Passive House

It has just been announced that bere:architects in collaboration with the Prince's Foundation for the Built Environment have been shortlisted in the BRE UK Passivhaus Competition for both the Watford and the Ravenscraig sites. The brief was to design a semi-detached residential Passivhaus for Watford where one dwelling will be allocated for social housing and one for mid-range market housing.

Compare the thermal image of our Passivhaus Mayville Community Centre with a nearby school built in 1958 (click more below). Same time, same camera settings. Use the temperature scale to see the facade temperature. The nearer to yellow, the more heat is being wasted. The nearer to blue or black, the less heat is being wasted. Enough said.

It has just been announced that bere:architects, in collaboration with the Prince’s Foundation for the Built Environment, have been shortlisted in the Whitehill Bordon Eco-Town Terrace Competition to design three zero-carbon terraced houses on the northern edge of the newly designated South Downs National Park in Hampshire.

http://idoxwam.richmond.gov.uk/WAM/createComment.do;jsessionid=DB2834EC143E47E783004A79A460BB6F?action=CreateApplicationComment&applicationType=PLANNING&appNumber=11/2588/FUL

The external works at the Mayville are now underway to start to put the south garden back together. The garden will be used for community food growing projects, host fruit trees, birds and bees, and provide valuable accessible outdoor space for the building.

Mike Jackson of Splash tv and ecologically-minded architect Eric Parks were on site yesterday in Ebbw Vale to film a 'Soft Landings' handover event for the Larch and Lime house.

Maintenance officer Peter Counsel from United Welsh Housing Association came to learn more about the technical aspects of the two passivhaus dwellings, including how to keep them running optimally for the future tenants.

bere:architects would like to thank Laura Mark, AJ sustainability intern, for her wonderful review of the recent event at the Camden Passivhaus.

The event was organised by the Good Homes Alliance with funding from the Technology Strategy Board as part of their Building Performance Evaluation programme.

Here is a link to Laura’s blog post. 

It has just been announced that two more of bere:architects’ projects have been awarded funding to undergo two years of research and monitoring as part of the Technology Strategy Board’s Building Performance Evaluation programme.

Following Jeremy’s visit to the Mayville Community Centre at the beginning of June where he was shown round the building by Rachel Witherick (b:a), Trevor Mbatha (MCP), Jessie White (MCP) and David Ironside (site manager for the contractor), today Jeremy visited our offices and joined us for the daily office lunch. Jeremy is hugely supportive of the passivhaus refurbishment of the community centre, a building he has been personally using for nearly 30 years in his role as Labour MP for Islington North.

Jenny Jones, of the Green Party and GLA, visited the Mayville Community Centre project this morning which is now weeks off completion. She was hugely supportive of what has been achieved by the Mildmay Community Partnership, bere:architects and the construction team, stating when she received the description of the project she could not believe all that was being done by a small community trust on one building. She was interested to hear how the fund raising efforts and vision of the MCP, with the expertise and technical support of local architectural practice, bere:architects, had translated into such a ground breaking and exemplar community project.