From the Construct Ireland archives

In the first installment of a new feature on international green buildings, Lenny Antonelli takes a look at five innovative, sustainable and striking buildings from around the world.

If achieving eco buildings is challenging for new build, it is doubly so for renovation projects. Philip & Delphine Geoghegan of iCon Architecture & Uban Design describe a low impact renovation that balances these apparent tensions with great success.

For a building to truly be considered a passive house a vast range of criteria need to be met, as Niels Bjergstrom, founder of Zero-Carbon Solutions Ltd reveals.

The need to reduce CO2 emissions and energy consumption from buildings has never been more immediate. There is a growing consensus that we must reduce our dependence on rapidly depleting, carbon intensive fossil fuels, which, amongst other things, will involve overhauling how buildings are designed, constructed and used.

The rendering industry in Ireland is in a process of change and thus has been the centre of much heated debate between renderers, the meat industry, Irish livestock farmers and the Department of Agriculture and Food.

Achieving building regulations compliance and a good energy rating is one thing. Delivering a genuinely low energy building is quite another. A new scheme by one of Ireland’s most decorated developers may help show the market a way forward.

Invest NI has itself invested in a new headquarters in central Belfast that it hopes will be seen as a model for sustainable development, as Richard Linger, Sustainability Director, White Young Green Ireland explains.

Can sustainability and social housing be married in one development? Construct Ireland investigates a ground breaking social housing project in West Cork.

As the organisation entrusted by OECD countries to predict future global energy supplies, the International Energy Agency’s projections have significant impact on energy policy around the world. IEA officials recently told The Guardian that the organisation’s figures on oil supply had been inflated and that oil peak is happening. Richard Douthwaite assesses the fall out

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.