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Featured Article
| Shifting ground |
Unless greenhouse gas emissions from land are tackled, any efforts to reduce emissions from buildings may fall short in attempting to stave off the worst consequences of climate change. Richard Douthwaite explains how, with a little ingenuity, techniques can be applied to dramatically reduce land emissions whilst simultaneously providing new raw material streams and energy source
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Official magazine of Easca  |
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Restoring order |
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Tuesday, 17 March 2009 |
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Page 1 of 5
Turning a ruined farm house into a usable dwelling has been a dream for
decades, but can an age-old structure really be brought-up to the
cutting edge of energy efficiency? Architect Frank Cooney has found a way with a ruin in Cavan currently undergoing renovation. Jason Walsh visited the site to find out more.
The Irish countryside is littered with derelict houses, tumbledown ruins whose destiny seems to be to slowly decay until all that is left is a pile of rubble. It doesn’t have to be so, as an architect in County Cavan has proved by turning an aging, roofless stone ruin into an eco-house that gives even the most cutting-edge of sustainable new builds a run for their money.
Starting again
A foundation-less, two-storey detached rubble stone building in Bailieborough, County Cavan does sound like an unlikely candidate for the description ‘energy efficient house’. Picturesque? Certainly. Efficient? Hardly. However, through the use of computer modelling, a desire to reduce embodied energy and make use of natural materials, along with attention to detail on the building fabric and primary energy system, that is just what has been achieved – a re-build that has turned a wreck into a home.
Owned by Frank Cooney and Patricia McCaffrey, the three-bedroom building is to become a family home. Why would an architect re-build a ruin? In part to prove a point, that any building can be significantly improved, but also because of a belief that traditional buildings have a lot to teach us – and plenty to offer us too.
Cooney, who worked on the design on the early 1990s of the Green Building in Dublin’s Temple Bar, has long felt that an environmentally-sound building should start with the simple things: get the fabric right and the rest will follow.
In the case of this house, however, Cooney also looked into traditional settlement patterns: why were small-holdings laid out the way they were? He explains that houses were often oriented east-west to maximise heat-gain and avoid overheating, while shelter was provided by trees and the ambient outdoor temperature moderated by creating a courtyard. Cooney was able to make use of all of these existing features while also applying what he felt was appropriate technology to bring this 19th century house well beyond modern building regulations.
The first engineers that Cooney contacted, who were not chosen to work on the job, saw the problem of making the house habitable in a purely technological fashion: “They suggested a deep bore hole and heat pump,” said Cooney. “We said, ‘first let’s see how far we can push the building – we have an east-west orientation, a sheltered courtyard and a thermally massive structure.’”
For Cooney, however, it’s all about the building fabric: “We said, ‘if we can achieve a [wall] U-value of 0.15 what does that do for us?’ With really high insulation levels we can keep the heat we gain. Then we looked at an air-tightness membrane, and we looked at blocking the chimney. Initially we proposed supply-air windows but moved away from those – they weren’t doing a lot for us.
“We looked at passive solar gain, having a large window on the southern elevation, so we modelled what that would do for us. We found that we were getting fifteen to sixteen degrees Celsius in summer and autumn without heating, so we proceeded from there.
The 19th century ruin which architect Frank Cooney chose to transform into a modern eco house
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