the recent report that Her Own Space has published about the place of women in the retrofit sector, which is heartening, insightful, and damning in equal measure. A great piece of work that

Building better performance: raising construction standards on site and in education, with Joseph Little (TUD)

Jun 4th, 2024 1h 22m

This week we're going by Joseph Little, Head of Construction & Building Performance in the School of Architecture, Building and Environment at TU Dublin. He joined us to talk about the journey he's been on leading the MSc in Building Performanc

Retrofit as a movement for social change (there's more to it all than fabric and finance), with Dan Hill (Dark Matter Labs)

May 27th, 2024 1h 13m

This week we're thinking about retrofit differently with Dan Hill from Dark Matter Labs (DML). Or rather, we're talking about retrofit's potential to become a movement for social change.In reality, retrofit is about much more than fabric and ec

Place-based hybrid finance to rebuild Ukraine and catalyse better building standards everywhere, with Iva Merheim Eyre (SMARTER4EU)

May 20th, 2024 1h 11m

This week we're joined by Iva Merheim Eyre from SMARTER4EU to talk about her recently published report the Catalogue of Good Practices, a document that details a variety of place-based hybrid finance models that have been used to rebuild and re

Peter Rickaby returns to ZAP: a lot of words about energy, retrofit, and natural building materials, all the way from South Africa

May 13th, 2024 1h 20m

Jeff and Dan are joined by Dr. Peter Rickaby again. We were due a catch up so we recorded the conversation because he's always interesting. Peter should need little introduction, so we'll just say he's our favourite retrofit expert (sorry every

The UK has a weird relationship with heat pumps: under appreciated influencers, wild pricing, and bad vibes. With Andrew Sissons (Nesta)

May 6th, 2024 1h 21m

This week we're joined by Nesta's Deputy Mission Director, Andrew Sissons, to discuss his take on why the UK has such a weird relationship with heat pumps.It was inspired by an excellent Twitter thread on the subject that gained quite a bit of

The UK has a weird relationship with heat pumps: under appreciated influencers, wild pricing, and bad vibes. With Andrew Sissons (Nesta)

May 6th, 2024 1h 21m

Building with straw on a continental scale and experiencing retrofit as a resident. With Cypren Edmunds (European Straw Building Association)

Apr 29th, 2024 1h 16m

The other week we had a chance to have a conversation with Cypren Edmunds, President of the European Straw Building Association about building with straw, experiences in retrofit, and the meandering path that led him to the green building trade

The energy performance of buildings matters, to me and EU and everyone you know, with Ciarán Cuffe (MEP)

Apr 22nd, 2024 51m 4s

The Recast Energy Performance of Buildings Directive is now enshrined in EU law, which has big implications for the built environment everywhere. Even the South East of England.To mark the occasion and get the lowdown on what this all means, we

A new way to measure performance, negative energy use, and learning from disaster zones, with Kate Crawford (KLH Sustainability)

Apr 15th, 2024 1h 17m

Kate Crawford is a building nerd who is obsessed with measuring performance. She's currently, Technical Director at KLH Sustainability, a multidisciplinary consultancy working in the built environment. Kate has a very interesting background in

Designing for deconstruction using natural building materials. With Chloe Donovan (Natural Building Systems)

Apr 8th, 2024 1h 12m

This week we're talking about modular construction and Natural Building Systems with MD Chloe Donovan.Chloe is a really interesting character with a fascinating product that she's bringing to market. Unusually, she's a farmer who got into build

Monitoring will make your buildings be worth more money, Utopi has proved it, with Falk Bleyl (CTO at Utopi)

Apr 1st, 2024 1h 20m

Up next we're speaking with Falk Bleyl, CTO at Utopi, about their sensor-based data platform technology. He describes it as an ESG platform which is true but it massively underplays the true value of what their product offers. Heads up, normall

“Use less stuff”: embodied carbon, value chains and the potential for change in the Declaration de Chaillot. With Lloyd Alter (Carbon Upfront), Kelly Alvarez Doran (Ha/f Climate Design), and Will Arnold (The Institution of Structural Engineers)

Mar 26th, 2024 1h 16m

Lloyd has been in Paris. He came back very enthused and excited by his experience there and wanted to communicate why to our listeners.“In the face of the climate emergency, a swift transition of the buildings sector is a direct requirement to

What do we do about ‘the office’? A retrofit challenge we don't speak about enough. With Harry Browne and Séamus Guidera (RKD)

Mar 19th, 2024 1h 20m

This week we got into an area of retrofit that feels neglected: commercial space. It's a subject we definitely touch upon but never really get into , so in order to remedy that we're getting stuck in.First up is a conversation with architects H

Fundamental problems in building design and how we manage thermal comfort, with Susan Roaf (Heriot-Watt; ICARB)

Mar 12th, 2024 1h 33m

We are delighted to bring you a conversation with Professor Emeritus Susan Roaf, of Heriot-Watt University this week to talk about a bunch of fundamental problems in building design and the management of thermal comfort. She is a wonderful gues

Fabric fifth: rethinking the hierarchy of retrofit, with Nigel Banks (Octopus Energy)

Mar 5th, 2024 1h 10m

This week we're joined by Nigel Banks, Technical Director - Zero Bills & Low Carbon Homes at Octopus Energy.Nigel joined us to discuss his recent article: Fabric Fifth, a slightly polemical riposte to fabric-first dogma, and an interesting phil

Retrofit: "We need to tackle low hanging fruit first", so what does that mean? With Fionn Stevenson

Feb 27th, 2024 1h 28m

We were blessed to enjoy a great conversation about retrofit and what we should consider our priorities, with the vastly experienced retrofit firebrand Fionn Stevenson.It was a challenging, surprising, and free-wheeling conversation spurred by

Natural materials, healthier homes, and the culture of sustainable building, with Will Kirkman (Ecomerchant)

Feb 20th, 2024 1h 16m

We enjoyed the company of Ecomerchant’s Will Kirkman a business that's specialised in sustainable and natural building materials for the building trade and consumers.We mainly rambled our way around the culture of building in the UK, how embodi

Engineering low-impact buildings and advice from self build, with Tara Fraser (Build Collective)

Feb 13th, 2024 1h

This week is all about the challenges of low-impact building in the sphere of self build with Tara Fraser, a chartered civil and structural engineer, and a director of Build Collective in Bristol. On the recommendation of former guest (and Tara

Shady business #2: shading for housing in a changing climate, with Tom Dollard (Pollard Thomas Edwards)

Feb 6th, 2024 1h 28m

Part two of our series on shading, this time with a return appearance from Tom Dollard of Pollard Thomas Edwards who joined us in January 2023 to talk about lazy thinking. Ostensibly, this time we met to talk about the Good Homes Alliance desig

A view from COP28, and relearning how to be an architect for after the Oil Age, with Kelly Alvarez Doran (Half Climate Design; Architecture 2030 Senior Fellow)

Jan 30th, 2024 1h 21m

With us this week is new friend, Kelly Alvarez Doran, via an introduction from Lloyd to talk about his experiences at COP28 and his carbon reduction consultancy Ha/f Climate Design that's challenged itself to reduce Canadian construction's emis

Conservation-led retrofit and energy efficiency for working buildings, with with Heidi Hopper-Duffy and David Hughes (Iarnród Éireann)

Jan 23rd, 2024 57m 32s

This one is about conservation-led retrofit and the retrofit of commercial (or institutional) building stock. We were invited to see a recent Iarnród Éireann (Irish Railway) retrofit project and meet with Heidi Hopper-Duffy (Environmental & Sus

The cost of sustainability, accounting for language, and the taxonomy, with Archie O'Donnell (KOSMOS)

Jan 16th, 2024 57m 42s

The first of our Dublin field recordings is with Archie O'Donnell a long-time face green building in Ireland, a fella who Jeff has a lot of time for, and someone Alex and I hadn't met yet. It was a good call. Originally trained as an architect