What If We Could Design Our Buildings In A Way That Was Healthy For Both People And The Planet?

[Music] thank you when you think about your home where you live is it the house or is it the feeling of being at home it is maybe the most essential part of your well-being as a person that you are able to feel at home feel safe but also feel connected to the place where you live we spend 90 percent of our time inside buildings Winston Churchill once said we shape our buildings and then they shape us I work as director for sustainable buildings at the Velux group I'm responsible for the Target show how to build sustainably which is part of our sustainability strategy the building industry globally accounts for one-third of energy consumption and carbon emissions that's a huge proportion any building is an ecosystem the facade the skin the roof the construction the static and the windows account for more than 80 percent of the total footprint so if you want to work on how you can make more sustainable less carbon footprint of buildings you have to look at the climate envelope [Music] my name is sinus learner I'm one of the founders of effect Architects located here in Copenhagen and we're called effect because we always saw architecture as a device to create positive impact in in the world around us and the effect is a Danish word for for impact and so we try to measure our our work and our company on the positive impact that our projects can have on our surroundings thank you three years ago we invited effect Architects and Atelier engineers some of the best in their field in Denmark to sit around the same table to look at the question how can we develop a concept for new build housing with a very low carbon footprint and the very best in no climate we've done 60 000 simulations on the indoor climate alone three years of development project and now we have arrived at Living places which is a concept for new build housing with a footprint that is one-third of the standard in Denmark and three times better than the standard indoor climate in Velux we have an approach and a principle that comes back from our founder one test is better than a thousand expert assumptions the project that we ended up doing in Ian which you see here is the Prototype so that's not for living it's really an exhibition uh project to show how these new housing typologies can work but these studies Are Made For Real developments living places is developed from five principles a healthy meaning healthy for people and for planet the next one is shared thinking about how our buildings are actually forming the communities the next one is simple making our buildings designed so that they can be taken apart and materials can be reused again adaptive ensuring that we built for many different typologies for homes for different families and scalable is basically ensuring that the solutions are affordable because that is the precondition for scaling they can be modular they can be small they can be large one family row house and multi-story because we actually have the ambition to impact housing as a whole building the Prototype and then scaling it into Mass housing the Prototype that we have realized here in Copenhagen is seven houses and only two of them are actually built as homes but we found it important to make this Village typology because we wanted to Showcase how homes are part of a bigger environment these homes are not single standing objects but they are part of a community foreign because it's connected with the entire house it's connected in here with the living room the dining situation it's kind of one space when we stand over here you can see right right up here you have that's just the first floor where the stair will end but it's also the entry to three of the rooms up in the house it also has another function which is that it enables the daylight to come deep into the house so here you actually have the direct sunlight coming in and from here you will be able to watch the clouds moving across the sky just like you can follow the sun on the walls moving over the the course of the day [Music] oh when you have heat building up inside the house it will move up through the house so you create a kind of Chimney here so when you open the window you have the natural ventilation bringing fresh air into the house and warm air out it's kind of working with nature in very simple ways but also in that way connecting with the with the surroundings thank you one of the things I appreciate when being here between the houses is that you get the feeling of how this will work when it becomes a real community in the future that you have the feeling that these are not single standing houses but it's actually the space between the houses that makes the the place is the life between the buildings and that's what you have when you can see the one building the one home the other home but also the possible community space that you have there or where you could maybe have a co-working space or you could have a big dinner or you could have people staying at a guest room imagining you know kids running up and down here or learning how to bike in this area while parents can hang out in the front Gardens is really how I'd like to see this play out [Music] here we are on the first floor and this is where you have the connection to the Skylark out here in the studio and the direct connection to the kitchen down here [Music] the stair here has become this uh you know Furniture in the middle of the house connecting all levels and at the same time right up here you have the you know the daylight coming in here and the darkness here and then the Skylight coming in from this place [Music] I really appreciate this diversity of different light settings that you get here which was kind of unexpected but something you experience when the building is here and it's done tonight so how did we manage to lower the carbon footprint with two-thirds it's actually quite basic lowering the carbon footprint is all about looking at what is inside the materials how many calories you could say it's like when you go shopping for food you look at the calories you look at the price it has to have a quality but it can't be too expensive so we've done the same looking at all the materials for these buildings we need to know where does the wood come from how is it produced how is it transported because you need to know the emissions what you can also see when you look at the way the timber is put together here the way the the panels and the wall are put together with the the pipes and even cables being mounted externally to the walls is that we had a Dogma when we did this building to say this everything needs to be designed for disassembly so you can take the whole building apart and you can put it together again in a new way or you can use the materials after the end of life like here you can see the joints of of pedals and you can see that everything can be screwed apart that way of seeing materials and buildings as something that is not permanent that's how we need to design the buildings of the future so that they can serve as material Banks but also carbon CO2 Banks where they will store the carbon for the lifetime of the building if we as human beings are actually designed for life on the Savannah for being outside 24 7. in bilox we like to say that a good indoor environment should feel like being outside on a summer day it wasn't like we tried to design a Savannah Savannah here but I do think that the quality of this big porch has the opportunity to actually move a life from indoors to to outdoors and also having the green I mean bringing the outdoors indoors [Music] also like enhance the community is all the like the shared green spaces where you can grow food or share your gardening skills it's so nice that actually have this soil to table idea I think that creates a much different understanding of the value of things the value of vegetables and when are they in season and when should you try to cook them so this whole understanding of the use of Natural Resources foreign you also have the sensoric aspects of daylight and fresh air that you are able to follow how the sun moves over the day and you're able to connect to the outside bringing the outside in is all what a good indoor climate is about and we do it with daylight and fresh air we passed the first floor and we are now up under the roof literally with the skylights that enables you from the bed to be looking at the stars above but it feels like a space that is kind of elevated from the rest of the house yes I think it's for many people who who actually come up here they they say it's a favorite room it's a bit of a surprise room people do not expect it when they look at the houses outside they expected to be only one story in the roof but there's actually two full stories if you have this flat part yeah in the top it's much more spacious than you'd expect I think that's a little bit of the secret with the typology that enables more square meter to be inside than you feel from the outside yes exactly one thing I really love when you're here is that you can once again see how the Sun is moving along uh over the course of the day so you see the light actually following it's a bit like a sun clock or a sundial no yeah yeah it works really well everything [Music] what we hope to contribute at the end of the day is basically to Showcase solutions that will enable us to leave this planet as a livable planet for our children and for the next Generations and it has to happen immediately but it's also not something that we can do on our own this is a team effort it's really about setting up the Partnerships that will enable this change across the industry and I think living places is an example of how this can be done [Music] with an ultra low carbon footprint with an excellent indoor climate with the materials the Technologies and the knowledge that is all here today we are not passing on a specific way of how sustainable buildings should look like we have given inspiration we have made a recipe people are free to take the recipe and they can try to make it their own this is the proof the inspiration now it's time to scale [Music] [Music] good foreign [Music]

Channel: ArchDaily

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Id: QuOHasMZTvA

Length: 14min 43sec (883 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 03 2023