Architecture and Pretty Things

2010-09-29

Sustainable Design Examples

http://www.dwls.org/sustainable-design-examples.html

DRUK WHITE LOTUS SCHOOL

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Sustainable Design Examples

Here’s some background information on our award winning engineering solutions.
Ventilation Improved Pit latrines:

Traditional dry latrines have been enhanced to ‘VIP latrines’. These eliminate fly and odour problems and – most importantly in a desert environment - do not require water. A double chamber system with an integrated solar flue allows their operation as composting toilets and produces humus that can be used as fertiliser.
Passive Solar Heating:

Ladakh is hot in summer and very cold in winter. But even in winter, there is often intense sunlight and the teaching spaces heat quickly thanks to their optimal 30° south-east orientation, combined with fully-glazed solar façades that gather the sun’s energy and store heat in high thermal mass walls.

The Residences are oriented due south, and use Trombe Walls, which are coated externally with dark, heat-absorbing material and are faced with a double layer of glass. Heat is stored in the wall and conducted inwards to the dormitories at night-time.
Gravity Feed Water System:

Water is a scarce resource in Ladakh. The system pumps snow-melt water from a depth of about 30m to reservoirs near the top of the site. One reservoir provides drinking water under gravity feed to the school, while the other reservoir provides irrigation water. Water availability is a key aspect of the hygiene promotion programme that forms an important part of the education.

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Calyx, Pines Gardens St. Margerets Bay, Kent

http://helionicsdesigns.co.uk/

http://www.rammed-earth.info/project/33/

http://www.pinescalyx.co.uk/venue-conference-wedding-events.html

Calyx, Pines Gardens

St. Margerets Bay, Kent

The Calyx is a visitor centre, conference centre, exhibition space, classroom and low energy build demonstration. It is set in the beautiful Pines Gardens, an organically run public garden facing the sea at the White Cliffs of Dover.
Surveyors Conker Conservation oversaw the design process and took the role of clients representative. They are specialists in solar and Passivhaus design work. We were asked to build double storey earth retaining walls for this earth sheltered building using the chalk dug from the site, some 650 tonnes. The chalk on site was not particularly strong, crushing at .8Nmm2. The engineer had not designed for this material before and the walls were expected to take both compression and lateral loads. With that in mind the walls were designed to be 650mm thick, which at that time were the thickest walls I had ever been asked to build.

After the soil was carefully extracted and we had separated the topsoil from the chalk, work could begin. There was only one straight wall in the whole design. Most of the building was set on a 12m diametre, but in the middle of the ground floor there was a series of more normal 300mm walls built on a series of compound curves.

Once the ground floor walls were built the first floor slab was poured, giving us time to build a 3m diametre boiler house on which the beautiful “bovedas tabicadas” dome was tested.

Once that was completed work continued on the first floor walls, with the slab propped from below to allow our Bobcat to drive on the green slab.

Rammed chalk was chosen for a number of reasons: the way it looks, the enormous carbon emmision saving made from not having to remove the soil from site, removing the need to bring manufactured materials to site, the price and getting the benefit of the enormous thermal mass the walls allow.

The walls were curved on the inside faces but facetted on the outside to allow standard 2.4m x 1.2m insulation batts to be fixed directly to the walls, with a waterproof membrane in between. The walls took 8 weeks to complete including the boilerhouse.

2010-08-17

Gloucester Cathedral

Medieval building was rarely if ever the simple implementation of a preconcieved design. Buildings were not drawn or modelled in their totality before work began on site, and much was therefore left to chance and ingenuity.

At the same time, large structures took so long to build that no one generation could ever hope to see them completed in their own lifetime.

As a consequence, medieval architecture is almost always the results of a slow collective process of adaptation, rather than the invention of an individual genious. - The Secret Lives of Buildings

Gloucester Cathedral began life in the early 600AD, however the building that exists today came into being in its simpliest form in the early 1089 where the King Edward II was laid to rest. Though much debate relates to wether this is the true resting place of the king, who after a lengthy imprisonment died and took over three months to be laid to rest. Mainly due to circumstances involving his Queen Isabella, and her lover Rodger Mortimer. There were supposedly plans for end the Kings life, due to his refusal to die at the hand of his ‘lengthy illness’. The king supposedly escaped dressed in servants clothes and lived out the rest of his life in western europe.

The architecture of the Cathedral evolved with time. The master mason passing on to his apprentice the medevial Gothic ideas of his time, with the apprentice evolving them with his own progressive ideals, and so for forth, from mason to apprentice for generation upon generation. The result was that the Cathedral was a cumulation of centuries worth of ideas.

For instance the tomb of King Edward II which was orgionally dark and serene, has developed a new form of serenity created from the use of celestory stained glass windows, giving the whole cathedral a sense of weightlessness and divine grandure.

” It was the sort of building that caused one to wonder how many angels could dance on the head of a pin”

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