Posts Tagged Energy efficiency
Stirling prize shortlist reflects new austerity in architecture
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on July 21, 2011
Two buildings on the Riba shortlist have been retrofitted to save money and energy, rather than built from scratch
A 1980s office block and a 1930s theatre are in the running to be named best new building of the year, as architects turn to retrofitting to save money and energy.
The Angel building in Islington, London, which BT vacated before the financial crash, has been shortlisted for the Stirling prize after a £72m refit. The 1932 Royal Shakespeare Theatre, which has been overhauled at a cost of £60m, has also been nominated.
The Royal Institute of British Architects' (Riba) annual £20,000 award has never been won by a refurbished building but the presence on the shortlist of two refit projects represents the emergence of austerity architecture.
New buildings commissioned before the public spending squeeze also made the shortlist, including the sweeping velodrome for the 2012 Olympics designed by Hopkins Architects, and one of the most expensive city academy schools ever built, the £38m Evelyn Grace Academy in Lambeth by Zaha Hadid Architects.
The velodrome is the first major Olympic venue to be completed and is favourite to win with odds of 2/1 at William Hill.
The Royal Shakespeare Company originally planned to demolish its 1932 listed home in Stratford-upon-Avon, designed by Elisabeth Scott, and replace it with a futuristic building by the Dutch architect Erick van Egerat.
The plan was revised amid cost concerns and local objections. Instead the RSC hired Bennetts Associates to slot a new thrust stage into the main auditorium, redesign the public areas and erect a viewing tower.
As well as saving money and reducing emissions, the refurb "captured the spirits and ghosts of the theatre", said Rab Bennetts, the architect.
The Angel building was stripped back to its concrete frame and reclad as a speculative office block, shaving almost 15% off the cost of a new building and reducing carbon dioxide emissions by about a third, the designer said.
"Refurbishment saves money and reduces the environmental impact of construction," said Simon Allford. "It also shows that we should be paying more attention when we design new buildings to ensuring they are capable of being adapted for future uses which we can't yet imagine."
This month Peter Rees, chief planner for the City of London, claimed there would be fewer new skyscrapers in the current economic climate and that applications to refurbish existing office blocks had increased. He said refurbishment projects were often cheaper, more environmentally friendly and provoked fewer objections than new buildings.
"My prognosis is there will be fewer towers and that's no bad thing," he told Building magazine. "There's a lot of late- [19]80s buildings that we shouldn't be throwing away."
Also on the Stirling shortlist is An Gaelaras, an Irish language arts and cultural centre in Derry, designed by O'Donnell and Tuomey Architects. It is the first publicly funded facility of its kind since the Anglo-Irish agreement.
The Folkwang art gallery in Essen, Germany, designed by former Stirling prize winner David Chipperfield, completes the line-up."Creative redevelopment is a strong theme in this year's list, with a major museum extension, a remodelled theatre complex and the innovative retrofit of an old office building featured, showing how even with tight planning and building constraints, talent and imagination can totally transform existing structures and sites," said Ruth Reed, president of the RIBA.
The selection of Hadid's academy highlights an ongoing row between architects and the education secretary, Michael Gove, who scrapped a major schools building programme and complained that architects were "creaming off cash" from contracts.
Architects reacted angrily to the claim, saying the high cost of the £55bn Building Schools for the Future (BSF) programme was down to wasteful procurement rather than their fees. In February Gove renewed his attack, telling a conference on free schools: "We won't be getting Richard Rogers to design your school, we won't be getting any award-winning architects to design it, because no one in this room is here to make architects richer."
In June the Conservatives claimed architects and landscape architects had received £98m in fees to build 113 schools under BSF, with the biggest single fee being £2.7m. The Department for Education said it wanted to see more standardisation in school design to cut costs, sparking fresh concern at Riba.
The winner of the Stirling prize will be announced on 2 October.
The stratospheric Strata
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on July 19, 2010
Elephant and Castle's Strata has dramatically changed the south London skyline – and the integrated turbines are a world first
Spin city: London’s Strata tower
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on July 19, 2010
It is the world's first skyscraper with built-in wind turbines. But is London's Strata a green gimmick – or the future? Jonathan Glancey takes to the skies
I am standing on the wind-buffeted tip of the Strata tower, looking out through the blades of what appear to be an enormous propeller, at the London skyline and the green basin beyond. St Paul's cathedral, across the river, seems close enough to touch. It's the kind of view, and the kind of heroically stylised building, you would expect to see in some 1930s sci-fi movie: the perfect place for a hero and a villain to have a rooftop showdown.
At 147 metres, the newly opened Strata is London's tallest residential building. The nine-metre blades I'm standing beneath are housed in one of three wind turbines that crown this new tower soaring above Elephant and Castle, an area of the city not known for flashy penthouses. But Elephant and Castle is undergoing a massive, if slow, transition from a rundown miasma of noisy road intersections, underpasses and vast housing estates into what the Borough of Southwark hopes will be a £1.5bn model of inner-city regeneration.
The plan was first made public six years ago and work is unlikely to be completed before 2020. It's a colossal challenge, as well as an opportunity, and the £113.5m Strata, the first of three skyscrapers planned for here, is a symbol of the dynamism and energy the project demands. And that energy must, of course, be seen to be green. It's early days, but if the turbines work as planned, and aren't too noisy for residents in the pricey penthouses beneath them, they should generate 8% of this 43-storey building's energy needs. This is roughly enough to run its electrical and mechanical services (including three express lifts and automated window-cleaning rigs) as well as the lighting, heating and ventilation of its public spaces, which include an underground car and cycle park.
Strata is the first building in the world to incorporate wind turbines into its structure. Yes, the new Bahrain World Trade Centre in Manama, by the firm Atkins, also boasts three giant turbines, but these are set on steel struts connecting its twin towers, not part of the actual towers themselves. While I can vouch for the strength of the south-westerlies that will turn Strata's blades, whether its turbines will set a precedent for future British towers is less clear: this rooftop was exceedingly hard to construct, almost prohibitively so, every part of it having to be hauled up.
However, what the three fans do, without a doubt, is give Strata a striking profile. Whether you find this exciting, disturbing or simply over-the-top will be down to personal taste, yet it's no surprise the tower has been dubbed the Electric Razor, not just because of its whirling blades but also because of its black and silver lines that seem to pixellate upwards; Boris Johnson, Mayor of London, has called it the Lipstick.
So what do green experts think? "You've got to take your hat off to the design team for delivering a building that captures the imagination," says Paul King, head of the UK Green Building Council. "I doubt wind power will become a common feature in high-rise inner city projects, but without this type of bold innovation, how would we ever know? Developments like this show that sustainability is increasingly becoming mainstream. That's something everyone should celebrate."
Including the 1,000 or so people who have already moved into – or bought into – Strata's 408 flats (each boasting floor-to-ceiling windows). And there is a difference between the two. Nearly every flat was bought off-plan, before construction began, 50-75% of them by investors. This is a shame: the whole idea of the tower is that it should be a guiding light for new inner-city residential development. This is meant to be a home for local people, not a machine for property market profiteering.
Indeed, 25% of the flats, on floors two to 10, are "affordable homes", for those on incomes of less than £60,000 (in central London that kind of money won't guarantee a home of your own); meanwhile, a three-floor pavilion to the side of the tower has been given to council residents leaving the soon-to-be-demolished Aylesbury Estate, a 1960s housing complex seen by most as an enormous failure. Tony Blair made his first speech as prime minister at this estate, in a bid to show his government would care for the poorest elements in society.
To my mind, Strata's big propellers give the building the feel of an airship holding aloft the passenger cabins (or flats) below. Or perhaps it's more like an old-fashioned transatlantic liner with its complement of first-, second-and third-class passengers. I think of this as architect Ian Bogle, of London-based BFLS (formerly Hamiltons Architects), leads me through the tall, narrow lobby to the lifts that shoot silently up to the residential floors.
'You feel like you own the city'
The views are spectacular. Most front doors open directly onto gaping vistas of London, framed by giant windows. They are not for the faint-hearted. Bogle goes to open what looks like a door at the side of a window and I think he might vanish into the ether. As it happens, he's simply opening a perforated screen designed to let fresh air in. "We've tried to get as much daylight and fresh air as possible into the flats," says Bogle. "You certainly feel as if you own the entire city from up here."
Indeed you do. There are magic moments, too: way below, trains race in and out of buildings and seem to pass through the tower itself. It reminds me of the super-modern city drawn by Antonio Sant'Elia, the Italian futurist architect, shortly before the first world war. His Città Nuova was a dynamic, machine-like metropolis through which cars and even aircraft would pass, via openings in the buildings. His imaginings inspired film-makers, from William Cameron Menzie's Things to Come in 1936, to Ridley Scott's Blade Runner in 1982; they also resonated in city developments as dramatic and diverse as the Barbican, the Pompidou and the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank. And they echo today in these views from the Strata tower, and in its mighty turbines.
But are they just a tokenistic green gimmick? Or will they propel us towards a new urban architecture, one that's cinematically thrilling and ecologically sound? Until its sibling towers rise and the redevelopment of Elephant and Castle is complete, it will be hard to properly judge Strata. Right now, it stands alone, a sleek silver sentinel, towering over the follies of the recent past.
Scientists to rebuild ‘Coronation Street’ house in lab to study energy use
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on May 28, 2010
Salford University staff to simulate life in terraced two-up, two-down in effort to make UK's housing stock greener
Energy-efficiency scientists are to study how people live by rebuilding an entire, redbrick Manchester terraced house inside a university laboratory's sealed testing chamber.
The two-up, two-down dwelling is identical to those portrayed in Coronation Street, television's oldest surviving soap, and to more than two million real-life homes.
It will be used for power-saving experiments in simulated climates featuring high winds, snow and Manchester's notorious rain.
The pre-first world war house is to be salvaged from a nearby demolition scheme. It will be dismantled within the next fortnight and rebuilt in the Energy Hub at Salford University.
Gas, water and electricity will be piped in and furniture installed, with staff from 13 academic departments taking turns to play the part of residents.
Life in this "Energy House" will be as busy as in any of the terraces which sprang up across the North of England to house those working in mines and mills, but focused on entirely modern concepts such as carbon-reduction equipment and smart-meter tests.
Psychologists will join engineers in a series of experiments to see if particular wall or carpet colours make people feel warmer and reduce the demand for heat. Home energy use accounts for 30% of the UK's greenhouse gas emissions.
"It's a house from the past, working for the future," said Dr Nigel Mellors, associate dean of science, engineering and technology at Salford and one of the team running a project aimed to last 20 years or more.
"But this one is only the beginning'" he said. "We reckon we'll know everything we need to about how to improve a terrace like this after about three years. Then we'll knock it down and build something different. Perhaps a typical 1960s house, to see how that can be improved."
The project is designed to parallel work on new-build energy-saving homes, recognising that many housebuyers prefer older properties for other reasons.
Dave Ritter, sustainability director at BDP architects, who are also involved with the scheme, said the sheer number of surviving terraces was proof of their appeal.
"They are in many ways an extremely successful design, with a particularly good sense of community and neighbourly links," he said.
"They are on a nice scale and sensibly laid-out inside. But energy-saving was not an issue at the time they were built, and this project is an imaginative and very practical way of putting that right."
Remodelled terraces have already proved a success in the Lancashire Pennine towns of Nelson and Colne and also in Salford, notably at Chimney Pot Park where the developers Urban Splash have "upended" the old model, giving 19th century terraces sleeping quarters downstairs and living rooms on the first floor.
Leeds has found a huge market as starter homes for its 40,000-plus back-to-back terraces, once condemned as slums for having inadequate ventilation but now, with three of their four walls comfortably sandwiched by other homes, praised for saving heat and economical use of space.
Green variations also include some Northern towns' policy of "alternate demolition", where the clearing of every other row of barrack-like terraces has doubled the gardens and open space of those left.
Larger scale demolition of traditional terraces by government housing renewal projects has caused anger in Liverpool, Manchester and Lancashire's former milltowns.
Professor Steve Donnelly from Salford's faculty of science said terraced houses had won their case for reprieve but now needed "ways of being more efficient, as they are going to house people for generations to come. That requires detailed and robust research, which the Energy House will provide".
Tony Juniper, former director of Friends of the Earth, said: "Domestic energy use accounts for a huge proportion of emissions which we have to reduce. The millions of real-life terrace houses like this one are going to play an important part."
John Alker, policy director at the UK Green Building Council, said: "This looks like a great piece of research and it will be particularly interesting to see the results on behaviour, where less has been done to date.
"But let's not forget that there is a hell of lot that we know already – the biggest barrier to low carbon home refurbishment going mainstream has tended to be the upfront cost to consumers, and that is set to be tackled by the Energy Bill in the form of 'Pay As You Save schemes'."
Interiors: Mind the Gap House
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on March 20, 2010
It was once an narrow, dark alley between two listed buildings. Now it's a stunning contemporary home
It takes an architect to look at a narrow, dark alley, a gap between two buildings, and think, "Yep, that's where I want to live." But that's exactly what Luke Tozer did. Unintimidated by the fact that the street frontage was a mere 2.3m wide, or that the houses on either side were listed, or even by the fact that the space, an alley opening out into a garden, was bang in the middle of the Bayswater conservation area, west London, Tozer made models of his house before he had even bought the site, and took them to planners and his would-be neighbours. "They listened quietly to what I had to say," Tozer says, "then wrote long objection letters to the council."
How did he convince them his Gap House was a good idea? "We worked hard to reduce the impact on the neighbours as much as possible," he says. Following some serious negotiations, in return for their side entrance, which was situated in the alleyway, Tozer got planning permission and paid to dig out the neighbour's front garden and build a utility room in its place. He also turned the neighbour's small, dark courtyard into a raised, sun-filled terrace with a new living space underneath.
"In a conservation area in London, you have to either preserve or enhance the character of the area," he says. "We were hoping to enhance its urban character and create a listed building of the future." Tozer's aim, along with his business partner Tim Pitman (together they form Pitman Tozer Architects), was to build a contemporary, low-energy house.
It's hard to picture from the street, but the narrow white render housefront cascades into a 185 sq m Tardis of contemporary living. "It reminds me of Mr Benn," Tozer says, "when he goes through the magic door in the clothes shop and enters a whole other world." Living, eating and entertaining are done at the back, in an open-plan lounge-cum-courtyard, while the narrower front of the house is dedicated to three smaller, identical bedrooms, one stacked on top of the other. "Having the sleeping areas so separate is great because we have two young kids," says Tozer's wife, Charlotte. "We just retire to bed. The rest of the living is done downstairs." And what's it like to turn your lounge into an outside space with one push of a glass door? "It feels like you are in LA or the Mediterranean."
Below the courtyard are three 50m bore holes serving a ground-coupled heat pump, which provides the heating and hot water for the house. Rainwater is collected on the house's roofs to minimise water consumption and passive solar gain minimises lighting and heating requirements. Charlotte says, "I was worried about the rainwater harvesting because I thought it was going to be stinky, and I was worried we'd be living in a freezing house and never get enough hot water for a shower." The outcome couldn't be farther from the truth. Not only has the house won a Riba Manser Medal – the annual prize for the best one-off house in the UK – but with it came an engraved silver plaque, affirmation that the Gap House can stand, narrow and proud, as a listed building of the future.
Is Gary Neville living in Teletubbyland with plans for his eco house?
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on January 28, 2010
The Manchester United football star plans to build an eco-home which closely resembles that of the Teletubbies . . .
Manchester United star Gary Neville has revealed plans to build an underground "eco-bunker" (above) at his home in Lancashire. Locals have already dubbed it Teletubbyland (top). Artists' impressions of the £8m zero-carbon development, designed to merge seamlessly with the surrounding moorland, resemble something between a futuristic hobbit hole and the hideout of a rural Bond villain. The architects, meanwhile, have compared it with Skara Brae, a neolithic settlement in Orkney. Whatever inspired this hillside hideaway, its similarity to the Teletubby residence is hard to deny. Rumours of a plan to build a vacuum-cleaning dog named Noo-Noo are so far unconfirmed.