28 February 2025 – The Cambridge Institute for Sustainability’s headquarters, the Entopia Building, brought home two prizes at last night’s Chartered Institution of Building Services Engineers (CIBSE) awards ceremony.
Entopia won the Building Performance Champion award and was also named the Project of the Year in the Retrofit Workplaces category.
The awards judging panel described the whole-life building performance of Entopia as exceptional. Despite what they called an “incredibly robust and challenging brief” the team that worked together on the Entopia Building had delivered an exemplary retrofit of a 1930s telephone exchange that had levels of performance comparable with a brand-new office building.
The Entopia retrofit shows that, with ingenuity and collaboration, it is possible to deliver healthy, high-performance buildings on a typical refurbishment budget.
“It’s a great example for others to learn from," said the judges, who called the project a trailblazer for large commercial buildings moving to net zero. “A huge amount has gone into delivering this retrofit.”
Anna Nitch-Smith, CISL’s Chief Operating Officer, said: “We are genuinely delighted that the Entopia Building has been recognised at the CIBSE awards, since they are focused on actual measured performance and tangible contribution to a net zero world.
“Entopia has shown what’s truly possible within existing technologies. We hope this inspires others in Building Services Engineering to take up the challenge of matching or – even better – beating our building’s performance in their next projects, and we’re here to help them.”
Constructed in 1939 to house a telephone exchange, the Entopia Building, formerly 1 Regent Street, was sustainably refitted at a cost of £12.6 million and CISL moved in in 2022. The updated building achieved a 35 per cent reduction in heat loss and uses only 15 per cent of the energy requirements of the original building. A total of 62,332kg CO2e in construction materials were avoided.
CISL's vision is for Entopia to become a Living Lab for sustainability innovation, where innovators, academics and pioneering companies in the built environment can come together to pilot and test new interventions in the design, operation and use of lived spaces – and to communicate and share the results for public benefit.
The project’s goal is to provide a space that replicates what the buildings of tomorrow will look like, so that experimentation can meet the needs of future building design for people, nature and climate.
The Entopia Living Lab will provide a test bed for innovation and communication of new solutions with the potential to drive higher sustainability ambition and impact throughout the built environment.