Existing buildings

Repair, Refurbish, Reinvent, Recycle, Ramboll

New buildings grow the world’s building stock by only one percent each year, with all other assets requiring maintenance, upgrades and alterations to keep them safe, sustainable and fit for purpose. Along with lower environmental impact and costs, building retention brings significant social and cultural dividends, creating unique and treasured spaces for our clients and their communities.

We draw on our many years of multi-disciplinary building optimisation to unlock sites to best meet these core drivers; be it meeting changing user demands, the extension of service life or the improvement of environmental performance.

Sammy Ofer Centre (Marylebone Town Hall), London

Contacts

Scott Brookes

Scott Brookes

Associate
T: +44 7971 987249

Inari Weijo

Head of Unit
T: +358 50 360 7230

Approximately 2/3 of buildings that will be operating in 2040 have already been built and the operational performance of this stock, as well as how we address the embodied carbon tied up in it, is critical to support the drive to meet global sustainability targets.

By employing a combination of cutting-edge digital and traditional techniques on a needs-driven basis, we analyse more so you can build less, embracing the principles of lean design to avoid groundless interventions which bring cost and carbon.

The most sustainable building

..is the one that is never built.

It is well known that the construction industry is a key contributor to the environmental crisis. By retaining existing assets, we can save of up to 70% more embodied carbon than building new, and the sensitive retrofit of façade and MEP systems also allow us to meet increasingly stringent operational energy targets. Our seamless multi-disciplinary mindset allows us to provide a fully tailored approach to steer clients on their unique route to zero carbon.

Cradle to Cradle

Ramboll acts as a trusted technical partner for all of a building’s life stages; through operational expenditure and maintenance cycles, capital expenditure upgrades or demolition phase – whole life engineering.

A proactive asset maintenance programme that addresses issues before they impact on building safety or operation has lower payback periods and is hugely beneficial in lowering the impact of material deterioration. Tactile inspections and digital investigation techniques enable our specialist diagnostic engineers to determine underlying causes of building fabric issues and provide suitable holistic repair and management strategies for the short, medium and long term.

Where demolition is unavoidable, we audit and inventory buildings before deconstruction to develop material reuse strategies, either through retention on-site, or to feed back into the circular economy to ensure that elements and embodied carbon is retained.

Related projects

Ramboll. The Lighthouse Building. Image: Daniel Shearing

Lighthouse building

In the heart of Kings Cross and dating back to 1875-1895, the Lighthouse building is a local landmark. It was left derelict for many years until developers; UK Real Estate took the bold decision to redevelop the Grade II listed building that was on Historic England’s Buildings at Risk Register.  

3D model of Svanemollen barracks

Svanemollen Barracks

Precision scanning of a large heritage site enabled an accurate reconstruction of historical buildings.

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Ramboll Group A/S

Ramboll Group A/S
Hannemanns Allé 53
DK-2300 Copenhagen S
Denmark
Tel:+45 5161 1000
Fax:+45 5161 1001

Danish CVR numbers

Danish CVR numbers

Ramboll Group
10160669

Rambøll Danmark
35128417

Ramboll Energy
35128417

Rambøll Management Consulting
60997918

Other sites

Other sites