Solutions in Sustainable Construction

Religious and secular complex: A reinterpretation of traditional local construction for a new mosque and community center, creating a space in the village open to all.

The secondary school project uses traditional building materials and technologies and places great emphasis on actively involving the local population in the construction process. Locally-sourced clay is mixed with aggregates and cement to cast walls on-site based on a two-piece formwork. The school is exemplary in terms of its successful approach to the adaptive use of building materials, community development, climatic mitigation and aesthetics.

Adaptive reuse for refugee education: Located in an informal settlement for Syrian refugees, the project creates a dignified school environment using a repurposed pavilion from the Expo 2015 in Milan (Italy).

Shea butter storage for Nyingali community: The striking towers of the storage units are designed for passive cooling and allude to traditional local architecture.

The UVA de La Imaginación project centers on creating high quality public spaces inserted into low-income, dense neighborhoods at a reservoir where two giant water tanks have been replaced by new infrastructure. The architecture takes inspiration from the site’s history, surrounding topography, and structure of existing tanks and pools, resulting in an intervention with minimal environmental impact. The project opened in 2015 and forms part of a network of 20 parks.

This project achieves midrise, mixed-use housing through a modular panel system that can adapt to create a variety of unit layouts and architectural forms, Vancouver, Canada.

Poetic interpretation of a water purification infrastructure as public space along the edge of the Ganga River in Varanasi, India.

This project is located in the city center and turns an unused arm of the River Spree into a natural 745m “swimming pool”. The pool is the equivalent of 17 Olympic swimming pools and features a 780m-long reed bed filtration system. The Flussbad will have a strong impact on the quality of urban life.

Following over 25 years of civil war, the reintegration of young soldiers is one of the great challenges Sri Lanka faces. This Community Library provided young men from underprivileged backgrounds with construction training during the implementation of the building. The slender building with a footprint of 1,400 sq m sits lightly in the landscape and wraps around an inner courtyard, taking full advantage of cross ventilation and daylighting. Rammed-earth walls and recycled materials reduce costs and the ecological footprint.

Ágora Bogotá will be unique. The city’s new convention center is stacked vertically to minimize the building’s footprint and to correspondingly maximize the surface area of outdoor public spaces in the heart of the city. The building features high levels of flexibility without compromising its architectural quality that is illuminated and ventilated naturally through an actively responding and acoustically sealed enclosure.