It’s the countdown to COP26. The world is making a concerted effort to address climate breakdown. The construction industry needs to up its game.
Between 2 and 4 November Architecture Today will be in residence at the COP26 House in Central Glasgow, designed by architect and Passivhaus designer Peter Smith of Roderick James Architects . Modest in size – a one-bedroom single-storey house built from homegrown spruce – the project demonstrates a simple, affordable way to build homes that help to meet our climate commitments.
The house is located on a site owned by Scottish Enterprise, between the Scottish Event Centre (SEC) – the main COP26 conference venue – and Glasgow Central Station, and will act as a hub for Architecture Today readers and everybody involved in the challenge of delivering greener buildings and cities to drop in on their way to and from COP26.
Please do email us at cop26@architecturetoday.co.uk if you’d like to get involved.
The aim is to provide a base to meet, discuss ideas and share thoughts on issues emerging from the COP26 discussions through a rolling programme of talks, presentations and social events. And, of course, to view the house itself. Currently under construction, the house is being delivered and built by members of Beyond Zero Homes, a group of consultants, manufacturers and suppliers who have contributed building materials and expertise. It stands as an antidote to the dizzying scale and complexity of the official COP26 venues and a testament to the entrepreneurship and collaboration that is so urgently required for the industry to rise to the challenge of moving towards zero carbon construction and bringing about a step change in the way the built environment is procured, designed and built.
It also stands as a riposte to the purpose-made, highly bespoke and often instantly disposable structures that are the stock-in-trade of exhibitions, festivals, conferences and summits across the world. Once COP26 is over, the house will be dismantled into its original 1.2 metre-wide panels and reassembled as part of a community of 12 affordable timber houses near Aviemore.
Glasgow will give the project the profile it deserves, but Aviemore is its spiritual home; while the project can be adapted to large-scale developments and offsite prefabrication, the house can be self-built on site by two people and was designed with small-scale rural developments very much in mind. Maybe that’s the project’s most valuable lesson: that in the battle to mitigate climate change, a low impact lifestyle is the most powerful weapon we have.
