Okay, I haven’t done a building of the week for a while, so the title of the post might be a bit out of place. Here’s a building that deserves a special mention, and not just because it contains my daughter’s name. It has lots of sustainability features and one particularly important innovation.
Edenica is a new office block in central London, 12 floors of office space with generous terraces and outdoor areas incorporated. It looks like a nice place to work, and it’s designed with the future in mind. The whole building will be electric, meaning it will never need to draw on fossil fuels at all. Air source heat pumps provide underfloor heating, and it is efficient enough that it will use half the energy of its neighbours.
The building is designed to maximise natural light, with automated shading to prevent over-heating. You can open the windows too. Hardly radical, one might think, but quite unusual for an office building of this size. There’s also passive cooling, which I’m always pleased to see. Concrete soffits are designed to absorb heat during the day, and are then cooled by the flow of nighttime air.
There are lots of other features to note, including bike storage. It’s water-efficient too, with both rainwater capture and greywater harvesting to reduce its water needs.
Here’s the big innovation though: Edenica is the first building in London to have a ‘materials passport’. That’s a database of all the materials used throughout the building. When Edenica reaches the end of its useful life, it can be disassembled rather than demolished, and everything can be reused or recycled. It treats the building as a resource bank – future generations can build something else from it, rather than having a pile of rubble to dispose of.
Maersk use materials passports with their ships, meaning ship-breakers in future won’t have to second-guess or test the steel grades when taking them apart later. They’ll know exactly what’s what and the whole ship can be recycled. It’s more unusual in construction, and the Triodos headquarters in the Netherlands is the first building I’m aware of that documented every component for disassembly.
Edenica will make it easier to do this in future because it is pioneering a new standardised system for materials passports. It’s been developed by the Waterman Group, an environmental consultancy. Their framework can be downloaded for free from their website, and they hope that it will in time become widespread across the industry. It’s an important part of bringing construction into the circular economy,
Construction is a huge source of waste, and traditional building techniques often assume a kind of permanence that makes it difficult or impossible to reuse materials. By contrast, Edenica will be manufactured offsite and then assembled. This approach recognises that even the most durable buildings are temporary in the grand scheme of things, but that the materials themselves have a usefulness beyond the project.
This is the future of buildings in a world where we need to be more careful about energy and resources. Low energy and water use, nothing burned to run the building, and long term stewardship of materials.
The Earthbound Report 