In our video interview with Peter Smith of Roderick James Architects, the architect explains how the COP26 House – Architecture Today’s temporary HQ in Glasgow – will go on to form part of a low-carbon, affordable development in the Cairngorms National Park.

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Designed by architect Peter Smith of Roderick James Architects, the COP26 House is a modular timber Passivhaus building installed on a brownfield site in the centre of Glasgow. Architecture Today was in residence at the house in early November, where we hosted a series of roundtable conversations in partnership with Medite Smartply during the UN climate change conference to hear about the challenges experts across the industry face in tackling the crisis.

Following the close of the COP26 conference last week, the house will now be dismantled into a series of 1.2 metre-wide panels and reassembled as part of a community of 12 affordable homes near Aviemore, a town in the Cairngorms National Park.

“The house has been designed to be easily constructed by a couple of people, and also easily deconstructed,” Smith told Architecture Today. “Rather than nailing and gluing everything together, it’s all been designed to be screwed and bolted together so it can be taken apart.”

“It’ll be taken up to a site near Aviemore where we’ve got planning and building warrant approval for 12 affordable houses.”

The COP26 House will become one of the scheme’s one-bedroom house, comprising an open-planed living room and kitchen alongside a dining room, utility space and bathroom at ground level and a bedrooom at mezzanine level. It is the smallest of five typologies being built to form the development, which will range from one-bed to family homes.

Read more of our COP26 coverage.