Blog
Jaya Skandamoorthy (BRE director of Enterprise and Innovation) attended a meeting at bere:architects today with Virginia Cinquemani (BRE Innovation Park) in order to establish the building and training and disemination programme around our competition-winning Chestnut House low cost passivhaus prototypes at the Watford Innovation Park.
The semi-detached pair of houses, designed in collaboration with the Prince of Wales' Foundation for Building Communities, will be completed in time for a ministerial opening in September 2012.
Bere:architects staff are now all participating in the new Yoga class at the Mayville Community Centre. Designed by bere:architects the Community Centre is a fully certified Passivhaus retrofit.
Those that attended on Monday found the qualities of a Passivhaus building helped make the Yoga class all the more enjoyable. The insulation, triple glazing, draft free construction and Heat Recovery Ventilation ensure that the temperature and air quality remain constant and pleasant throughout the class as well as creating a quiet and calm atmosphere perfect for Yoga.
(These notes are selected from an email discussion with Bill’s permission)
A friend sent me a link to this anonymous blog post
"A wildflower meadow atop a roof in Islington. This picture was inspired by a National Geographic article. I love the idea of having a green roof - a little piece of the English countryside in central London, hidden from the city streets below."
Cold Weather and the Elderly: As the cold weather bites, vulnerable and elderly people are the ones who will suffer the most, and they are the least able to fight the cold, damp conditions.
Rising Energy Prices: With rising energy prices, more and more people are slipping into fuel poverty.
Last Tuesday morning we visited our ‘towards Passivhaus’ Retrofit-for-the-Future project at 3 Passfield Drive in East London to take some thermal images of the finished retrofit. We wanted to take advantage of the cold snap that is being experienced across the country to check the thermal performance of the building.
At 8.30am on Tuesday morning the outside temperature was 1.5°C. The thermal images of the front facades of Passfield Drive, shown above in Fig 1, are a powerful visual indication of just how much energy this retrofit is saving.
It has been announced today that The Chestnut House, our Passivhaus designed in collaboration with the Prince's Foundation for Building Community, has been chosen as the winning pair of houses to be built at the BRE’s Watford Innovation Park. The Scottish based PassivCollective’s Passivhaus design has been chosen for the BRE’s Ravenscraig site in Scotland.
At one of our low energy refurbishment projects, Dyne Road, bere:architects carried out a masonry permeability test before installing internal insulation, in order to check whether the brickwork needs protection against penetration of outside moisture. Without such a check, there is a risk of serious fabric problems resulting from the work.
The Green House Competition has been launched to find people to live in and assess the Larch and Lime Houses at the former steel works at Ebbw Vale in South Wales, designed by bere:architects’ and built by United Welsh under a competition administered by the Building Research Establishment Wales.
With bere:architects’ Retrofit for the Future projects one of the most difficult details to realise on site was at the eaves where the airtightness layer in the loft was sealed to the parge coat on the external walls. This is a common and problematic detail for many retrofits seeking to reduce draughts in this area as it is crucial that the membrane remains airtight whilst passing around the rafters to seal to the wall.
