Welcome to the archive of Construct Ireland, the award-winning Irish green building magazine which spawned Passive House Plus.
The feature articles in these archives span from 2003 to 2011, including case studies on hundreds of Irish sustainable buildings and dozens of investigative pieces on everything from green design and building methods, to the economic arguments for low energy construction.
While these articles appeared in an Irish publication, the vast majority of the content is relevant to our new audience in the UK and further afield. That said, readers from some regions should take care when reading some of the design advice - lots of south facing glazing in New Zealand may not be the wisest choice, for instance.
Dip in, and enjoy!
Of huge importance to our national identity and one of the major features of the rural Irish countryside are the derelict small cottages, scattered across the land, that have long fallen into ruin. Often situated in Irelands most beautiful and remote areas, Terry Cunningham, Rural Enterprise Adviser of the Southern Tipperary office of Teagasc sought to revitalise and fully utilise these charming and unique dwellings from our past.
A striking new house in County Cork proves that meeting the passive house standard needn’t mean sacrificing good design
Closed-panel timber frame home in Wicklow with impressive thermal performance and airtightness
In the hands of the right architect, meeting the passive house standard needn’t involve compromising on design. Construct Ireland visited a recently certified passive house which shows that a seamless low energy architecture is possible
Do termites apply building science better than humans? Award winning architect Sean Harrington takes a characteristically left-of-brain approach to our international feature, leading to some humbling lessons.
John Hearne explains how truly low energy buildings can succeed or fail depending on how they engage with their occupants.
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.
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.
In
issue 2 we reported on an innovative new energy bike scheme being
implemented in Sligo. Its instigator, Wilhelm Bodewigs, got in touch to
tell us about an interesting Tram system proposal for the county