Not long ago the American plastics industry and the American Chemistry Council were at war with the US Green Building Council over the fact that they would even consider that plastics were not green. But they are fighting a losing battle, as those few architecture firms that actually care about sustainability try and build with more natural, bio-based materials. They would absolutely go into shock if they saw this harbinger of the future, the Enterprise Centre at the University of East Anglia, which Ben Adam-Smith says " might just be the most sustainable large building ever constructed in Britain."
I almost went into shock myself when I saw it on Passive House +; we don’t see a lot of thatch in North America and I have never seen it used on walls. Not only that, it’s prefab thatch; Ben Adam-Smith writes:
The building is designed by TreeHugger favourite Architype to some very tough targets: “70% bio-based materials, a threshold for embodied carbon, passive house certification, a Breeam Outstanding rating, and local sourcing and supply of materials.” Passive houses can be very foamy because they need a lot of insulation, so there are some perhaps conflicting goals here.
The Passive House standard sets really tight limits on air changes, and I would have thought that they would have trouble achieving this with these natural materials, but evidently not; the air tightness layer is nothing more than OSB (Oriented Strand Board) with special tapes on the joints. They hit 0.21 air changes per hour, which is pretty spectacular.
But what really is so remarkable is the materials palette. A few years ago I got into a big bunfight when I suggested that there should be a version of Michael Pollan’s Food Rules for buildings, which included not building with anything your great-grandma wouldn’t recognize as a building material, that you can’t picture in their raw state or growing in nature, or that you couldn’t pronounce. I wrote:
The Enterprise Centre looks almost edible. I am still shocked. Forget being the greenest building in the UK; it might well be the greenest building anywhere.
