Innovations
Boase
We are born indoors, live, love, bring up our families, worship, work, grow old, sicken and die indoors. Architecture mirrors every aspect of our lives – social, economic, spiritual.
Eugene Raskin
Architecture provides for one of humankind's basic needs: shelter. With global population growth, the need for dwellings is increasing. However, forty percent of the energy consumption in the USA can be traced to building construction, materials and maintenance. Globally, the construction and operation of buildings consume the majority of the earth's natural resources and energy and provide the bulk of landfill waste. There is a clear need for architects to shift towards a more sustainable environmental epistemology in order to fulfil basic human needs now, without compromising the ability to do so in the future. However, there is move towards sustainability being pioneered by individual architects and designers responding to the challenge of finding the best possible solution.
There are over 14,000 registered contaminated sites dotted around Copenhagen. This fact, together with a desire for good housing provides the point of departure for urban planning project, BOASE, which won first prize in a contest by the Danish Building Research Institute. This group of architecture students, aims to “make the Earth accessible for future generations” and have also won the Danish Design Centre's Vision Prize 2001.
The project's concept is centred on bioremediation - the use of trees and vegetation, such as willow and poplar and clover to biodegrade the toxins in the soil and purify the ground. At the same time, wastewater from the dwellings is used to fertilise that soil, creating a sustainable loop between soil and dwellings. Thus this plantation of trees and bushes from Danish fauna forms the ecological basis for a habitable oasis in the city and will grow and spread simultaneously with the dwelling development and the settlement growth.
The dwelling itself is an industrially produced, prefabricated unit, with separate, recyclable parts. This modularity optimises the building process and avoids the large-scale building wastes traditionally produced by construction work. This flexible approach also allows the individual to cheaply customize their unit their own individual taste.
The walls and roof of the communal area are made of a 'smart' textile, which collects solar energy through woven-in fibres of solar cells and can both ventilate and insulate via a self- regulating, inflatable construction. This 'intelligent' textile construction is made of inflatable elements that form a flexible structure. The structure inflates when it is cold outside and deflates when it is warm and is controlled by an intelligent operating system.
The dwelling constructions are airlifted onto pillars, in order to allow as much light and air to the plants as possible and minimise impact on the formerly barren ground.
BOASE is an example of how environmental criteria can guide the design process and become part of the architecture's vocabulary, in a interdisciplinary, holistic and sustainable concept.
