[MUSIC PLAYING]
Today, many concerned architects are doing their part to enhance the sustainability of our planet for future generations.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Using recycled natural resources, new eco-friendly materials and increasing the ability of homes and buildings to capture and generate their own power, sustainable architecture is minimizing negative environmental impact.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Ottawa is Canada's stage where social and political issues, such as sustainability, are played out. Located in a fashionable Ottawa neighborhood, the currents designed by Vancouver architect Peter Busby and built by Windmill Developments is a shining example of mixed-use sustainable architecture.
When we look at the three pillars of sustainable design, they include environmental, obviously, economic, and social. So we want our buildings to be part of the community, offer something back to the community. And when we started that project, obviously, the GCTC was looking for a new home, and it became apparent that the particular community we were putting it into would like to have the facility there. So it made sense to try and combine the two.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Well, the main physical things that you'll notice are the fact that the building is rotated through 45 degrees. And the reason for that is that we're interested in attracting solar gain in the winter time, that can really help with the heating bills, keep people warm. There's a high degree of insulation in the building. And there's a sharing of energy systems between the theater and the building of residential components above so that the heat generated by the patrons at night in the theater is then used to heat the building for the rest of the evening. So we're basically moving heat around from a source to a user. So there's quite a few different strategies now.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
It's more than just energy efficiency. It's everything from the context of the site. Are you reusing a site that was derelict? Those versus just developing a greenfield and knocking trees down. To the materials you use. So for the whole design element, you want to be using materials that have a high recycled content, have a low ability to end up back at landfill in the sense of their reuse capabilities, those sorts of things.
And then the choosing of the interiors, and that's really the toughest when you get to residential, is looking at interior choices you have that let people feel they're buying a nice house and not sacrificing their creature comforts, while still being highly sustainable products.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
This is an 1,100 square foot unit custom to this building. And what's unique about this unit, when you walk in, the first thing you see is an exposed concrete column, which is a neat aesthetic feature. And also because that concrete is a high ash concrete, you can see that the coloring of it is actually a little darker than a typical concrete. And that highlighting one of the sustainable features.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Then as you walk in, you've got a large dining area and kitchen area to the left.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Behind that is a great, spacious master bedroom, master bathroom.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
In the bathrooms, there's low flow, faucets, and dual flush toilets, and other things like that that make it a highly sustainable product.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Then you come out here, and you've got a great living area and den. So it's a very functional unit within the 1,100 square feet.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
The fireplace is actually a neat electric unit we picked out because they take little electricity, they're much more efficient than, say, a gas equivalent.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
The building is laid out in such a way that you're going to get either northeast exposure and views or you're going to get southwest exposure. And especially, when you get up to the penthouse areas where they have views that go in both directions and they have rooftop terraces, where you can sit up there and you can be looking-- have a table at one side that looks out to the southwest and have your breakfast in the morning out to the northeast, and watch the sun come up over the parliament building. So it's really got some spectacular views.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
The public has got to want-- has got to want healthier buildings. They've got to want lower energy-consuming buildings. And they've got to tell their developers.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Knowing what we know today and with the building technology which we have today, it's just the responsible thing to do. There's no negative to not building a sustainable building, but there are lots of negatives to just keep it ongoing as usual.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
I think there's a huge demand that the public is aware of to basically save the planet and to reduce our carbon footprint, and to actually respond to the challenges that we perceive that there is in the world today.
It's a nice-looking building. It's got reasonable sized units. It's well-designed. And it's almost like it hasn't made an issue about the issue of sustainability. It doesn't require that you live a different lifestyle when you move into this building. And that's a very key thing. It basically integrates sustainable design in all aspects of the building without making it a real issue.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
The [INAUDIBLE] is a very important example because it is a private sector developer working with a cultural institution in the theater to build a sustainable residential tower, and it's also built on a reclaimed Brownfield site in the downtown of Ottawa. So it's a very important example of hopefully where developers may go.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
The picturesque Lorentzian Mountains stretch from Southern Quebec to the shores of the St. Lawrence River. Here, using the surrounding natural elements to his advantage, owner and engineer Andre Dupras designed a sustainable country home as his laboratory for his family.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
What I think sustainable for me is, this house probably will need no maintenance for at least 20 years because of the hard material and the quality of the wood and the quality of the construction. That's number one. Number two, it uses about 1/3 of the energy that a normal house of this size and construction would normally use. The third thing is natural lighting. For me, natural lighting is important.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
I started to do research on this house, trying to find materials that would be maintenance-free: The cedar outside, naturally the floors.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
There's no crack in the gypsum anywhere because the steel structure is all bound together. Everything is built on this foundation wall, on the perimeter. So when the house moves, it moves a little bit like a boat. So it's all very tight together.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
All the geothermal field is about 8 feet deep only and it's horizontal. So I have two rows of piping there, about 12,000 linear feet of pipes. And I use the energy of the ground to heat the house.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
So I decided to use this source of energy for this house, double skin wall, natural ventilation, double raised floor, and air conditioning from the floor instead of from the ceiling. So all this technology I tried to apply in a house.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Marie had all of her requirements for the gym and I had about 15 paintings. So I created at least 15 areas where I would put these paintings. And Johanne Corno was the main artist that I started to collect when I was very young. And strong bodies, powerful bodies, I feel it mixes perfectly with the activity of Marie, or strong bodies in gym and trapeze, and you need a lot of strength for that.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
A lot of cooking and a lot of living in the kitchen. So I didn't want to build a kitchen that was far away from the central gym. So I brought it in. And the actual bar divides the kitchen and the gym.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
The office space, again, is open. It's more play on the computer during the weekend and extra work that we bring at the cottage. It's fairly hard to do it when you're up here. Since the piece of land has 150 meters on the lake, all the bedrooms are looking at the lake. So the corridors are more in the back and the bedrooms are all facing the lake.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
The geothermal field is now a soccer field. And same thing with another piece of land that was not fairly interesting. Built a volleyball court on it, and the badminton court, and the gym, and the lake, and the water ski. So add that up, it's a good place for a kid to be.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
For me, it's a place where I can push the limit of this geothermal system and radiation. And now, I'm using radiant cooling and I'm testing it. What are the limits of this system? This is what I'm monitoring right now in order to put it in a building in Montreal. So it's like a small laboratory for me. But for the kids, it's certainly not that.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
There are so many things going on here that you have to take your hat off to the owner, who's basically taken on all of this and tried to hit a number of initiatives. Who wants to create a house that's a wonderful playground for his kids and for his wife who is a practicing artist. And so you have this unusual space.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
But in addition to that, some of the initiatives to build on unstable land, to develop a steel structure for a weekend cottage, the double insulated walls, the ground source heat pump, all of these initiatives are pretty aggressive for what is basically a retreat. And so it's a wonderful collection of experiments.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
In this particular house, we have an engineer with a very strong interest in design, very concerned about how his rather unique family lives and plays. And he's a businessman, so he understands cost accounting. So when he talks about his house, he likes to demonstrate very clearly how the cost accounting is done in order to argue that, in fact, this is not an expensive house, but in the long-term, an inexpensive house.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Barcelona is a thriving metropolis with an urban population of more than five million and counting. To improve the city's architectural sustainability, local architect Henrique Ruiz-Geli has incorporated practical and novel energy-saving measures into this unique design.
Looking at the other houses, everyone is facing the street. There's this street life, this car life. In fact, we were more interested in the nature behind the house. So we twist the house in order not to face the street, but rather to face the forest. So in fact, this nature generates this topography. And the house, by the reading of the concept, also generates this topography. So the form which maybe looks like strange or bizarre is the right reading of what's the context is telling you.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
The green land follows and generates this green roof. That's the way we have generated a very interior climate with no use of air conditioning so far. And in Spain, it's hard to do that. So sustainability is not a vision. It's going to be by law.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
The first thing you do is to go into your office at home where you are supposed to download the urban feeling, then you are able to do your last email.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
The next space is the playground. It's time to see the kids. It's where the ramp is. It's a continuous space where basically they can paint in the walls and they can use the floor. It's all very industrial and strong materials. I need the space with the longest distance to the dormitory of the parents. So children and parents are in the opposite places of the house as far as the house can get.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
There you meet the big living room where the kitchen is open. It's a place where you spend more time. It has this fixed glass, looking to the future pool and looking to the forest, looking to the green, it's where the limit of inside and outside disappears.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
So at some point in this room, the master bedroom, with a view to the outside, with a view to the tree. So when you are sleeping and you are one floor up, in fact, from the bed, what you see is this green surface, which is the terrace, which is all this green landscape. And it's very nice to be in a private room, but at the same time, to have this garden inside the room.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
We have a concrete house, which is very good thermically for the interior. In Spain, it's very hot. But we could not leave these concrete walls to the neighbors, this bunker. We had to do a cultural bunker. So in fact, we generate this topography. It's a unique art piece.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Once we were doing these concrete walls, we contact an engineer who calculates breaches, structural breaches. And he increased the concrete for us and said, look, if we have a concrete wall with no windows, I can use this as a beam. That's how this house cantilever and flies over 16 meters through the public space, through the garden. The house is a bridge by itself and it's used to generate more room, more fluidity.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
It's a landscape of events in a spiral way. You live, you cook, you sleep, you lie, you love, there is sex, then you continue. And there is a garden. And then you go back, there's a coffee. It's a continuous line.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
It's contemporary, and we would like very much that people live today on today's architecture. The 2000 architecture is here. And if they open their minds and then they generate a new demand, all the construction industry will change for that.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
It's in Spain. It's a hot climate. Issues of cooling are major concerns. And so the green roof, the heavy mass walls would be a good response to that. And to avoid air conditioning would be quite laudable and try to respond to that initiative.
But beyond that, it's a very aggressive, adventurous form. The ramps of the building, the concrete frame, the huge cantilever. It's very, very exciting project. But it's not your standard response. As you can see, the houses on either side are quite nondescript by comparison.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Although I must say, it's just a wonderfully exciting living space. A real challenge to how we normally live in a house, but it's also a dynamic new way of thinking about how we could build houses in semi-suburban landscape.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
If I compare all three and I look at experimentations in trying to do sustainable design, the currents offers a very accessible piece of sustainable design that each individual client can purchase. They don't have to do the thinking. They know when they buy into this, that they're getting the best and sustainable design.
In contrast to the house and laurentians the Dupras residence, it's the personal initiative of one owner to try and experiment with all of these features in one home, which is a Herculean piece of work. And also the Villa Bello in Spain, again, relies on the sophistication of trying to infuse sustainable design into an ordinary neighborhood. And so he comes up with a very aggressive building form and a response to the environment through a bunch of features like the green roof and the heavy mass, and trying to remove the demand for air conditioning.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
The type of sustainable home we choose to live in can make a world of difference in the quality of life for ourselves and for those who follow us. Sustainable architecture will continue to alter the building paradigm of the past, while it creates optimism for a green tomorrow.
[MUSIC PLAYING]