Forgive the awful pun. But the new BREEAM 2008 guidance has been published today and I've been reading Mel's handy summary of what it all means. We're currently considering whether to go BREEAM Bespoke on a project that we're working on, so it is all rather timely.

I think most architects and services engineers have mixed feelings the BRE. From its origins as a government-funded body, since going private it seems to try to squeeze money out of every angle, while effectively operating a monopoly on green accreditation in the UK. The new guidance only seems to reinforce this when you read that to achieve the highest level of Outstanding, in addition to an 85% score you must have the project written up as a case study by BRE Global - and I'm sure that doesn't come for free.

In the case of our project, as it doesn't fall into one of the pre-existing categories we would need bespoke criteria drawn up. One might think that the BRE might like to have the invitation to expand their research base, and get to road-test criteria for another building type - but no, it will cost around £2-3,000 to get the criteria drawn up, and that's before you even start paying for the assessment process. And if you look at the criteria and decide not to go forward, it's just money down the drain.

Our arts client is absolutely serious about wanting to do the most environmentally responsible building they can given the brief and site - and they would really like to have a recognised accreditation to prove it. But when it looks like a BREEAM assessment would cost more than the acoustics fees, one starts wondering whether it is really worth it. Any views out there?

From just being us and a cat (literally) we now number five in the studio. We have Thomas - modelmaker extraordinaire and workshop master (will post some examples of his bandsaw skills soon); Richard - who has bravely made the switch from Vectorworks to Microstation and is now busy fleshing out our ideas and making sure they actually fit on the site; and Jack, our student for the summer. Not sure where all the women are...but we would like to find a Part I/II to start in September so if there's anyone out there looking for a job, get in touch.

Well, six months into the new practice and we are proud to announce that we received planning permission for our first project. It's only tiny, but we think it is rather lovely and, in a rural conservation area, it sailed through planning with no hitches. Here's to a 100% record...

Oh my. It feels like this afternoon is the first little breathing space I've had for months. We've been busy here - putting in our first planning application (for a tiny, lovely, cottage extension), finishing up a feasibility study and small strategic masterplan down in Hastings, and responding to several potential new projects. We've done some fun things too - a visit to Orkney, most recently, where we visited both the new - the Pier Arts Centre - and the old - the magnificent St Magnus Cathedral and, even older, standing stones in beautiful fields.

This afternoon, I've got a report out of the door and have managed to start on a small research project into affordable housing that has come in - a pleasant, focused thing to do and a change from coordinating a complex mix of stakeholders and factors. Tom is still very busy, but also switching his focus to another project for a couple of weeks. And our childcare is starting to allow us less juggling and more good work time. So our apologies for the blog lapse, but we will try to get more regular as our office routine settles down.

Today brings claims by leading M&E contractors that Part L enforcement is "shambolic". HVCA President John Miller said "Contractors are not hearing or seeing anything about enforcement of Part L. Building Control Officers have responsibility for this, but many are turning a blind eye.”

We had a conversation about this only the other day, prompted by hearing of by a Building Regs non-enforcement situation that had resulted in problems, years later, with a project we know about. The plain fact of the matter is that very few BR issues seem to be enforced, particularly on smaller projects. The onus is generally on the developer or architect to do the work right and to get a completion certificate; if this isn't given, for whatever reason, there is very little chance of a statutory enforcement notice being issued unless the non-compliance is hugely dangerous to life and limb.

So a building can stand for years without a completion certificate, and then when it goes on the market...well, a prospective buyer is right to demand the certificate and the situation becomes tense. And even enforcement notices are often ignored; and as these come with a time limit beyond which they expire, illegal structures can exist for years, as happened with a roof extension on a building I used to live in.

Given that Part L is set to become increasingly tougher and more expensive to comply with, what's to say that a sort of mass disobedience might not occur - or a sub-market of properties, more affordable to buy, that simply don't come with completion certificates? Of course this is very unlikely to happen - and the claims by HVCA seem to suggest that BC officers are in fact issuing certificates despite having little evidence of Part L compliance.

BC is, as every architect knows, an area of local government where resources are stretched. There simply aren't enough man-hours funded to mean that every instance of non-compliance is issued with an enforcement notice so most BC departments prioritise 'dangerous' situations. But one of the problems in the project mentioned above was a minor fire door issue - is this not considered dangerous enough? when is a door dangerous enough to warrant enforcement? and where does Part L fall along this scale of priority?

The current debate over the proposed 'eco-towns' that has had communities holding demonstrations, developers withdrawing schemes, planners and advisers worrying about transport and the usual suspects predicting the concreting of our verdant hills, focuses the mind on what we really mean by 'eco'. The isite blog has touched on this already, focusing on the rather weak green credentials of some of the probable eco-town projects, and I hear Rob has cogently summarised the issue for buildings as 'carbon, cost, comfort': "What's the point of creating a technically perfect low carbon building if the occupier doesn't like it or won't use it the way you want to?" (via Phil). At the larger scale: what's the point of building a zero-carbon housing estate town in the wrong place for transport, for local communities, for the bigger picture? Sustainability is not simply about carbon: it is about sustaining communities functionally and psychologically; reinforcing or creating a sense of place that engenders pride, that will encourage all generations to live there for the long term, as well as providing the buildings and services that they need to do so, and limiting our impact on the climate and environment.

Most local communities want affordable housing for their children, and lower carbon emissions; and it is easy to imagine a way of consulting over the location for new 'eco' development that would be vastly less contentious than getting developers to submit bids to central government. It is damaging to genuine efforts towards a lower carbon footprint that unsustainable projects such as some of the 'eco-town' sites are badged with the 'eco' label. Cynicism about the impact of low-carbon policies on everyday life is already increasing, and if popular suspicion reads every government 'green' initiative as a covert way of doing something unpopular, support for measures that might genuinely do good may well wither away.

The same goes for products that are dubiously badged 'eco'. Like the rest of the world, I was at Ecobuild for a few hours this week and left dispirited at the crude rebranding of plastic and aluminium windows, timber products shipped across the Atlantic, and unrecyclable insulation as 'green'. Prize for the most absurd 'green' product probably goes to the "basalt fibre reinforced polymer" wall-tie which is supposedly better than the steel one because it minimises thermal conductivity; this may never take off in the building industry but some of the more serious products are equally contradictory.

One problem is that the word 'sustainable' is so fuzzy that terms such as 'eco' and 'zero-carbon' have been seized upon as substitutes, although they tend to narrow the debate to something purely technical. There is a need to reclaim the debate from the point-scoring of codes and percentages, however difficult it is to do so in language that is clear and unambiguous. Otherwise there is no way that our carbon emissions are really going to reduce - we need to address the system, not just the symptoms.

For an immersion into the complexity of the information systems that surround us, I can't recommend highly enough Dan Hill's post over at City of Sound (a real must-read blog) on The street as platform. It's long, yes - but covers almost every use of data in our lives, from phones to Oyster cards, wifi to CCTV, and vividly demonstrates how this is changing the way we operate in physical space. As Hill writes, this is a "new kind of data, collective and individual, aggregated and discrete, open and closed, constantly logging impossibly detailed patterns of behaviour. The behaviour of the street."

The post describes no technology that doesn't already exist, which makes it all the more remarkable. And as Dan points out, "How much of this life of the street, this rapidly increasing torrent of human activity, is registered as a field of enquiry or activity in most planning activity?" This data-filled world presents huge challenges to the processes of planning, governance and management of the public (and private) realm.

The interface between the physical and the 'virtual' (not a good word, but it will have to do) and indeed the private and the public is becoming blurred to an extraordinary degree. Who is to govern the part of the street where my open wireless network is accessible, and where therefore someone might want a bench to sit on so they can use their laptop? Who decides whether the pavement in front of an office building can be monitored by the CCTV of the tenant? how does this overlap with the council-run CCTV system? If a widely circulated YouTube clip features a brutal mugging in a prominent London square, how do you persuade people that it is actually a safe place to eat lunch, and does this have anything to do with its physical design?

As architects, this is something we must take into account. It may mean that a commission to redesign a public space may in fact result in interventions in the data web much more than physical changes on the ground; but this is a difficult thing to persuade a client of, not least because to maintain a positive presence in the web requires more skilled ongoing management, and is more potentially controversial, than the cleaning of new paving slabs.

And, as Dan Hill says, "we should be aware of the limits of information services, until made physical. Either from a phenomenological point-of-view, or from the view that just says these systems tend to be transient, it's important to keep a sense of perspective". The physical is still important - it lasts, it is democratically visible and tangible to all users in the same way (though of course interpreted vastly differently), it has qualities of sensory pleasure or discomfort. But to pretend that we can opt out of the data network and experience purely the physical is now a fallacy.