Wongani speaking at RIBA Guerrilla Tactics about Coops
Wongani will be speaking at the RIBA’s annual flagship conference, RIBA Guerrilla Tactics, on Wednesday 5th November. He will be sharing more about how we organise and operate as a cooperative at Transition by Design at the conference for small and medium sized architectural practices. The talk will be titled ‘Radical Practice – How architecture cooperatives can transform the way we work’. There are a great list of speakers in the line up and Wongani will also be involved in a panel discussion. You can find out more about the conference here.
Goodbye & thanks to Olivia
Olivia has been working with us on a 3-4 month summer placement as part of her studies at the University of Bath. She was also with us last summer, as the course has an integrated study and placement structure, where you study and work in both your second and third year. She brought a great positive energy to the team, wrote amazing articles about straw and clay (from various workshops she completed during her time), and learnt a lot during her time working across a range of projects. We wish her all the best as she continues onto her final year of studies at the University of Bath.
Passivhaus Institute Low Energy Building Certification
Our deep retrofit in the Florence Park area of Oxford is nearing completion. Critical to achieving Passivhaus Institute Low Energy Building certification was to hit the air tightness target. We are really happy to have a provisional result of 0.3! To put this number into perspective a Passivhaus needs to be below 0.6, building regulations is below 8 and many leaky old buildings may be up to 20. For this 1930’s home we improved the air tightness by a factor of 60! By this metric, we believe this to be one of the best performing buildings in the Oxford.
This absolutely draft free home minimises heat and energy lost through the cracks and gaps in the building. Equally the internal air quality is incredibly high as a ventilation unit (MVHR) provides warm, fresh and filtered air. When air is extracted from the kitchens and bathrooms the heat is reclaimed to heat the incoming air. You can learn more about this in our retrofit guide that we produced for Cambridge City Council.
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