How do you, in practice, create substance in sustainability, structured project approach and visualisation of the actual sustainability in a project??

This is one of the major challenges Rambøll is facing together with the other companies in involved in the consortium. They are responsible for providing solutions for what presently on the drawing board looks like the largest hospital complex in Europe, namely the new Århus University Hospital. If political and financial possibilities allow so, the hospital shall bring together all present hospitals in Århus under one roof.

Sustainability in a project will always be defined by the nature of the actual project and its surroundings/framework, whether for instance physical, natural, infrastructural, supply-technical framework.

In the hospital project we have chosen to work with the conception of sustainability in the original definition comprising an environmental as well as an economic and social aspect for the evaluations, where the climate like the other conditions will be evaluated on the effects in the three aspects.

Sustainability will be evaluated and planned as part of the master plan for the project. The master plan will be in preparation until mid-2009 and it includes technical, infrastructural, medico-technical and environmental design guidelines for how to perform the design. Sustainability will result in actually formulated sustainability goals for many environmental and planning conditions, based on minimum goals in observation of the legal requirements on environmental, working environmental, building as well as other legal areas. The decisions in the master plan will indicate where and on which terms project-specific sustainability goals shall be determined and decided.

The work includes technical analyses, hedging of alternatives and new technologies and legislation and economic considerations for the individual conditions. We aim to pick the bulk of the low-hanging fruits and visualise the investments/prioritisations contributing to the sustainability of the hospital. The master plan will suggest the limitation of the sustainability of the project and the potential represented by the sustainability for the project.