Baca's Green Sky Thinking -

'Beautiful Green'

On the 18th of April, Baca Architects and Mott MacDonald hosted a Green Sky Thinking event titled “Beautiful Green”.

Through some radical new designs Baca and Motts are exploring how luxury homes can help to raise the benchmark for environmental design. As part of London’s Open City, Green Sky Thinking Week, the talk examined the challenges of achieving passive house without compromising luxury and all mod cons.

Robert Barker from Baca presented some of the practices environmentally responsible projects and discussed our latest venture, which once completed, experts suggested could be the most ambitious Passivhaus building in the world to date.

Discussion included the role that innovative technologies and computer aided design (such as parabolic modelling, adaptive environmental monitoring systems and Building Information Management systems) would need to play in delivering these types of homes.

Roger Ashman from Baca hosted a ‘have I got green green news for you’ quiz tested the statistical knowledge of some of the leading ‘green’ experts in attendance. Some fascinating facts were uncovered – every £1 invested in flood defences saves £8 later and in August 2010 there were 25,000 passive houses in Europe and only 13 in the US!

Amelia Milner from Mott MacDonald spoke further about how their involvement as a environmental consultant early in the design process can lead to interesting and innovative Architectural responses. She went on to explain their staged goals for an environmentally responsible building: optimising orientation, optimising building fabric, minimise energy consumption in use and optimise carbon factor of energy used.

Thomas Lefevre, director of Etude explained the Passivhaus standard in detail and its place in achieving the aspirations of many clients of responsible, sustainable living.

We look forward to next year’s event to add to the discussion of the past two years.

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