Planning - passivehouseplus.ie

Local authorities across the UK are starting to embrace the passive house standard by formally encouraging its use in their planning policies and local area plans. This follows confirmation from the government last year that councils were entitled to set higher building energy efficiency standards locally than is mandated by Part L of the building regulations.

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.

With some of the most impressive moves toward sustainability over the last few years coming in the form of planning requirements, it should come as no surprise that many local authorities are pioneering energy efficient housing in their own housing stock. Jason Walsh visited a site in Oldtown, County Dublin, to see how Fingal County Council is putting sustainability into practice with help from Keenan Timber Frame, Ecological Building Systems, Nutech Renewables and others

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.

Iain Douglas, President of the Irish Planning Institute reveals his views on the state of planning in Ireland, and the factors which could not only damage the environment in Ireland, but also cause social segregation, and aid unsustainable development across Ireland

When the two worlds of heritage and development collide opinions frequently become polarised and fraught with difficulty. There are few more vexed issues, as Tim Carey, Heritage Officer with Dun Laoghaire Rathdown County Council reveals

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.

In this adapted extract from his new book Natural Building: A Guide to Materials and Techniques, seminal eco architect Professor Tom Woolley outlines some of the reasons why natural building is necessary.