From the Construct Ireland archives

Beauty is only skin deep, or so goes the cliché, but is there more to 'grace' in a building than its exterior? Jason Walsh visited Rathnew, County Wicklow, to see how an ordinary office building was being transformed into a paragon of sustainability and spoke to two of the building's designers and occupants, architect Tomás Ó Leary and engineer Mark O'Brien

Ireland ’s reliance on fossil fuel sources for electricity generation places the whole country on unstable ground as these limited resources dwindle

Construct Ireland tracked down the busy director of Limerick Civil Trust to talk about the sterling work already done, current projects and to ponder the implications of recent FAS cutbacks.

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

A new development at Grange Lough, Rosslare, reveals that passive houses can be made Irish – both in terms of what they’re built with, and how they look.

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.

The Carroll’s cigarette factory in Dundalk has been reborn as an avant garde exemplar of wind energy storage and an ingenious approach to integrated heating, ventilation and cooling, as sustainable design expert Chris Croly of BDP explains.

Sligo estate house adds hemp lime extension & renovation with vertical bore-hole heat pump

Completed in October 2006 the headquarters of the Netherlands chapter of the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) is nothing if not a striking building. It also happens to be one of the single most sustainable buildings created in recent years. Construct Ireland continues its series of examining internationally significant sustainable buildings, with Jason Walsh putting questions to the building's architects, Amsterdam-based RAU.

Economic analysts are starting to warn of the threat rising oil prices pose to Ireland’s recovery prospects. Richard Douthwaite argues that energy efficiency and renewables investments must be central to government plans, and explains how more than 100% of the cost of energy investments may come back to the exchequer.