When it comes to green building in the housing market, many of the green features centre around energy generation or energy conservation. This can include anything from adding solar panels to generate some or all of the building’s energy supply, incorporating energy efficient heating, cooling or white goods and generally focusing on the energy aspect of the building.
House.E+, designed by multi-disciplinary design firm Polifactory, takes this energy focus in a completely different direction.
The residential building, planned for a site in Vancouver, is described by the designers ‘not only a resourceful building regarding energy efficiency and sustainability, but also well equipped to actively respond to future demands of smart grid systems.’
Instead of focusing on energy generation in a simplistic, singular manner, the designers will put into practice a holistic system that incorporates energy, water and passive features that will allow House.E+ to produce more energy than it consumes.
While energy generation is perhaps the most complex and sophisticated element of the design, the building’s true sustainable foundation comes from its geothermal nature. Due to the fact that the building has been designed to sink 2.5 metres into the ground, geothermal heating and cooling will allow climate control to occur naturally. The architects say the rammed earth walls act ‘like breathing structures, allowing air exchange without significant heat loss, working naturally as a thermal mass, storing heat in winter and rejecting in the summer.’
With the building already offering to run at a carbon neutral level in terms of heating and cooling, it makes sense that any energy generated could lead to a surplus given the home’s low energy requirements.
Rooftop photovoltaic panels and wall-embedded micro-hydro turbines will produce energy, with the excess used to aid in the home’s aquaponics farm and distributed back onto the main grid.
While sustainability at its most basic root is about living within the resources that we have, sometimes creating an excess of a positive and environmentally responsible resource – such as green energy – can create a larger green impact. By focusing on tackling energy use from both a passive and active front, the effects are not singular; by creating a self-sustaining built space, but they are multiplied to affect the larger on-grid area.
