Daintree-Living and working in a Sustainable Building

Brian T O Brien
Solearth Ecological Architecture

The Daintree Building.

The Daintree Building is a mixed use urban building comprising  7 apartments, offices, craft space and a public café. It is locate d on a tight urban site on Pleasant’s Place, behind  Camden Street, Dublin.

The project is the result of a long collaboration between Daintree Ltd, the client and Solearth Ecological Architecture, which involved a number of studies of alternative sites before a building on this was commissioned in 1999. The brief was to design an ‘oasis in the city’- a beautiful place to work and live in- that would be highly sustainable, and be a delight.

The site strategy set out to optimise the competing impulses to provide a formal elevation to the north-south Pleasants Place (to guide perhaps the evolution of this thoroughfare from alley to street) and the desire to turn the building towards the sun.

From this the social heart of the project: a two-tiered courtyard, emerged. The lower courtyard hosts a craft shop and public café  creating a vibrant semi-public space within the urban block. The semi private first floor ‘solar terrace’ will be used by the residents as a gathering point (all apartments are accessed from here via a number of entrances) as a relaxation area.

Above and around this the architectural form emerged from the need to maximise internal space, and to take advantage of solar aspect, opportunities to create external spaces at high level and chance views. These led to each apartment having a unique layout, while the demands of planning and privacy led to the stepping sections and curved mansard roof.

The materiality of the building is informed by a desire to imbue a sense of delight and tactility with as low impact a palette as possible; timber for warmth, lime render for continuity, bamboo for tactileness, and copper seemingly for adornment.

Constructionally there is complexity also; the basement and ground floor are of masonry including ‘eco-cem’ concrete  (which displaces  C02 heavy Portland cement with GGBS*) while from first floor level upward the building is timber frame  clad in Irish cedar and lime render on heraklith board – this build-up chosen to accommodate the  expected settlement over the first 12 months.  The untreated western red cedar cladding is positioned mainly on south elevations where it will weather to a silver-grey over time. Roofs are clothed in a sedum plant which provides habitat and rainwater attenuation.

Finishes are chosen for health and delight: natural paints to internal surfaces, sheep’s wool, cellulose and wood fibre within walls and floors as insulation, organic waxes and oils to the recycled pitch pine flooring. Extensive use is made of salvaged bamboo (from the 2001Nissan IMMA art installation on the Carlton Cinema art installation) in balustrades and internal screens. Copper – as the highest embodied energy material in the building – is used to protect the low embodied energy wood and because it is eminently reusable. It is used un-patinated in order, like the cedar, to age gracefully.

The low energy design approach uses the fact that residential areas want solar gain whereas commercial ones don’t, but do benefit from passive ventilation and natural daylight to optimise plan and section energetically. In retrospect the cost cutting decision to omit a passive heat exchanger between the internal office gains  and the heat seeking apartments may have been a false economy. There were others.

Energy demand is first reduced  by having high levels of insulation (U-Values of 0.19W/MsqK).  Space heat is then generated using a vertical bore hole heat pump system in turn powered by distant wind energy (to theoretically eliminate CO2 impacts). Building integrated solar thermal panels will provide 60% of the building’s hot water needs, and a gas condensing boiler will back-up to both systems as required. Water efficient fittings are used in all the bathrooms to reduce demand and WCs are supplied with ‘greenwater’ (recycled/filtered  rainwater from terraces and courtyard. The building’s design heat energy rating had been calculated at  27 kwh/msqA by HER Method, and in a part study (Autumn 2006) an sample apartment was evaluated at 60Kwh/msqA by the new DEAP Method ,making it an A rated energy label under SEIs new rating system for implementation of the Energy Performance of Buildings Directive.

The building design facilitates recycling by locating recycling areas according to frequency of usage-wine bottle banks are located on the resident stairs, larger green bins at the rear of the courtyard.  Office and apartment compost is handled by a series of green cones within the garden courtyard

Another architectural and sustainable element the ‘green gantry’ (a timber and bamboo structure in the courtyard - houses bicycle spaces and provides a planted screen to mediate summer sun and attract birds and insects. This has been left relatively raw as it will soon receive a treatment by an artist who specialises in recycled materials.

The project achieved planning in 2000 after an appeal and a redesign that subtracted  one floor level. It then remained undeveloped due to market caution until 2004 when Cunnane and Donaghey began construction. Practical completion was in November 2005. The site area is 520msq with a gross building area of 1300sqm. Contract cost on average was €2250/sqm (tendered in 2004).

Many of the decisions taken in Daintree were made six years ago and the advanced technologies of then are now thankfully more commonplace. Thus while the building is still unusual in a number of ways it is perhaps the blending of uses and the carving out of a new room in the city ‘s spatial matrix, where resident office personnel and paper craftspeople mix with  café loungers and shoppers in a living example of convivial city, that is its most unique contribution.   

*ggbs: ground granulated blast furnace slag- a by- product of the steel industry.

Project Team:

Role	Responsible	Firm  & Address	Phone Fax
Architects	Brian O Brien Mike Haslam	Solearth Ecological Architecture 68 Dame St Dublin 2	01 6771766 01 6708180
Architectural Consultant 2000 to 2002	Adrian Joyce Architects.
Structural Engineers	Chris Bakkala Bilal Abou Jahjah	Buro Happold Malt House South Grand Canal Quay Dublin 2	01 6786330 01 6786349
M&E	Susan Cormican	Buro Happold Malt House South Grand Canal Quay Dublin 2	01 6786330 01 6786349
QS	Kevin James Peter Devichl	Gardiner & Theobald 79 Merrion Sq. Dublin 2	01 6785737 016785735
CONTRACTOR	Cunnane & Donaghey Construction.	Block A, Marlinstown Office Park Mullingar. Co Westmeath	044 9385444 044 9385445
Electrical	MacGratten Kenny
Mechanical	Malone Electrical	B6 Centrepoint Business Pk. Oak rd. Dublin 12.	01 465 9582 01 465 9586

 

Other Sub-Contractors And Suppliers:

Timber Frame: Riverview. Tel  044 79482/ 3
Green Roof: Bauder. Dubnoghoe, Carrickmacross, Co Monaghan. Tel. +042 969 2861.
Insulations and membranes:  Ecological Building Systems (MaCann and Byrne), Main St Athboy Co Meath. Tel 046 9432104.
Sheep wool Insulation: Ochre wool.
Cellulose Insulation: Polypearl, Deerpark, Oranmore Co Galway. Tel  091 795949
GGBS Concrete: EcoCem. 56 Tritonville Rd, sandymount. Dublin 4. Tel  01 6670900
Solar Thermal Panels-Veissman by Precision Heating
Heat Pump-Unipipe.
Fall Arrest System: Ridgeline. Tel  048 71 357594
Kitchens: Delgrey, Kilcoole Industrial Estate Kilcoole Co Wicklow.  Tel 01 2871072.
Doors: Casey Doors. 23 Baldoyle Ind. Estate. Tel 01 8390325