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| Squaring the Circle |
Atop a hill in New Ross, County Wexford, is a beacon for sustainability in large-scale developments, which draws extensively from across the palette of sustainable building options to achieve a building that is notable not just aesthetically, but also in health, energy and environmental impact terms. Jason Walsh visited the new Solar Croi spa, part of the Brandon House Hotel, Health Club and Spa, to find out more.
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Official magazine of Easca  |
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Sustainable Building Technology
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Page 1 of 5
In the future, the high cost and scarcity of fossil energy may force a
shift towards retaining and modernising old buildings, thereby avoiding
the use of huge amounts of energy to manufacture building materials. John Hearne
visited the Belvedere Orphanage, a group of 19th century dwellings
whose low energy refurbishment may offer a template for development in
the future, by using wood pellet district heating and a host of energy
saving measures whilst nonetheless paying great attention to preserving
the buildings’ heritage value.
The challenges thrown up by architectural conservation can be daunting on their own. Add in a sustainability agenda, all kinds of budgetary constraints and the ultimate goal of creating a workable social housing project and those challenges can seem insurmountable. But in a major new project in Tyrrelspass, Westmeath County Council has managed to incorporate one of the country’s first wood pellet district heating systems into a beautifully restored nineteenth century orphanage.
“Unlike most formal institutions of the period, the orphanage comprised six individual structures.” architect Lenzie O’Sullivan of de Blacam & Meagher explains. “According to Slater’s Directory of 1856, the institute was designed to accommodate widows and their children. It’s built in the Tudor Revival style of the early 19th century, along a carefully set out symmetrical crescent facing communal parkland. The layout mirrors the configuration of the adjacent 19th century village green in Tyrrelspass, also instigated by Jane, Countess of Belvedere.” Four identical cottages are book-ended by a parochial school to the South and the large matron’s house to the North. Deceptively large, they incorporate a front to rear split level structure with four separate levels within each cottage. All contain three well-proportioned rooms and a small bedroom off the front room, with a cellar underneath. “It was a very clever design at the time.” says Ciaran Jordan of Westmeath County Council. “They were attempting, rather than build a huge, old institution, to instead make it look like a town and make it feel like a town.” After the orphanage closed in the 1940s, the buildings fell into disrepair. By the time the county council acquired the site in the eighties, most were in an advanced state of dilapidation, with one of the buildings completely destroyed and trees actually growing up through foundations. Several possibilities were discussed before the local authority settled on a plan for the site. As Ciaran Jordan explains, the Belvedere project was not the most cost effective means of meeting local housing needs. “Without the Department of the Environment on board, their housing project unit, we wouldn’t have been able to do it…We dabbled with the idea of letting it go into private development but that wasn’t economically viable. We decided the only use we could think of, particularly that was compatible with its history, was social housing.” The project also received funding under SEI’s House of Tomorrow programme.
In practise, the twin aims of conservation and sustainability didn’t conflict quite as much as might have been expected. “A lot of it was rebuilding.” says Lenzie O’Sullivan. “We had the skeleton of a building, and that was about it, so there was an opportunity to conceal anything that might have been obstructive. The more dilapidated, the easier it is to conceal.” Much of the building fabric of the cottages; original timber, windows, internal plastering and fireplaces were either missing or beyond meaningful repair. The matron’s house at the end of the crescent however had been in continuous use throughout its life, and much remained here to provide the restoration team with reference details. Original windows, rainwater goods, some internal plastering and the ornate hardwood bargeboards were pretty much as they had been a hundred and fifty years before. Most of the cottages retained their original rubble-walls and it was here that energy reduction met its first obstacle. “From an energy standpoint there were particular difficulties in trying to make this a low energy project.” says building services engineer, Paraic Davis of Davis Associates. “The brief from the local authority was that the energy consumption should be as low as possible in the buildings. Because we didn’t want to interfere with the visible fabric of the building, it meant that it wasn’t possible to use, for example, double glazing to the front of the buildings, nor was it possible to insulate the walls either front or back, because of the kind of construction they were, which was a mix of rubble wall and cut stone.”
A plaque which gives a reminder of the faithfully rebuilt development’s history
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