The Juxtaposition of Old and New

The other day, Martin took Wei hong and me on a tour of West Cambridge, where new University buildings are located. This is where the famous Cavendish Laboratory, for example, has been relocated to.

When new buildings are built or when exsiting buildings have large retrofits, it is required that the building provides 10% of its energy needs through a renewable source. At first, the University was thinking about installing one large renewable energy fixture - such as a small wind farm, for example - but then decided against it for various reasons. Instead, buildings put up solar panels on hardscape where cars park or have biomass boilers. Below are just a couple of pictures of West Cambridge.



In the city centre, Cambridge University looks like it did 800 years ago. This is the side of Cambridge you see as a tourist when you come visit.

But as soon as you move out to the fringes, you see a whole other side:

This is a picture of a swale, a feature which allows storm water to slowly seep into the ground rather than run off immediately. Features such as these help buildings gain BREEAM certification.


This is one of the newest buildings, to which the swale belongs to. It's so new that it is actually still quite emtpy (lights are still on at night though...) One of its purposes is to provide spaces for new research to interface with start up companies to market new technologies.

This sign is for the building below:

The "LEED" equivalent here is BREEAM, which stands for: The Environmental Assessment Method for Buildings Around the World. I tried finding a plaque but couldn't...

These funny looking roofs are to cover the hundreds of parked bikes! On the West Cambridge site there are actually quite a few of these type of covered biking parking spots, but this is the largest we saw.