The private speculative sector can’t build affordable housing, but there are other ways of achieving this, writes architect Mel Reynolds.
In the fourth instalment of Nessa Duggan’s column on designing and building a passive house for her young family, the focus shifts to overcoming drainage issues to secure planning, and just how small the heat load may be in the family’s new home.
In the third instalment of Nessa Duggan’s column on designing and building a passive house for her young family, she describes the process of designing a house to suit the family’s lifestyle.
Casa Architects has achieved NPPF 55 statusfor the development of a new passive housein a listed parkland near Frome, Somerset.NPPF 55, recognised as one of the mostdifficult planning applications to achieve, setsstrict planning restrictions to allow only trulyoutstanding or innovative architecture of thevery highest quality and standard to be built in the English countryside.
Construct Ireland tracked down the busy director of Limerick Civil Trust to talk about the sterling work already done, current projects and to ponder the implications of recent FAS cutbacks.
A marked lack of adequate central government action to promote sustainable house building in Ireland has been recently counteracted by planning authorities such as Fingal County Council taking action into their own hands, and setting standards geared to protect their constituents in an oil and gas scarce future. However, as sustainable building consultant Will Woodrow discovered from surveying planning authorities around the country, local government willingness is not always met with a full grasp of the issues needed to make sustainable housing happen.