BBM Sustainable Design is living by the mantra of ‘waste nothing’, with the firm set to start construction on the UK’s first building to be made onsite entirely out of waste.
Later this year, BBM will begin work on Mark II of ‘The House that Kevin Built’ in Brighton. The original house was also designed by Brighton-based architect Duncan Baker-Brown, who heads up BBM.
This innovative project, named after Grand Designs host Kevin McCloud, set about designing and building a highly sustainable domestic property over a period of six days using a combination of ‘offsite’ technology and unusual building systems and materials.
The construction was aired live on television, with the building dismantled at the end of the show and re-erected at the Building Research Establishment’s Innovations Park.
The on-site iteration will be built on the University of Brighton’s campus from waste and surplus material from local building sites and other local industries.
As with Philippe Starck’s new eco-house product, timber will be central to construction, but the type of timber used and the manner of use will be quite different. The walls will be made of waste timber products and ‘cassettes’ containing waste material will be slotted in between the timber. These cassettes will be removable so that new building technologies can be added easily.
The building aims to encourage community interaction with a production line being set up near the site allowing students, apprentices, local builders and school children to get involved with the making of the structure. Once completed, local community groups will be able to use the building’s exhibition and workshop space, while the upstairs will house the university’s headquarters for sustainable design.
“There is a huge pile of construction waste that’s building up in this country and to ignore is quite frankly sinful,” said Baker-Brown, who co-founded BBM Sustainable Design and is a senior lecturer in the university’s arts department. “Through this project we are going to show that there is no such thing as waste.”
Cutting-edge sustainable technology will be incorporated into the design from the outset, including fully integrated solar panels, whole-house ventilation and a heat recovery system.
It is the flexibility of the cassettes, however, that really adds value, enabling easy retrofitting of prototype construction systems, components and technologies for testing before release to the commercial market.
Work on the new building begins in November with completion scheduled for May, 2013.
