Last month I finally visited the ‘2226’ office in Austria near Bregenz. The building, realized about 4 years ago, already won many prizes. What is special about this building: it has no heating system, and in fact no ventilation system,… Continue Reading
Many colleagues in the field feel frustrated when trying to improve the materials performance of buildings: the lobbying and framing of materials is huge, blurring a real discussion on what materials with best performance and lowest impact should be applied.… Continue Reading
Last month the OECD published its report with the latest figures on material consumption worldwide. [1] Currently that is 79 GigaTon of materials per year, and we are going to 167 Gt (!) in 2060. Every year. This includes a… Continue Reading
Since it looks as if we are going to introduce the climate measures for buildings mainly via municipalities or cities, I have recovered some of my older research material about urban sustainability, developed when I worked at Wageningen University. The… Continue Reading
If we want to solve the problem with CO2 emissions in practice, then we have to assess CO2 emissions, and nothing else, as I argued earlier. And we do not. As for much of our policies or building and retrofit… Continue Reading
The Tetra Materia (see previous article) approach might be useful for practice, its not the whole story. It guides direction, but does not set targets. And our system has an overall limit as well. Materials, even renewables, come exclusively from… Continue Reading
The Trias Energetica is one of the generic guidelines that has a wide adoption in the Netherlands since the nineties: it states that, in order of importance: 1 reduce energy demand, 2 use renewable energy 3 use fossil fuels as… Continue Reading
In principle, its impossible to create a 0-embodied energy house, energy will always be needed. However, in the present time 0-embodied energy it is understandable as 0-fossil embodied energy, exa house exclusively based on renewable energy. 0-embodied energy, if that… Continue Reading
There are some strange excesses in the need for more sustainability, and especially with regard to the undefined “greening” of things. One of these, and you notice it more and more, is the tendency to plant trees on buildings. Not… Continue Reading
It is remarkable that the kg/m2 approach for buildings , as described in the previous article, is nearly completely absent. That is, nowadays. More then 100 years ago it was regularly used a a criterion in architectural competitions, the lower… Continue Reading