Nhu Pham
Associate | GMAP, WELL AP, LEED AP BD+C
Increasingly critical, sustainability must be embedded as a core design driver and sustainable design must go beyond compliance, integrating environmental system thinking for a climate-positive built environment.
A set of push and pull factors drew Nhu into the field of sustainable design—her concern for the climate crisis and her fascination with the idea that building design can be quantified and optimised through environmental performance. The two passion converges in her work at DP Sustainable Design, where she conducts bioclimatic analysis and brings a strong focus on energy and carbon modelling, and implements holistic solutions that enable developments to meet their green objectives.
For Nhu, the industry has yet to fully realise the potential and momentum that sustainable design possesses to authentically address climate challenges; a perspective that she has been further affirmed in through her close involvement in net zero The Greenhouse at Dulwich College (Singapore) project. The client’s sustainability vision and goals were ambitious, and translating them into practical solutions presented unique challenges and opportunities for the innovative integration of architectural design and environmental performance. Upon completion in 2023, The Greenhouse at Dulwich College (Singapore) is the first building of its type to obtain Green Mark (GM) Platinum – Zero Energy certification with three additional badges under BCA’s GM2021 framework.
Nhu’s close involvement in shaping the project’s sustainability journey, from setting performance targets to ensuring sustained performance post-completion, has not only strengthened her technical knowhow. It has also deepened her belief in the capacity of data-driven design and a dynamic multidisciplinary approach, anchored in a whole-of-systems thinking, to help shape more resilient and future-ready developments. A firm proponent of this, in 2024, Nhu served as an industry mentor to a group of final-year students at her alma mater, the Singapore University of Technology & Design (SUTD), in the development of EZCarbon—an intuitive, one-stop solution that helps designers and sustainability professionals efficiently calculate embodied carbon at early design stages.