Gale & Snowden wins Eco Building of the Year Award 2012

At last night's prestigious Michelmore's Commercial Property Awards ceremony, Gale & Snowden Architects were presented with the best Eco Building of the Year Award by the guest speaker Michael Portillo, for Knights Place Passivhaus affordable housing development.

The awards ceremony was held at the new Forum building on the Exeter University campus site.

David Gale, in the acceptance speech, thanked Exeter City Council and in particularly Emma Osmundsen for their vision to support an innovative scheme that would help to defeat fuel poverty and at the same time help mitigate climate change.

Knights Place is amongst the largest Passivhaus developments in this country to date. The development is in the heart of Exeter and built for the people of Exeter. This exemplar low energy scheme will raise the standards of building in the region and beyond and also raise people’s expectations of what is possible from our built environment.

For more information on the award-winning Passivhaus development at Knights Place, please visit the project profile on Gale & Snowden's website here.

Design for Future Climate competition showcase event features three Gale & Snowden projects

The Technology Strategy Board (TSB) held their Design for Future Climate competition showcase event this week at the Building Centre in London.

The TSB booklet produced for the event features three Gale & Snowden climate change adaptation projects: a new build extra Passivhaus care facility for the elderly including high level of dememtia care, known as 'St Loyes Extra Care 4 Exeter'; a new Passivhaus public swimming pool design for Exeter, known as 'Swim 4 Exeter'; and a new build Passivhaus office development at Tiverton, known as 'Passivhaus @ Devonshire Gate'.  The articles on these three projects, featured in the TSB booklet can be read below.

Our PassivOffice at Devonshire Gate project was featured as one of the key project presentations of the Day.  Architect Tomas Gartner presented the PassivOffice project on behalf of Gale & Snowden and was part of the Q&A panel session following the presentation.  Gale & Snowden's presentation can be viewed below.

The RIBA will be publishing shortly a book written by Bill Gething of design for future climate.  Gale & Snowden's TSB Extra Care 4 Exeter project will be featured in the book.  We will let you know when the book is on sale.

Open publication - Free publishing - More climate change

Open publication - Free publishing - More architects

Environmental Performance Monitoring at Knights Place Passivhaus Building

Environmental performance monitoring of the Passivhaus scheme Knights Place is now under way.    For the next 2 years 3 flats at Knights Place will be monitored to study their actual energy and environmental performance against their original design intent. All too often buildings are being designed and built to Part L energy regulations and performance monitoring of these buildings has found that they are falling far short of their original design calculations.  Excessive heat loss through the fabric and high infiltration rates, issues associated with thermal bridging and poor air quality are being found with many modern new builds.   The monitoring work is being undertaken under the Technology Strategy Board (TSB) Building Performance Evaluation programme (BPE).  The aim of this study is to monitor the following:

• Air quality over 2 winters and 2 summers via CO2 sensors in the bedroom and living room

• Air temperature and humidity monitoring over the 2 year period

• Energy consumption of all the electrical sub circuits - cooking, ventilation, small power, lights etc

• Solar hot water panel energy monitoring

• Air permeability re-tests in the first year and second year after handover

• Mechanical ventilation with heat recovery (MVHR) monitoring - testing air volumes over time, power efficiency of the unit in use, heat recovery efficiency during use

• Infrared surveys and fabric dynamic heat flux tests

• Occupant surveys and BUS questionnaires

As results come in we will post them on our blog - keep an eye out, it should be interesting.



       

Knights Place Passivhaus



    

Air permeability testing           Sub Metering & Data Hub



 

    Temperature & Humidity Monitoring

 

Knights Place Infrared Image

Wi5 Data Collection Hub

Gale & Snowden shortlisted for sustainability award

Gale & Snowden Architects have been shortlisted for the Michelmores Commercial Property Sustainability Award for the ground breaking Knights Place Passivhaus development in Exeter for Exeter City Council.

The Michelmores and Western Morning News Commercial Property Awards is the region’s premier commercial property competition, showcasing the very best in West Country commercial property projects, buildings and people. The categories are designed for commercial property projects of all shapes and sizes and winners are announced at a Gala Awards Dinner in the summer.

This year’s awards, hosted by TRH Michael Portillo, will be held at the University of Exeter’s prestigious new £48m Forum building on Tuesday 19th June 2012.