Sustainability Excellence Award
This week we profile the winner of the Sustainability Excellence Award, which was awarded for the first time in 2018.
Professor Brenda Vale is a Research Fellow in the School of Architecture. She received the award for Staff Excellence in Sustainability—the first staff member to receive this award.
“I am honoured to have received this award, and I loved receiving this support for my work from those who nominated me and judged the award,” Professor Vale says. “I do feel that this award belongs equally to myself and to my husband Robert Vale, who has been working alongside me in the same area for decades.”
Professor Vale has spent much of her career focusing on sustainability in architecture, and says one of her highlights was discovering, in architectural practice with Robert Vale in the United Kingdom, that it was possible to build a zero space-heating energy building for the same price as a conventional building.
Professor Vale’s current focus is on helping her PhD students finish their studies, and she is also working on two books about sustainability in collaboration with some of her colleagues and former students.
“Sustainability in architecture is a hugely important issue,” Professor Vale says. “We seem far more interested in making buildings safe against potential hazards like earthquakes rather than known hazards like climate change, failing soil fertility, and increased population. We are in a good position in New Zealand to aim for a zero-carbon society, but we have a long way to go. There are no easy answers in sustainability, only the big changes that need to happen.”