Student Work
Environmental Awareness Center
1∕9
Title
Environmental Awareness Center
Project Description
Looking beyond what is built in “Adaptive Reuse“, this architecture uncovers a wider range of energetic potentials within the plot.
In splitting the program and deriving multiple envelopes, solar exposures can be tweaked respectively, for each situation on site. The detachment allows to passively create distinct climates in different buildings; one of which is using water as thermal mass (slides 1-3). While deploying rainwater as a new construction material from the site, a prototype for the water-wall, a modified Trombe-wall, emerges.
A direct expansion on the built substance is the greenhouse that slopes over the southern masonry wall of the old library (4-7). This ancient „lean to“ type is performing as an unheated greenhouse, using the existing brick as further heat storage. Eventually, three different types were conceived.
In this concept, the perception of local material changes and promotes ideas beyond haptics as the central quality of an aestheticized on-site substance. Fair Haven climate is reconsidered as a set of environmental assets, a new materiality from which a supplementary structure is aimed to evolve.