Peter Smith of Roderick James Architects takes us on a virtual guided tour of the COP26 House, a modular timber house where Architecture Today is hosting a series of roundtable events with Medite Smartply during the UN climate change conference.
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Watch our video tour of the COP26 House in Central Glasgow hosted by Architecture Today’s Broadcast Director Dave Myatt with the architect Peter Smith of Roderick James Architects.
Architecture Today is in residence at the COP26 House 2-4 November, where we are hosting a series of roundtable conversations in partnership with Medite Smartply and reporting from the COP26 conference.
The one-bedroom modular timber house located on a brownfield site in the centre of Glasgow is an exemplar of sustainable and Passivhaus building principles. 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.
“Things need to change if we’ve got any chance of meeting our climate commitments. Whilst we’re on the world stage like this, we have to grasp this opportunity to show to the world what we can do in this country with simple technologies, with home-grown timber, with a team of companies that we’ve come together within an extremely short period of time, what we can do as a nation, as a species even,” said Smith about the importance of presenting the COP26 House during the 26th UN Climate Change Conference of the Parties (COP26), which is taking place in Glasgow 31 October-12 November 2021
“With a bit of collaboration, a bit of careful thought, we can solve the problems that we’re facing at the moment. There are going to be lots of people looking at us, looking at Glasgow, and I hope that they see this as a small beacon of hope in amongst the darkness. There’s no excuse for not doing it.”
“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,” said editor Isabel Allen of the COP26 House.
Follow our coverage of COP26.
Read an edited transcript of the conversation:
Dave Myatt I’m Dave Myatt from Architecture Today. With me, Peter Smith from Roderick James Architects. We’re taking a virtual guided tour around the COP26 House, the zero carbon house. So Peter, do you want to start by telling us what it’s made of?
Peter Smith Sure. Hi, Dave. The COP26 House is made as much as possible from natural materials, and predominantly from timber, homegrown Scottish timber. So Sitka spruce, C16 mostly, but also we have wood fibre insulation, and obviously things that aren’t able to be made of natural materials, like for example the windows and the equipment inside the house. We’ve looked to use materials where the suppliers have concentrated on minimising their carbon footprint for those materials as much as possible.
Dave Myatt So let’s take a look at the parts then, because I suppose this could lend itself to helping towards the housing crisis, the chronic shortage of houses, insofar as it’s rapid to construct as well as being sustainable and kind to the environment. Talk us through the pieces, would you?
Peter Smith This particular design is an adapted version of one of our standard, barn style designs. And a few years ago, I was approached by two women who wanted to build a house each for themselves in Maryhill in Glasgow. And they asked me to design something along these lines that they could help to build themselves. And so we took the building apart and looked at each constituent part, to see how it could be put together very easily using standard materials and standard construction methods, as simply as possible, by potentially two people with a couple of trestles and a few hand tools.
Dave Myatt Is it possible that this could actually just be a kit form product that anybody could buy, prepare their site, and build for themselves?
Peter Smith Absolutely. That’s one of the beautiful things about this design, is that it’s so simple that anyone can do it. We can provide a kit of parts, or we can provide a kind of turnkey service with a main contractor, but it’s come from the self-build background with that in mind, that people could put one of these together themselves.
Dave Myatt In terms of foundations for the COP26 House, I’m guessing that this wouldn’t be typical of the permanent placement, but you’ve got it on timbers.
Peter Smith On this particular site that we’ve chosen for COP26, it’s an existing industrial brownfield site in the middle of Glasgow. So there is actually, as you can see there, an existing concrete slab. There was a building there before. And so we had a word with the engineers, and they said it would be okay, as it’s a temporary building, to simply fix it down onto these timber tram lines that we made using railway sleepers. One of his main concerns was actually fixing the building down, because it’s actually quite a lightweight building, so we had to concentrate on how those foundations there were strapped to the ground.
For a normal house we would use, for example, concrete pad foundations. Now we can either use green concrete, using recycled aggregate, that kind of thing, or even concrete pads that we could get from other building sites, from demolition sites, and actually recycle them rather than them being sent to landfill. All you need is a grid of about 15 one meter square concrete pads to fix this building down onto. Obviously it depends on the ground conditions, but it’s that kind of principle.
Dave Myatt And the construction process. Just talk us through and give us some timelines.
Peter Smith I was quite surprised myself actually, how quickly the building went up. Obviously with COP26, the process of getting things done all had to happen within a very short timescale. We actually got site access around the beginning of September, so we only really had two months to build this house. And the beauty of it again is, these panels were prefabricated in a factory. So they’d been put together during the month of August, they arrived on site on the back of, I think, two wagons, and we put the whole shell of the building up within about two or three weeks, we were wind and watertight.
Dave Myatt Inside, timbers, very evident. Just discuss would you for us, the floor, the lining, and how the insulation comes together.
Peter Smith Yeah, sure. So the floor is a grid of 10 square cassettes, all bolted together. They can also be unbolted at the end of COP. I’ll tell you a bit more about that in a minute. But back to your question about the rest of the building and the insulation. What you don’t see in this image is the fact that we’ve got, within the floor, the walls, and the roof, probably about 200, 250 to 300 millimetres of wood fibre insulation. So between the joists and the rafters we’ve got the insulation packed tightly.
On the inside we have a lining board, you can see it visible on the roof there, Smartply Propoassiv, if you can read upside-down, provided by Medite Smartply. And on the outside then, we actually didn’t need any sheathing boards. We just have a breather membrane. The whole house has been designed to be breathable, so that a bit like Gore-Tex, it lets vapour permeate through the building to the outside, rather than having it all stuck on the inside and getting lots of condensation.
Dave Myatt And what kind of insulation values are you able to achieve?
Peter Smith We’re actually pretty much bang on Passivhaus levels of insulation, 0.12 I think for the floor, walls, and roof. That’s what we aimed for. And with the windows and doors, we’re about 0.9, 1.0, so not far off passive. A good, well-insulated small home that hopefully we would be able to heat either with a toaster or a few candles.
Dave Myatt And the roof and windows, just take us through how these come together.
Peter Smith So up on the mezzanine level, we’ve got two banks of roof lights from FAKRO that kindly came on board with us, and because of the opening within that 400 mil thick roof, they increase the available head height up there by over a meter of extra headroom, by installing these roof lights. The rest of the roof, as you could see from the inside, it’s all timber, even the external roof covering. We were able to get this specially treated IRO roof cladding material, which has been charred and then brushed, and then painted to give this effect. So you can see the grain of the timber in the foreground. But again this took out the need for slate tiles or corrugated metal roof, that kind of thing, so helped us again reduce our carbon.
Dave Myatt And the heating and ventilation. How is that working?
Peter Smith So back to the Passivhaus principles, we’ve insulated the building as much as we reasonably can, and made sure that we get it extremely airtight, so that we’ve got no drafts and no loss of heat through leakage. And then once the building is nice and airtight, we can introduce a ventilation system with a heat recovery aspect to it, where the warm air that we extract from the kitchen and the bathroom, for example, passes over a heat exchanger and heats up the cold air that we bring into the building from the outside, and therefore we’re not losing the energy that we have in the warm air, it goes straight back into the building combined with the fresh air from outside.
Dave Myatt This is in the very near finished state, just before you started putting the decking in. Just tell us about the external cladding. It looks very similar to the roof and it marries in very neatly.
Peter Smith It is, it’s the same stuff. It’s again from BSW, the IRO timber cladding on the walls. We went for the black finish. It basically comes in any RAL colour that you want. But we chose this kind of black, white, and red combination. We thought kind of looks slightly rustic, but still got a modern feel to it. And with the vertical lines on the timber, it just makes it stand out a little bit. But both the walls and the roof, we went for the hit and miss timber boarding. So you’ve got two boards side by side, with a wee gap in between them, and then the top board covers that gap and reduces the amount of visible fixings that you’ve got, and creates this vertical emphasis.
Dave Myatt What about maintenance and life expectancy? With timber, there is some need to look at it periodically.
Peter Smith Yeah. That’s one of the major benefits of using this IRO treated timber product. It’s been first of all kiln dried, and then goes through this charring process, which gives it a longevity that you wouldn’t normally get with off-the-shelf timber from timber yards. It’s been through this extra level of protection. And then you get the choice of paint colours on top. And so the life expectancy of these timbers is much higher, probably about twice what you would normally expect from normal timber that’s not had this treatment. And so that again feeds into the whole carbon footprint thing, because if you’re replacing and not having to do as much maintenance to the timber, then you’re cutting down cost, you’re cutting down carbon, cutting down wastage. So it was important that we used something that helped us in that respect.
Dave Myatt In terms of the timescales for production, clearly a one-off is not the most efficient way, but if you’ve got a whole sequence of production going for a small estate of these, how fast could you help to solve some of the housing crisis issues that we’re facing?
Peter Smith That’s a good question. We’re under a lot of pressure, as a country. Well, the government is under a lot of pressure to meet this housing demand. We need to be building 350,000 houses a year at the moment. And at current standards, we’re talking about 120 tons of carbon for an average 100 square meter house. And the timescales involved as well, it’s not achievable, and we cannot achieve our carbon reduction goals at the rate we’re building at the moment using normal building techniques. So this house, for example, like I said earlier, we got on site on the beginning of September, ready for the beginning of November. Two months construction process for a 75 square meter house, I think, is pretty good, especially as it’s the first of many, hopefully.
But we’ve got four or five different house designs based on this construction system, so a one-bed, two-bed, three-bed, four-bed, semi, detached. And all of them, once we get into production, using the team that we’ve put together to build this house. We’re called Beyond Zero Homes, have a look at the website, there’s a wee plug for everyone. And we’re ready to go. We could be churning out hundreds if not thousands of these a year, if anybody wants them. We’re ready to go.
Dave Myatt In terms of life expectancy with a suitable maintenance regime, how long would you expect to get out, and what do you do at end of life?
Peter Smith That’s another interesting aspect of this. If you look around you at the concrete tower blocks that were built in the 1960s, that are being pulled down now, in many cases local councils haven’t even paid off the mortgage for those buildings and they’re being ripped down. But the embodied carbon that is in them, it’s horrific really that we’re already pulling those buildings down.
On average, a house that was built to current standards would have a life expectancy of 60 years, which I think is shocking as well, sometimes even less. There is no reason, with the right amount of maintenance… The way that this building has been constructed, it’s been designed to be deconstructed, and so every constituent part can be taken off, replaced, repaired. And so like I said, with the right amount of care, there’s no reason why this building or these buildings couldn’t last a hundred years or a couple of hundred years. That’s the beauty of it. It’s been designed carefully to be as maintenance free as possible, but also to be repairable whenever it needs it.
Dave Myatt: And why is it so important to be at COP26?
Peter Smith: I think this is a once in a lifetime. It’s a final chance for us to make a difference, to change the way the construction industry is working at the moment. It’s clearly broken. Things need to change if we’ve got any chance of meeting our climate commitments. And I think whilst we’re on the world stage like this, I just felt we have to grasp this opportunity to show to the world what we can do in this country with simple technologies, with home grown timber, with a team of companies that we’ve come together within an extremely short period of time, what we can do as a nation, as a species even. With a bit of collaboration, a bit of careful thought, we can achieve… We can solve the problems that we’re facing at the moment. And I felt there are going to be lots of people looking at us, looking at Glasgow, and I hope that they see this as a small beacon of hope in amongst the darkness. Sounds a bit corny, but I think it shows what can be done. And at this same time, it shows there’s no excuse for not doing it.
