Coillte Teoranta

The building is the first all timber office complex in Ireland. It covers almost 2,300m2 of floor space and provides accommodation for almost 100 staff working in a wide range of forestry related disciplines.
Welcome to the archive of Construct Ireland, the award-winning Irish green building magazine which spawned Passive House Plus.
The feature articles in these archives span from 2003 to 2011, including case studies on hundreds of Irish sustainable buildings and dozens of investigative pieces on everything from green design and building methods, to the economic arguments for low energy construction.
While these articles appeared in an Irish publication, the vast majority of the content is relevant to our new audience in the UK and further afield. That said, readers from some regions should take care when reading some of the design advice - lots of south facing glazing in New Zealand may not be the wisest choice, for instance.
Dip in, and enjoy!

The building is the first all timber office complex in Ireland. It covers almost 2,300m2 of floor space and provides accommodation for almost 100 staff working in a wide range of forestry related disciplines.
Kevin O’Flaherty’s development overlooking Galway Bay combines impressive energy saving techniques with the sorts of features that buyers of high-spec homes have grown to expect, as John Hearne discovers.


Few words in the vocabulary of Ireland’s built environment come with more baggage than ‘bungalow’. For many people, it embodies a total disregard for good architecture and the environment, in part due to its association with isolated one-off housing. John Hearne visited a house in Mayo that mixes considered design with a host of modern technologies to breathe new life into the form.

Richard Douthwaite explores the best options available to solve the intermittency problem of wind energy and help Ireland to harness its famously abundant natural resources

Kirk Shanks, Senior Researcher at the Sustainability Research Development Group, the Focas Institute, DIT describes the development of this new sustainable generation.

The desire for better insulated, more environmentally friendly homes is driving ever more Irish self-builders to investigate alternatives to traditional block building. Jason Walsh visited a contemporary style factory-built timber frame house built in County Waterford in 2005.

An experienced timber framer with an eye for detail, Tim O'Donovan set about building a low energy stick-built home in the Cork countryside and achieved a staggering level of airtightness.
Words: Lenny Antonelli

The groundbreaking Gaelscoil an Eiscir Riada, Tullamore, Co. Offaly was the first project to comprehensively draw from the Department of Education & Science’s DART (Design Awareness Research and Technology) programme, delivering a sustainable research project on school design.