Bond wins prestigious international innovation and research award

Bond Professor Craig Langston, Faculty of Society & Design, has taken out one of five Premier Awards at the prestigious Chartered Institute of Building (CIOB) annual International Innovation and Research Awards.

The CIOB is the world's largest and most influential professional body for construction management and leadership with over 80,000 members worldwide.

The CIOB International Innovation & Research Awards celebrate achievement across the built environment, from academic research to industry innovation, and are open to applicants from anywhere in the world, and at all stages of their career, whether CIOB members or not.

From many hundreds of nominations covering journal papers published in either 2012 or 2013, Professor Langston won the major research award for his paper entitled ‘Validation of the adaptive reuse potential (ARP) model using iconCUR’. 

The adaptive reuse of existing buildings that have become obsolete is an important strategy for sustainable development and a pertinent response to excessive resource usage, resulting from typical destruction and redevelopment.

Professor Langston’s paper looks at the validity of earlier work to model adaptive reuse potential (ARP) using a new multiple criteria decision analysis tool called iconCUR.

Based on a review of twelve case studies, the research determines the extent of agreement between ARP and iconCUR evaluations that both claim to be useful in making decisions about building reuse. The results show a high correlation between these approaches, whether based on raw scores or on relative ranking, and match expert opinion concerning appropriate actions.

Professor Langston’s ARP model and his subsequent work on multiple criteria decision making arose from two consecutive Australian Research Council Linkage Projects for which he was first-named chief investigator and Bond University was the host institution. The combined value of these grants was $615,000 of external funding.

This research has led to eleven refereed journal papers and nine refereed conference papers, and a research book entitled ‘Sustainable building adaptation: innovations in decision-making'  to be published by Wiley-Blackwell in February this year.

Professor Langston said it was a great honour to be acknowledged as writing the best journal paper in the construction discipline for the last two years.

“Most of my colleagues from around the world would have submitted a paper to this competition, so to be chosen for the Premier Award from such a field is most unexpected, but very gratifying,” he said.

In addition to authoring over 100 papers, five books and three software programs, Professor Langston has been awarded four Australian Research Council (ARC) grants totalling about $1 million, won the Emerald Literati Network Outstanding Paper Award (Facilities) in 2013 and took out the Bond University Vice Chancellor’s Quality Award for Research Excellence in 2010. 

“Bond University has been very supportive of my research, including numerous internal seeding grants, and provides incentive for research-intensive academics like me to perform at their best,” he said.

Bond was the first university in Australia to have its construction degree accredited by the CIOB.

The Bachelor of Construction Management and Quantity Surveying is a popular three-year degree offered by the Faculty of Society & Design.