Open Source Content Management

In recent years, the drive to reduce the embodied carbon of buildings has led to a resurgent interest in timber and other biobased building materials. But peering into the future, if we are to think not just about carbon but also land, water, and regenerating nature, how might we build to meet our essential needs, and what might we build with?

By Lenny Antonelli and Andy Simmonds

It’s a radical idea: that to negate the environmental damage of construction, we don’t just need to build sustainably, we need to build less. However, most architects and building designers earn a living by doing exactly the opposite: by building stuff. So how can the design practice be reinvented for a world in which we need to do more with much, much less?

Forgive the 80s hip hop house reference in the headline, but the volume of the walls in this volumetric modular school building in Birr was literally pumped up – with recycled newspaper insulation. Built to passive house principles, it’s a story of one Roscommon manufacturer reimagining the role that offsite methods can play in the delivery of highly sustainable permanent accommodation for schools – while delivering exceptionally low embodied carbon results. Additional words - Jeff Colley

New and tightening sustainability requirements are hitting the construction sector at an increasing pace. Irish Green Building Council membership engagement officer Lenny Antonelli goes through the main requirements – and offers clues on how to keep ahead.

Sometimes a building comes along that does almost too much. Passive house stalwarts Kirsty Maguire Architects’ latest opus is an award-winning architectural, engineering, and sustainability feat – which asks questions not just about how we build, but how we live.

Rapidly decarbonising our cold, leaky dwellings is the greatest challenge facing the building industry, one fraught with complexity and risk. Given that the UK faces similar challenges to Ireland – in a similar climate, with similar housing stock – what can we learn from British efforts to meet this challenge? Leading UK green building association the AECB has put forward a proposal that could help to chart a new course through these choppy waters.

Few architects are tasked with knocking their old family home, but for John Morehead, once this difficult decision was made, it was a chance to create a future-proofed new passive house that embraces its stunning natural surroundings and exhibits remarkable attention to detail.

How do you solve a problem like decarbonising social housing, and do so rapidly, en masse, in a manner that lifts vulnerable people out of fuel poverty while delivering warm, healthy homes? River Clyde Homes may be about to pull off the seemingly impossible.

The new Oxfordshire studio of Charlie Luxton Design, the practice of the well-known TV presenter and architectural designer, is deeply impressive for its exhaustive attention to sustainability across every facet of the project, from energy use and embodied carbon to the reuse of materials and the ecological restoration of the three-and-a-half-acre site. It’s a gorgeous building, too.

TrustMark defends scheme & says it creates a pathway to PAS 2035