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These Massive Mirrored Dishes Could Make Solar Cheaper For All

Using simple materials also helps. “The reflective material we use for the mirror facets are similar to that of potato chip bags.”

More> Co.Exist

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Thailand’s New Tallest Skyscraper Just Opened, But It Looks Like It’s Missing Some Pixels.

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Does solar now pay better than crops? A great alternative to empty land.

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Seeder making its mark in Washington D.C.

It was an eventful month for Seeder in Washington D.C.  Seeder CEO Alex Shoer was invited to the White House as “Emerging Global Entrepreneur,” pitched on stage at the 1776 Challenge Finals to compete for $500k and spoke at the U.S.-China Renewable Energy Industries Forum to leaders in the energy industry and a large Chinese delegation about Seeder’s innovative business model on roof-top solar financing and how they are helping to deploy solar at scale in China.

Seeder had access to high level stake holders at the various events, including some of the biggest CEOs in the country (Brian Chesky - Airbnb, Julie Hanna -Kiva, Mark Cuban - Shark Tank, Steve Blank - Father of Lean Startup) plus high level officials at the Department of Energy, IFC/World Bank, Commerce department, and the US Export-Import bank. 

Seeder officially launched their innovative zero-cost solar model for the China market in partnership with UGE earlier this year and it has been talked about in the press with articles in the Global Times and Wall Street Journal and taking off amongst commercial buildings in China, being deployed on over 2MW of projects.

If you want to learn more about how to get solar on your roof at no cost and lock in 10-15% energy savings from day one then fill out our solar request form here and we will get back to you within 24 - 48 hours.

Below are some of the events Alex Shoer attended and people he visited during his whirlwind trip in the D.C.

Now back in Shanghai, the plans including wrapping up their Angel funding round, closing a few new solar projects and identifying additional financing partners who want to invest in this high-reward solar deployment model.

To the next steps...

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Projected growth of the wind industry over the next 35 years. via the Department of Energy. 

For more information on how wind power is poised to go big — really big http://grist.org/climate-energy/2-cool-maps-that-show-how-wind-power-is-poised-to-go-big-really-big/ 

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Growing our way out of climate change by building with hemp and wood fibre

Article by Mike Lawrence

From domestic housing to the Science Museum, plant-based construction materials cut reliance on scarce resources and build healthy, efficient and zero carbon buildings

How can buildings help with climate change? It’s all about renewables and “sequestered carbon”.

The Department for Business, Innovation and Skills’ 2010 report on Low Carbon Construction concluded that construction was responsible for around 300m tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions, which is almost 47% of the UK’s total. Of this, around 50m tonnes is embedded in the fabric of buildings.

Making one tonne of steel emits 1.46 tonnes of CO2 and 198kg of CO2 is emitted make one tonne of reinforced concrete. One square metre of timber framed, hemp-lime wall (weighing 120kg), after allowing for the energy cost of transporting and assembling the materials actually stores 35.5kg of CO2.

If we can convert plants into building materials, we are in a win-win situation. Plants use the energy of the sun to convert atmospheric CO2 and water into hydrocarbons – the material from which plants are made. 

The plant acts as a carbon store, sequestering (absorbing) atmospheric CO2 for as long as the plant continues to exist. This CO2 is only re-released when the material is composted or burnt, and the great thing is that through replanting it you can re-absorb this CO2 annually, in the case of straw or hemp, or every decade or so in the case of timber, rather than the 300m years that it takes to recycle coal or oil.

Secondly, plant based materials can be used to make high performing building envelopes, protecting against external weather and making a building more comfortable, healthy and energy efficient to live in.

Not only can they be used as insulation materials, displacing oil-based alternatives such as polyurethane foam, but they also interact with the internal environment in a way that inorganic materials just can’t do. 

This is because they are “vapour active”. Insulating materials such as hemp-lime, hemp fibre and wood fibre are capable of absorbing and releasing water vapour. This is doubly effective, because not only can they act as a buffer to humidity (taking moisture out of the air), but they also stabilise a building’s internal temperature much better through latent heat effects (energy consumed and released during evaporation and condensation within the pores of the material).

To build using hemp, the woody core or shiv of the industrial hemp plant is mixed with a specially developed lime-based binder. Factory-constructed panels are pre-dried and when assembled in a timber frame building, the hemp shiv traps air in the walls, providing a strong barrier to heat loss. The hemp itself is porous, meaning the walls are well insulated while the lime-based binder sticks together and protects the hemp, making the building material resistant to fire and decay. The industrial hemp plant takes in carbon dioxide as it grows and the lime render absorbs even more of the climate change gas. Hemp-lime buildings have an extremely low carbon footprint.

Building with hemp lime. Photograph: University of Bath

In this way bio-based materials can be used to construct “zero carbon” buildings, where the materials have absorbed more CO2 than is consumed during construction. By applying PassivHaus principles (the voluntary industry standard for low-carbon design) to bio-based buildings, a building’s energy use once inhabited can also be reduced to minimal levels. This is a true “fabric first” approach, where the fabric of buildings passively manages energy consumption, rather than purely relying on renewables such as solar panels and ground source heating systems, which have a more limited life-span and the potential for failure.

I worked on a project recently for the Science Museum to reduce the high energy cost of archival storage. They needed to have large enclosures kept at a steady humidity and temperature to ensure that items ranging from the first edition of Newton’s Principia through to horse drawn carriages and even Daleks do not deteriorate. Normally this uses energy intensive air conditioning systems.

The three-storey archival store that the Science Museum built in 2012 using a hemp-lime envelope was so effective that they switched off all heating, cooling, and humidity control for over a year, maintaining steadier conditions than in their traditionally equipped stores, reducing emissions while saving a huge amount of energy.

Improved bio-based materials can also passively improve the internal air quality of buildings by interacting with airborne pollutants, removing them from the building. The new HIVE building – a £1m project funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council – has been designed as a platform for research projects into this kind of sustainable construction. The HIVE has a purpose-built flood cell, which will also support research into creating buildings and building materials that are more flood-resilient – a valuable resource in these times of climate change induced adverse weather conditions.

The Hive building. Photograph: University of Bath

Industry and government must also embrace the opportunities presented by bio-based construction materials to reduce emissions. Domestic housing is a key part of this. Good quality housing can be built out of structural timber with a bio-based insulating envelope using straw; hemp-lime, or other systems using wood fibre or other cellulose fibres.

With domestic housing high on the government’s agenda, it is time the construction industry recognised the economic and environmental benefits of bio-based construction materials and became less reliant on depleting resources including oil and steel.

This article was originally published in The Guardian 

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Can China’s 13th Five-Year Plan deliver more sustainable cities?

Article by He Quandong

China’s next five-year plan must turn the country’s urbanisation ambitions into concrete, implementable measures, says the Energy Foundation’s He Dongquan

Better public transport is likely to be a priority in China's 13th Five-Year Plan (Image by Yuxuan Wang shows Beijing's central business district) 

  As China’s policymakers mull the contents of the country’s next Five-Year Plan, chinadialogue asks a range of contributors what they would like to see in the development blueprint. In March China published a new urbanisation plan for 2014 to 2020. How this vision is implemented through the 13th Five-Year Plan will determine what China’s cities look like in the years ahead. There are a number of points in the plan worth noting. The overall approach to sustainable cities is excellent. It calls for urban space to be optimised through public transport, high-capacity infrastructure and mixed-use development. These ideas are closely linked to China’s energy-saving and emissions-reduction needs. New concepts include: transport-oriented development, mixed communities,urban growth boundaries and intensive urban development. These point towards fresh approaches to city building as planners seek to waste less on unnecessary infrastructure, shift patterns of behaviour, introduce systems to support public transport and change the emissions status-quo. As well as greater use of low-carbon technology, new energy systems, smart cities and energy and emissions saving, the new plan calls for industrial land to be reallocated to encourage the circular economy. This recognises that, as China has urbanised, the efficiency of land-use has been low.

Also download our special journal: Reimagining China's cities Next we need to wait and see how the 13th Five-Year Plan turns these ambitions into concrete policies and implementable measures, and how it coordinates action across different government departments. Another change is a new emphasis on the role of small cities. In the past, Chinese urbanisation policy looked to major hubs, but now the government recognises that a spread of smaller cities is needed to resolve economic and social issues. This will require changes in land ownership, government finance and taxation and the hukou system, in order to allow for a new phase of urbanisation, distinct from a past model dependent on GDP growth and government land sales. The document also stresses that China’s urbanisation plans must be both feasible and properly enforced. Planning laws introduced in the past decade have supported the idea of “three plans in one”. This is the idea that content common to economic and social planning, urban planning and land-use planning should be carried out via a single process. The hope is that this will produce more scientific and feasible proposals which, crucially, are more likely to get implemented. In line with this approach, the regional plans proposed in this new document will include the housing authorities, the development and reform authorities and land authorities – going much further than the existing system run by the housing ministry. I expect at the overall level the 13th Five-Year Plan will focus on solving issues faced by migrant workers, the hukou system, and coordination across different planning systems. Urban low-carbon development is likely to be covered at the level of specific plans, with the focus being coordination across different sectors. The combined planning mentioned above is mainly happening at the local level: coordination mechanisms between the Ministry of Land, Development and Reform Commission and the Ministry of Housing are not yet in place. If we want better quality planning then the 13th Five-Year Plan needs to resolve this issue.

This article was originally published in China Dialogue

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Wooden skyscrapers could be the future of flat-pack cities around the world

The development of engineered timber could herald a new era of eco-friendly ‘plyscrapers’. Christchurch welcomed its first multistorey timber structure this year, there are plans for Vancouver, and the talk is China could follow

When American engineer William Le Baron Jenney designed the world’s first skyscraper in Chicago in 1884, no one believed in his unconventional technologies. His lightweight steel frame relieved a structure of its heavy masonry shackles, enabling it to soar to new heights. Perplexed by this trade-in of solid brick for a spindly steel skeleton, Chicago inspectors paused the construction of the Home Insurance Building until they were certain it was structurally sound. 

Of course, Jenney’s revolutionary edifice provided a blueprint for city skylines across the world. By 2011, China was reckoned to be topping off a new skyscraper (500ft or taller) every five days, reaching a total of 800 by 2016. Toronto, now North America’s fourth largest city, currently has 130 high-rise construction projects under way.

Chicago’s Home Insurance Building, widely considered to be the world’s first modern skyscraper. Photograph: Chicago History Museum/Getty Images

As a result, buildings are slowly choking the atmosphere. In Britain, where the construction industry accounts for almost7% of the economy (including 10% of total employment),47% of greenhouse gas emissions are generated from buildings, while 10% of CO2 emissions come from construction materials. Furthermore, 20% of the materials used on the average building site end up in a skip.

So just as Jenney’s steel-frame solved the issue of the dense, stunted buildings in the 19th century, architects and engineers are now seeking new ways of building taller and faster without having such a drastic impact on the environment. And that has seen them revisit the most basic building material of them all: wood.

Although wood in its raw form could not compete with Jenney’s steel-frame wonder, a type of super-plywood has been developed to step up to the challenge. By gluing layers of low-grade softwood together to create timber panels, today’s “engineered timber” is more akin to Ikea flat-packed furniture than traditional sawn lumber, and offers the prospect of a new era of eco-friendly “plyscrapers”.

For Vancouver-based architect Michael Green, the sky is the limit for wooden buildings. While nearing completion of the University of Northern British Columbia’s Wood Innovation and Design Centre in Prince George, Green’s practice, MGA, has also drawn up plans for a 30-storey, sun-grown tower for downtown Vancouver.

If built, Green’s vision would be easily the world’s tallest wooden building, soaring past the current contenders – London’s Stadthaus at nine storeys, and the 10-storey Forte Building in Melbourne. But that’s not the main motivation, according to MGA associate Carla Smith. “To be honest, it’s not like we really care about being the tallest,” she says. “We really do see a wooden future for cities, and our aim is to get others to jump on board too.” 

The Nelson Marlborough Institute of Technology arts and media building under construction in Nelson, New Zealand

Green is giving away his hefty, 200-page instruction manual, The Case for Tall Wood Buildings, free of charge. He hopes it will inspire architects and engineers to branch out beyond their concrete and steel confinements, and embrace a material that sequesters carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, holding it captive during its growth and lifetime in a structure – one tonne of CO2 per cubic metre of wood. To put that in context, while a 20-storey wooden building sequesters about 3,100 tonnes of carbon, the equivalent-sized concrete building pumps out 1,200 tonnes. That net difference of 4,300 tonnes is the equivalent of removing 900 cars from the city for a year.

But while timber advocates such as Green hope to to sow the seeds of change in the minds of policymakers worldwide, building regulations still put a low-rise lid on the height of timber buildings. This is based on wood’s historic reputation as kindling for a great city fire: in London, Chicago and San Francisco (to name just a few), roaring fires have ravaged city streets, wiping out great swathes of grand architecture and razing urban history to the ground. But while the classic timber-framed city of 1870s Chicago was gone in an instant, today’s engineered timber develops a protective charring layer that maintains structural integrity and burns very predictably – unlike steel, which warps under the intense heat.

The rigidity of mass timber panels has tended to restrict architects to a “house of cards” design, whereby panels are slotted together and stacked on top of one another in repetitive patterns. But new innovations are coming thick and fast: theUSDA recently announced a $2m investment for wood innovation, and in the previously scorched city of Chicago, mega-firm Skidmore, Owings and Merrillpublished a study that re-imagines the 42-storey Dewitt Chestnut apartment block as a timber tower. In Europe, a 14-storey wooden building is currently under construction in Bergen, Norway, with another eight-storey structure on its way up in Dornbirn, Austria – the prototype for a 20-storey plyscraper designed by the global engineering firm Arup.

The finished NMIT arts and media building

One other important breakthrough came in British Columbia, a Canadian province half-covered in forest. Since 1996, more than 16m hectares have been destroyed by North America’s native mountain pine beetle, which releases a blue-staining fungus into the wood, halting the flow of nutrients and water and the killing the tree. 

The province faced the prospect of billions of these dead lodgepole pinestriggering a huge release of carbon dioxide – until a means of using this undesirable blue-stained lumber for building was realised. British Columbia promotes its use through the Wood First Act, passed in 2009, which requires all new, publicly financed construction projects to first consider wood as the primary building material.

The most prominent example is Vancouver’s 2010 Winter Olympic ice rink, the Richmond Oval, which features massive glued-laminated timber arches of beetle-ravaged wood. Building regulations are now loosening up in Canada, reflecting the recent successes of the country’s wood use. Last month, Ontario raised the cap on timber structures from four storeys to six, just as British Columbia did in 2009.

But perhaps the most promising realisation of wood’s worth is in New Zealand, where the violent earthquakes of 2010 and 2011 left almost one third of the Christchurch’s buildings – including 220 heritage sites – up for demolition. Almost four years on, the city’s grand rebuild has begun, and wood has taken a step into the spotlight due to its durability in high-seismic activity zones. The “new” Christchurch, as outlined in the Central Recovery Plan, is proposed to be a low-rise, “greener, more attractive” city costing around NZ$40bn (£19bn), almost 20% of the country’s annual GDP.

A detail of the Merritt building in Christchurch’s central business district Photograph: PR

Andrew Buchanan, professor of timber design at the University of Canterbury, sees a growing interest in the use of wood in Christchurch’s rebuild. “When it first happened, people were scared of concrete and masonry buildings,” he says. “Wood was seen as a very desirable and very safe alternative.” 

Earlier this year, Christchurch welcomed its first post-earthquake, multistorey timber structure – the Merritt building in the city’s central business district. The structure uses a “post-tension” technology – the brainchild of Buchanan and his colleagues – where timber is lashed together with steel tendons that act like rubber bands, allowing the building to snap back into place following any seismic movement. And recently, the Southern Hemisphere’s first engineered timber factory opened up in Nelson, producing timber panels for flat-pack cities across the globe.

In China, Arup is currently working to educate engineers on the use of wood. With even a superfirm like SOM – the architects behind One World Trade Centerand the Burj Khalifa – considering using of wood for high-rise construction, the industry finally appears ready to grasp its full potential. 

Several of SOM’s buildings are in Chinese cities (the 71-storey Pearl River Building in Guangzhou, and the 88-storey Jin Mao in Shanghai, for example), so perhaps their Timber Tower could take root there too? “Judging from the speed that the Chinese usually adopt new technologies,” says Arup director Tristram Carfrae, “this really won’t take very long!”

This article was amended on Monday 6 October 2014. The NMIT arts and media building is in Nelson, not Christchurch

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9 creative use for shipping containers

Over the past decade, fleets of shipping containers have left the shipyard and have been popping up on dry land as an eco-friendly—and economical—method of surprisingly elegant design. We've rounded up nine recent projects that take the humble boxes to new heights.

1. Firm: NL Architects  Project: Barneveld Noord Bus Station, Netherlands Standout: The Dutch firm used four shipping containers to construct a bold structure—complete with a waiting area and cafe—designed to make travel less stressful.

2. Firm: GAD Architecture  Project: Trump Cadde, Istanbul Standout: Located in the Trump Towers Mall, this roof-terrace market redefines the notion of a food court. Twenty-five units house food vendors and shops, creating an urban interpretation of the city’s legendary bazaars.

3. Firm: distill studio  Project: The Box Office, Providence, Rhode Island Standout: Twelve colorful office and studio spaces were created using 35 recycled containers on the site of an abandoned lumber yard in the Olneyville neighborhood. The efficient building uses just 25% of the energy consumed by a conventional office building.

4. Firm: Inhouse  Project: Ninety9Cents, Capetown, South Africa Standout: The advertising agency’s double-decker reception area references the nearby harbor and provides a vibrant and comfortable lounge for clients.

5. Firm: North Arrow Studio and Hendley | Knowles Design Studio Project: Container Bar, Austin, Texas Standout: Seven recycled containers, each with unique interiors, are stacked and arranged around a central courtyard at this new watering hole, located on hip Rainey Street.

6. Firm: bof Architekten  Project: Bharati Antarctic Research Station, Antarctica Standout: The Hamburg, Germany–based firm utilized 134 cargo containers wrapped in an insulated shell for this self-sufficient facility commissioned by India’s National Center for Antarctic and Ocean Research. The building can be disassembled and removed without any impact on the environment.

7. Firm: Envelope A+D Project: Proxy, San Francisco Standout: A 25-foot-high vertical conveyor belt is the centerpiece of the Aether Apparel store in Hayes Valley. The building is composed of three 40-foot containers, and is a part of Proxy, a temporary village of shipping containers.

8. Firm: Platoon Cultural Development and Graft Architects Project: Platoon Kunsthalle Standout: The global arts and culture organization conceived the three-story structure in the Mitte district as an experimental space to accommodate exhibitions, performances, and events.

9. Firm: Tsai Design Studio Project: Vissershok Primary School, Cape Town, South Africa Standout: Located just outside the city in Durbanville, this rural school features a bright refurbished-shipping-container classroom to accommodate 25 five and six-year-old students. A canopy roof protects the building from direct sunlight and an adjacent green wall shields the play area from wind.

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Maximizing energy possibilities for pedestrian walkways and flooring.

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Presenting the five most inspiring sustainable buildings in 2014. Click on each picture to get more details. 

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Building the World's First Carbon-Neutral City

Masdar City, near Abu Dhabi, boasts green buildings, a fleet of electric cars and massive solar arrays. But will the experiment work?

The oil-rich Emirate of Abu Dhabi is well aware that someday the crude will stop flowing. What then? In a rather epic attempt to get ahead of their own future, the powers that be are hard at work building and promoting Masdar City, an ambitious self-contained renewable-energy experimental city designed by Foster and Partners and rising in the desert 11 miles from downtown. Now in its sixth year of development, the city, which is being managed by local conglomerate Masdar (with significant backing from the government), is well underway. As an experiment, it’s fascinating. As a viable hunk of commercial real estate, however, the jury is still out. 

With one million square meters (247 acres) developed so far—about 15 percent of the master plan—and 4,000 residents in place, Masdar City is no small undertaking. Its “greenprint” is meant to demonstrate how a city can rapidly urbanize while simultaneously managing energy, water and waste, never forgetting that while “sustainable” is nice, it has to be commercially viable to remain sustainable for the long term.

The glass at the Masdar Institute Campus is shielded by terracotta grills. (Masdar City)

Nearly all of the electricity in the current phase comes from a massive 87,777-panel, 10-megawatt solar plant along with building-mounted solar panels, and demand is kept in check by an impressive array of design features that minimize the need for air conditioning despite the desert locale. The site is higher than the surrounding land to catch breezes off the Persian Gulf; the short streets are narrow and laid out to maximize shade all day long; building glass is shielded by decorative terracotta grills; and a 45-meter wind tower pulls breezes from above and pushes them through the streets to create a cooling effect. The result: temperatures that the developers claim are generally 15 degrees cooler than the desert.

Nearly all of the electricity comes from a massive 87,777-panel, 10-megawatt solar plant along with building-mounted solar panels. (Masdar City)

As for water, the goal is to recycle 80 percent of the wastewater generated by sinks, baths, showers and even dishwashers and washing machines as “greywater”meant for multiple re-use. All buildings must meet the equivalent of LEED Gold certification—a rating awarded by the U.S. Green Building Council—and use sustainable palmwood whenever possible. Interestingly, there are neither faucet handles nor light switches in the city. Everything is motion-activated.

One casualty of design revisions forced by the 2008 financial crisis were the Logan’s Run-style driverless travel pods that would have buzzed around the city. Instead, a fleet of electric vehicles has been deployed for now, but the main goal is to make the compact city as walkable and bikeable as possible, completely eliminating the need for fossil fuel-powered transportation.

As the city slowly rises around Masdar’s Institute of Science and Technology, which specializes in energy and sustainability, other tenants include the International Renewable Energy Agency, Siemens, General Electric and Mitsubishi. Together, they employ a few thousand residents, but the ultimate $20 billion plan, which may not be achieved until 2025 (if at all), is to accommodate 40,000 residents and 50,000 daily mass-transit commuters.

The big question: will Masdar City ever stand on its own financially, making it replicable in places where billions of government dollars aren’t readily available? It looks like we won’t know for at least another ten years, but in the meantime, architects and urban planners can certainly borrow the best ideas from this pricey sustainable playground and leverage them for worldwide benefit. Just be sure to bring along some extra water for the bike tour in case the breezes aren’t blowing.

This article was originally published by the editorial team at XPRIZE, which designs and operates incentivized competitions to bring about radical breakthroughs for the benefit of humanity.

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Solar is so popular right now, we're facing a shortage of panels!

© SunTech

From glut to shortage for first time since 2006

It's worth repeating again and again: The price per watt of solar power is going through the floor while worldwide installed capacity is going through the roof (up 53x in the past 9 years!). This is great for the environment, because for each solar panel that goes up, demand for electricity from dirty sources goes down, causing a great virtuous cycle of demand destruction. But there are limits to how fast an industry can grow, and we're apparently starting to hit those limits, at least temporarily, and production will need to further increase to keep up.

Demand is expected to go up 29% this year, so it's not surprising that supply has a hard time keeping up. That's exactly why Elon Musk and SolarCity say that we will need many solar gigafactories.

The last time supply was tight, in 2006, the solar industry installed about 1.5 gigawatts that year. Contrast with today: The industry expects to install as much as 52 gigawatts this year and 61 gigawatts in 2015. That's about as much as is actually being produced by viable factories.

Renewable Energy Policy Network/Screen capture

Back in 2011, I wrote something called The Solar Industry is Like a Yo-Yo to explain the boom-bust cycle facing solar panel makers:

"For about as long as it has existed, the solar power industry has been going from boom to bust, and vice versa. It is growing fast, and has been for years, but forget about a smooth upward curve: Up close, the trajectory looks like the Alps."

Renewable Energy Policy Network/Screen capture

Busts might be bad for individual companies, but they aren't necessarily bad for solar power itself, as we've seen in the past few years. A glut of panels meant that prices fell and a lot more solar power was installed than if prices had been high.

Now that demand has grown to match, and maybe now exceed, supply, the opposite will happen. Solar prices will go up, or at least not fall as fast, and more solar panel makers will make money. This will attract competition and new investments in additional capacity until supply once again overtakes demand and prices fall because of the glut...

Wash, rinse, repeat.

© BNEF

Originally published on Bloomberg.

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Person of Interest: Ken Yeang, green architect

Interview by Kathryn Freeman Rathbone originally published here

“If you can make a place that gives people an identity and let’s them know how, where, and when they are, and make it green, that will make architecture a success.” – Ken Yeang, T.R. Hamzah & Yeang

“I’m currently at my busiest, but I’m also at my happiest.” This is no small statement for any architect to make, especially one like Ken Yeang, who as the founding principal of T.R. Hamzah & Yeang has been working tirelessly at the forefront of green design for the past 40 years. We pushed him to dig a little deeper and talk about his state of content, and he shared with us his thoughts on green design and how to leave this world a happier place.

gb&d: You’ve been practicing green design for the past four decades. How did you break into the field during its early development, and why did you commit to its advancement at the start of your career?

Ken Yeang: In 1971, when I was finishing my undergraduate degree at the Architectural Association in London, green design wasn’t very fashionable. I went to go work on research at Cambridge on a Social Science Research Council grant—these are very big grants in the UK—and six months into the project, I realized it was all about the environment. But a record for that kind of work didn’t exist in architecture, so I enrolled in ecology courses in the Department of Environmental Biology. I earned my doctorate and published my dissertation, “Theoretical Framework for Incorporating Ecological Considerations in the Design and Planning of the Built Environment,” in 1975. This field of study was very important to me, and I went back to Malaysia and set up practice.

But the [architecture] field wasn’t ready to support it. There was no engineering support. I started by looking into passive mode design, which is similar to what I call “bioclimatic design.” It’s a climate-responsive approach; the design responds passively to the latitude and the climate of each project’s location.

gb&d: How long did it take for architecture to catch on to sustainable design?

Yeang: A little more than 15 years ago, the whole world jumped up and said, “We have to do something about the devastation of the environment!” Engineers started to support it. By 2010, every architect was doing green design.

This is a good and bad thing. Good because it’s good for the environment. Bad because it’s often not done properly. Even LEED can be misleading. It’s good because it creates greater awareness of green design, especially for clients, but bad because it’s disproportionate. It gives points for things like bicycle parking. A LEED Platinum rating is not an end-all. The Living Building Challenge pushes beyond LEED. It’s a step in the right direction because it’s performance-based.

In Singapore, Ken Yeang’s Solaris Tower integrates full-size trees and other plants into the façade, assisting in the research facility’s 36% reduction in energy consumption.

View from one of Solaris Tower’s many terraces.

gb&d: Sustainable design goes by many different names. Do you believe there is a right term?

Yeang: The term “sustainable” as it applies to architecture came from “Our Common Future,” a UN report. All the sustainability terms are synonymous. I like to think of it as shades of green, from light green to dark green.

gb&d: Where is your current design work taking you? Do you spend your days leading your offices, or do you still do research?

Yeang: We have three offices: about 30 people in London, 70 in Malaysia, and 300 in China, but they run independently. Right now, I have my office divided into six or seven teams, and I talk to each of them for about 20 minutes per day. We talk about their work, the day-to-day developments with clients, and how to manage their expectations. The meetings are back-to-back, and, when things are going badly or it’s very, very busy, it can be extremely depressing. But we also have a research topic of the day, and we often collaborate with consultants and universities to explore new topics. We push as far as we can. I spend my time researching and writing.

I’m also working on the aesthetic for green design. What should it look like? It’s a movement—just like Modernism—and it should have a whole new style. It should be hairy. It’s not pristine.

The nearly 16,000-square-foot living wall on the façade of this data center aids the building’s energy performance and provides added biodiversity and habitat to the site.

gb&d: Where do you want to push the field next? What’s the most important achievement architects must accomplish?

Yeang: There’s a whole generation of green designers being trained right now, and they’ll come into the field within the next three to five years, so green design will happen automatically. This is good. We’ll be able to focus on making architecture that makes people happy. If you can make a place that gives people an identity and let’s them know how, where, and when they are, and make it green, that will make architecture a success. My father told me that to be a good human being, you must do good, be good, and feel good. I’m trying to achieve that to varying degrees of success every day.

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The newest Passive House building

Courtesy of Peter Ruge Architekten

Setting new standards of sustainability through the design of the Passive House “Bruck”,Peter Ruge Architekten’s project is a model apartment complex, consisting of 36 one room staff flats, 6 two room executive suites and 4 three-bedroom model apartments currently being built in southern China. With a 95% energy savings over that of a conventional Chinese residential building, the project is the first housing of its kind to be realized in the countries damp, warm, southern climate. Construction just began last month and is expected to be completed within the upcoming months. More images and architects’ description after the break.

Courtesy of Peter Ruge Architekten

This design approach plays a central role in the future strategy of recognized Chinese real estate development group Landsea.  The company’s plans to establish a research and development center in Changxing acts to test, improve and implement innovative, energy saving and sustainable building practices in China.

Courtesy of Peter Ruge Architekten

Peter Ruge Architekten planned model apartments so that Chinese families, interested in the benefits of sustainable housing, could be provided with an opportunity to temporarily reside in the building. Through this direct experience, prospective clients are able to gain their own understanding of passive house living has to offer, as the building demonstrates maximum comfort and quality of residence. This aims to reduce any prior reservations had towards the success of passive house design in extreme weather conditions.

Courtesy of Peter Ruge Architekten

The local climate has shaped the impression of the facade: triple glazed window units have been specifically used in all private rooms and common areas, whilst fixed sun shading elements protect the glass facade in the warmer half of the year. The closed areas of the highly insulated facade act to protect the building shell from intense sunlight through a screen of colored terracotta rods.

1st floor plan

Peter Ruge Architekten, together with their client Landsea, and in cooperation with engineers from the German Passivhausinstitut Dr. Feist, have achieved an important architectural milestone through the design of Passive House “Bruck”, and the successful introduction of sustainable and future-oriented passive house standards to the Chinese residential housing market.

Architects: Peter Ruge Architekten Location: Changxing, Zheijang Province, China Team: Peter Ruge, Kayoko Uchiyama, Matthias Matschewski, Jan Müllender, Alejandra Pérez Siller, Duan Fu Structural Engineering: Shanghai Landsea Building Technology Co. Ltd Mechanical and Electrical Engineering: Shanghai Landsea Architecture Technology Co. Ltd Thermal Structural Physics: Passivhaus Institut Dr. Feist GFA Building: 2,200 sqm Duration: 2011-2013 Completion: 2013