For this session, we will focus on how to achieve sustainability and meet the RIBA 2030 Challenge targets when working on small projects where budget is a constraint.
Meet the panellists
Tara Gbolade - Gbolade Design Studio
Tara Gbolade is co-founder of the award-winning Gbolade Design Studio winner of the RIBAJ Rising Star award. Through inside-led placemaking, her practice specialises in residential and mixed-use developments for public and private sector clients in urban and suburban settings. They achieve this through their ethos of being; design-led, commercially viable, innovative, and sustainable.
Tara works with local authorities including Epping Forest DC, Purley Regeneration Area (Croydon), and the government-designated Harlow & Gilston Garden Town where she leads the development and implementation of their sustainability strategies. This includes setting the direction for the environmental and socio-economic sustainability ambitions, ensuring that high quality sustainable design is embedded within new residential developments, and, the regeneration of existing communities.
Sara Edmonds - seARCH Studio
Sara Edmonds runs Studio seARCH with her husband in North London specialising in residential, retrofit, and heritage projects. They work across all London boroughs including Hackney, Camden, Haringey, and Tower Hamlets and further afield, and have completed projects in Islington, Kingston upon Thames and beautiful rural Ireland. Sara is also a coordinator at the Architects Climate Action Network, co-founding a recent campaign called Households Declare, and sits on the steering group of Stokey Energy, a community energy group. Working in the face of a climate emergency, the focus of Studio seARCH is to drive systemic change in the built environment and wider communities through bottom up grassroots projects and strategies.
Liam Swaby ARC Design Studio
Liam is a RIBA Chartered Architect and the managing partner at ARC Design Studio, an architectural design practice that he co-founded to develop and promote a theory-enriched, environmentally responsive approach to the way that we design, construct and inhabit built space. Alongside this he holds the position of Associate Lecturer at The University of Lincoln, where he leads a final year undergraduate architectural design studio. The studio explores the social, cultural and economic shocks created by the global pandemic to imagine how we might accelerate our transition towards a healthier, more sustainable future for our built environments. In practice, Liam works as part of a multi-disciplinary team that promotes collaborative problem solving; working to bring together various strands of the creative process and to apply the energy and passion of the next generation to create projects that facilitate a healthier relationship balance between people, planet and profit.
Rod Hughes - 2030 Architects
Rod is a founding director of 2030. Through his leadership, strategic and organisational talent, the office has developed specialist expertise and a broad portfolio of interesting projects. His passion for sustainable design remains undiminished even after 30 years!
Jess Hrivnak- Sustainable Development Adviser at RIBA
This session is interactive. If you have a question for the panellists please submit five days before the event to ribalondon@riba.org.
Please note this event will be recorded.
