Homes must be converted to zero carbon if targets are to be met

15 July 2011, source edie newsroom

Almost any home could have its carbon footprint reduced to zero and measures to convert them should start immediately if government targets are to be met, a building performance expert has claimed. 

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Dr Lubo Jankovic, from the Birmingham City University's School of Architecture & Centre for Low Carbon Research, argues that to meet ambitious targets of reducing emission by 2025, 95% of existing housing stock needs to be made eco-compliant.

The findings were revealed from research recently carried out at the University on a model 'zero carbon home'. Dr Jankovic and his team have been working on instrumental monitoring and post-occupancy evaluation of the Birmingham Zero Carbon House, a carbon-neutral building based on 170-year-old redbrick Victorian house.

He said: "Technology to make our homes more energy efficient are not new, for example using more insulation or installing energy renewable systems such as solar panels. Done right this has the potential of 90% return on investment over a 25-year lifecycle - but if you get it wrong, then it could end up adding extra cost of about the same amount."

To ensure new eco-modifications are carried to maximum efficiency, Dr Jankovic says that builders and contractors have to work in a more holistic manner with designers who use advanced simulation modelling. "At the moment everything is done in silos, but if there was more joined-up thinking it would make a big difference."

Existing 3-D modelling and simulation software can already test a building's environmental vulnerability. But the research has developed a method to virtually integrate the various energy-saving systems to accurately predict their eco-value over a set time period.

According to Dr Jankovic, when this method is applied a return of investment can be demonstrated and mortgage-lenders or other agencies could then make an informed decision when looking at the benefits of upgrading a particular home or building.

Maxine Perella

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Smart Structures - What Is Intelligent Architecture Like?

BERLIN.- "Building intelligently" is one of today´s leading questions worldwide, as design, architecture, and urban planning have to urgently find answers to changing global circumstances. The laboratory-talk "Smart Structures - What Is Intelligent Architecture Like?" will investigate new approaches and ideas such as drastic weight reduction, functional integration, and the development of sustainable combinations of materials to support minimization of environmental damage - towards an intelligent and flexible architecture. How can architecture free itself from established styles? 

There is no such thing as a final state of a romantically perfect eco-balance. In a continuous flow of evolving cycles, design, architecture, and urban planning have to deal with facilitation of intelligent adaptation to changing circumstances. Knowledge and experience are increasing, but stereotyping, rhetoric and misunderstanding between professionals with different backgrounds and affinities hamper development of a new design dynamic. More than in other trades in building and construction improvements depend on integration of design disciplines and cooperation between industrial sectors that are not accustomed to combined thinking. The first challenge is to make disciplines and industries understand each other.

This is even more important, since progress depends on seemingly contradictory propositions. Dogmatic belief in various levels of recycling ignores the industrial energy consumption it may require, plus its implications for the greenhouse effect. The consequential principle of design for disassembly is certainly valid, but as a by-product it feeds prejudice against any kind of chemical bonding, thereby raising suspicion about any innovation and improvement of gluing and of composite structures, whereas this has the potential to develop into the realm of sophisticated renewability. Composite structures are generally mistaken for a limited range of high range materials, typically Carbon Fibre Reinforced Polymers, whereas composite thinking offers opportunities to increase added value by combining minimum amounts of all kinds of different materials in smart product elements based upon optimum use of their properties.

Architects choose materials by what they express rather than how they can be processed and what they can do. They tend to think that weight reduction, which most of them favour, is a matter of choice of materials, whereas it can have much more impact if it involves rethinking both structure and style. It appears difficult for architects to critically reconsider their rather traditional views on architectural identity on all levels from detail, via building to ever changing urban networks. Opportunities for developmental strategies of cooperation will be discussed by curator Ed van Hinte together with his Dutch and German controversial partners to boost mutual learning and inspiration as well as information exchange for fruitful cooperation in the future. “Building intelligently” is one of the today’s leading questions worldwide and will generate revolutionary approaches for the audience as well as for experts and producers of building materials. Pioneers in this field are invited to reinvestigate the issues of sustainability and responsibility of architects as to evoke radical changes in architecture and design.


Reposted From: http://www.artdaily.org/index.asp?int_sec=2&int_new=31418

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