Office building Baumschlager-Eberle: a building without heating

Source: Detail; photo: Jakob Schoof

The architects from Baumschlager-Eberle have built a very special office building in Lustenau, Austria, partly for their own office, partly to be rented.
Although it was not their intention to build a building according to passive standard, it has become a real passive building, since the building has no heating system (and no mechanical ventilation).
More details can be found in Detail and at their website.

The AI PassivHaus in Scotland

Source: AI PassivHaus

The AI Passivhaus in Scotland was the first certified passive house in England (in 2009). It partly is a renovation of a barn and partly a new, underground building to reduce the visual and environmental impact on the landscape to a minimum. Very interesting is their extensive blog on the construction process with a huge amount of pictures.

Building with bamboo

Simon Velez, Colombian architect, Marcelo Villegas, engineer, Oscar Hidalgo, architect, they all discovered the opportunities of bamboo as a building material.
As Simon Velez says in the video below: 'We should combine mineral materials, such as concrete, with vegetal materials, such as bamboo. We are too much carnivorous architects and should be more vegetarian architects."

Simon Velez and Marcelo Villegas also concentrate on other materials such as straw bales, poured earth and on simplified structures.

Other examples of bamboo construction can be found at Chiangmai Life Construction.

Intelligent building façade

Homeostatic façade system (source: www.fastcodesign.com)

The homeostatic façade system is a very nice example of an intelligent building façade system to control the solar gains in a building (still a prototype), based on the principle of dielectric elastomers. But it is not clear to me if the material of which this prototype is made is so sustainable.

Creative houses from reclaimed stuff

Interesting TED talk by Dan Philips: his houses may not be architecture, but his vision on our building industry and our way of living certainly is inspiring.

Sustainable social houses

The leader in sustainable social housing projects in Flanders is the social housing company Zonnige Kempen in Westerlo, in the north of Flanders. It is the youngest, but most active social housing company concerning sustainable social houses. They have both new building and renovation projects.

Basis for their approach is the Trias Energetica, but they added 3 more steps in order to develop their Six Steps Approach. Quite interesting is the last step: communicate both positive and negative findings

They participate in several European research projects and European research networks and developed several demonstration projects.

Examples of sustainable buildings (1)

Sometimes, real examples say much more than checklists for sustainability. Therefore hereby some links to examples of sustainable buildings. I only mentioned projects for which more detailed information on different sustainability aspects is available.

Every year since 1997 the American Institute of Architects AIA selects the ten best green (American) projects for its Top Ten Award. The selection is based on a ten measures metrics. One of the interesting items in the detailed project profiles is 'lessons learned'.

The EULEB project, partly funded by the Intelligent Energy Europe Programme of the European Commission, provides detailed information about 25 European high quality low energy public buildings (information available in English, French, German, Spanish and Italian).