May 7 2025

Fife College has unveiled its Dunfermline City Campus, the first net-zero carbon tertiary education building in Scotland and the other half of the recently completed Dunfermline Learning Campus.

Scheduled to formally open later in the year, the further education facility comprises a campus of three new buildings designed by Reiach & Hall Architects.

Attaining an embodied carbon footprint of 560kg CO2e/m2 for the teaching building and a total embodied carbon footprint of 601kg Co2e/m2 as a whole the campus is held as a pathfinder project for the Net Zero Public Sector Buildings Standard.

To hit these targets, the project team, which includes A10, Woolgar Hunter, Horner and McLellan, Balfour Beatty, replaced concrete floor slabs with cross laminated timber planks, held up by beams fabricated using 96% recycled steel. A knock-on benefit of this approach is a significantly reduced structural load, reducing the volume of concrete required for the superstructure and foundations. As a result, embodied carbon totals fall 20% below what would ordinarily be expected for a building of this scale.

Stewart MacPhail, project director for Balfour Beatty, commented: “Close collaboration with Fife College, the design teams, and our supply chain has been key to delivering the industry-leading carbon performance achieved in the teaching building. The successful external verification gives us confidence in the accuracy and integrity of our carbon figures and reinforces what can be achieved through innovation and partnership.”

Offsite manufacturing was employed for some mechanical and electrical components of the building, minimising the requirement for on-site labour and reducing wastage. 

6 Comments

#1 Posted by monkey9000 on 7 May 2025 at 14:38 PM

This is it "unveiled"!? Looks like a hellscape. Choose your images carefully for a publicity drive.

#2 Posted by Logistics Hub on 7 May 2025 at 17:16 PM

As good a looking industrial unit as I’ve seen …… phwar

#3 Posted by Mark on 7 May 2025 at 22:25 PM

Agree with #1 & 2, that's a poorly chosen viewpoint for a PR shot. For a sustainable building it appears to have tons of M&E plant: whatever happened to shallow plan buildings with natural cross-ventilation, and internal courtyards to allow light and air into the depth of the floorplate?

#4 Posted by Fat Bloke on Tour on 8 May 2025 at 11:02 AM

Project team vibe -- like some sort of endless list of Dickensian lawyers stretching out into the middle distance.

Not good -- middle class welfare in full flow.

Lots of talk about embodied carbon with nothing mentioned regarding cost -- I wonder why.

Design -- as mentioned by others it is pretty poor.
Learning cube is not a good look -- Death Star Poly comes to mind.

#5 Posted by End User #23123 on 12 May 2025 at 17:51 PM

True sustainability demands we revisit fundamentals.

Constructing large, unsightly new buildings, perhaps not fit for purpose – often poorly designed and laden with electric gadgetry– is unequivocally the wrong approach.

'Net zero' is a hollow claim anyway; the infrastructure required for renewable electricity generation, demands vast resources. Such poorly designed structures offer no sustainable solution. This is particularly true given a privatised grid and generation linked to a larger neighbour country that is very far from fully renewable.

These heavily badged up buildings are far from net zero – they are merely clunky, carbon-intensive, money intensive, smoke screens to the real problems of resource depletion, pollution over consumption and lack of humanity.

Does a Cybertruck in building form save the planet?

#6 Posted by Lovely on 13 May 2025 at 08:36 AM

'Death Star Poly'- love it, perfect analogy and totally original as well.

This looks and feels like a bad episode of Black Mirror, it's just so inhumane and dystopian.

And not sustainable at all of course unless you want to live in the Matrix while the machines grind down the remaining resources (and our consciousnesses) to a manageable pulpy sludge.

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