Services

The planning and design of sustainable communities requires a high degree of integrated thinking and the application of experience to site-specific challenges. The team at Co-Perform can help at a number of levels including engineering-type calculations for energy, water, carbon and materials assessments, preparation of design advice to help shape decision making and options analysis, as well as evaluation of schemes against applicable performance benchmarks.

Our primary objective is to help you navigate a path through the planning process and to remove as many obstacles as we can. We have trusted relationships with a diverse range of relevant authorities and a clear understanding of their values, policy frameworks and how they make decisions. These relationships and experience across many projects helps us to advise you on any necessary design modifications and/or potential risks so that they can be addressed very early in the design process.

Many years of experience has taught us that computational modeling needs to be used appropriately and carefully to ensure that it supports an agile design process that is required to achieve a well-integrated design solution. All of our building analysis is tailored to the specific project requirements and is used to supplement, not replace, the experience of the design team. By using streamlined analysis processes we ensure that design options can be readily investigated at an early stage whilst ensuring that the final design meets all of the necessary compliance requirements.

The team at Co-Perform has a great depth of experience when it comes to the design of sustainable buildings in Australia and overseas. We appreciate that designing an innovative green building can present unique and complex challenges that require sophisticated engineering solutions, but we also know that sometimes it’s just about good design and getting the basics right. Our priority is to make sure that our role in the design process is clearly articulated and tailored to the needs of the project without introducing any unnecessary complications.

Each year seems to herald the arrival of another rating system for evaluating building performance and at Co-Perform we’ve had direct experience with most of them in both the local and international arenas. We constantly strive to derive as much value as possible from the application of rating systems to ensure that they are much more than just a tick-box exercise, ensuring of course that we don’t forget to tick all the boxes on our way to compliance.

Verification, support and funding from Government programs can help the positioning of your building in the marketplace. Certain Government programs raise awareness and/or provide robust comparative ratings of your building with respect to the competition. Support funding is available for certain segments of the market and this can assist with upgrading and repositioning your assets for competitive advantage. At Co-Perform we have excellent experience and relevant accreditations with most of the major Government programs.

Energy management and ratings provide many benefits: reduced energy costs; reduced risk to energy price escalation; attraction of tenants. On the latter point of tenants, Co-Perform note a growing contractual trend for large organisations to require professional services providers operate from buildings that achieve certain NABERS benchmarks; thus adding an additional driver toward energy management. At Co-Perform we have a wealth of expertise in all facets of building upgrades from rating and auditing through design to implementation. Our service offering is supplemented by a significant depth of knowledge and experience in building services engineering.

New Planning Scheme requirements such as BESS and the Better Apartment Design Standards have highlighted conflicting requirements to limit facade cooling loads while at the same time raising interior daylight levels. Furthermore, the interpretation and application of these requirements varies across the various Planning Authorities, introducing significant risks that can increase project costs, cause inefficient iterative design processes and results in delays when trying to obtain Planning Permits.

These big risks can be managed by making a small investment in early-stage engineering advice. Co-Perform’s objective is to help the design team to develop a scheme that meets the Planning Scheme criteria and to facilitate the process of obtaining a planning permit.

For many developments the advice can be easy to implement, for example a change in glazing specification or modification to window size, but for other developments it can be more difficult, such as a modification to the internal apartment layouts, managing glazing areas and shading. In all cases it is best to be aware of the implications and required changes at the earliest possible stage of the design process.