With the success of Dockside Green on the other side of the country, according to Canwest News Service, Quebec now plans to increase its investment in sustainable development with a $300 million project of 800 environmentally-friendly housing units. Dubbed Cité Verte, the neighborhood is planned for Quebec City in the Saint-Sacrement neighborhood at the corner of Chemin Sainte-Foy and Avenue Saint-Sacrement.
Modcell, a company in the UK that makes prefabricated panels from staw and hemp, this year completed a two-story straw bale home on the campus of the University of Bath. The home, referred to as Balehaus@Bath, was designed by White Design. Over a year, the Balehaus will be monitored in thirty-second increments with 12 sensors inside and 66 sensor in the walls, measuring such things as thermal performance, acoustics, air tightness, and relative humidity.
The other day, Design Boom reported on this project for the city of Groningen in the Netherlands. Designed by NL Architects, the project, called Sozawe -- welfare department and work agency -- has office spaces, a large interior public space, and 215 parking spaces. Each of the nine office floors includes access to outdoor spaces with trees and a view over the city.
This is the Idea House by Broadway Malyan for Sime Darby Property, one of the largest property developers in Malaysia. The home was designed as an attempt to become the first carbon zero residence in South East Asia. The home would be prefabricated in modules to save on labor costs, speed up the construction process, and make deconstruction of the home easy at the end of its useful life. Some other green aspects of the home design include:
Green building certification is an interesting phenomenon. It’s meant to convey a message about the building’s level of “green” or “sustainability,” but the message is only as strong as the system that creates it. If you push beyond that message, you might ask: how many of these certified buildings are, say, positive energy? That’s the goal of Elithis Tower recently opened in Dijon, France. It has 1,600 sensors that examine energy and emissions. This information is then displayed on a special public sign in full transparency for everyone to see. The sign is both dynamic and clear.
At one time, Paradise Park Children's Centre in London had a lush vertical hydroponic garden covering certain portions of the structure. That time is no more, reports The Architects' Journal, the BBC, and the London Evening Standard. The building, designed by DSDHA, called for a living wall to mitigate against planting the structure on a portion of open park space. DSDHA retained landscape architect Marie Clarke and had the green wall system installed at a cost of £100,000.
There's something about the simple design of this small container home that I really like. It was mentioned on A Site-Specific Experiment, which is run by Chutayaves Sinthuphan out of Bangkok, Thailand. The one-bedroom, one bathroom home was built using two, 20-foot containers with cutouts for windows and doors. There's a prefab bathroom inside and the interior is insulated with a recycled content material.
Just yesterday, architecture firm RMJM announced plans for a $1 billion, landmark green project for the Atasehir district of Istanbul, Turkey. The Varyap Meridian development is slated for a new residential and business district -- and just might transform into a new financial district for Turkey. Of course, the buildings will each seek LEED certification, and if obtained, it could be the first green development of its kind in the country.
The Guardian just published an interesting article about the world's first Active House. An Active House, as compared to a super low-energy Passive House, is a highly efficient home that captures more energy than the occupants need for heat and power. In particular, this Denmark Active House should generate enough electricity over 30 years to cancel out the energy costs of building it. And it operates like a machine: a computer monitors the temperature and climate of the interior and opens, closes, and adjusts windows accordingly.
This is a quick public service announcement from Phil Clark, a journalist at UBM Built Environment in the UK. He blogs at Zerochampion and previously wrote a guest article on this site.
Want to hear from experts and professionals on their experiences of sustainable design and construction? All from the comfort of your home or office? Well a new virtual event I’m running next week, called Sustainability Now, may well be up your street. It’s free to attend and offers a flexible way for finding green content, from reports, articles, and data to video and audio shows. You can also connect directly with your peers in green architecture, engineering, and building at a lounge area, which offers instant messenger communication for users.
