Architecture is responsible for about 45% of the carbon dioxide (greenhouse gas) emissions in the UK. Architects are a large part of the problem, and consequently the solution– sustainable architecture.

The UK government has set a target of reducing CO² emissions by 20% by the year 2010. In the United States architecture– residential commercial and industrial buildings and their construction materials– account for nearly half of all energy used in the USA.

Here in Ireland, Fingal County Council have taken a lead on sustainable architectural design by introducing a mandatory planning requirement for seven areas that all new developments reduce energy use and CO² emissions relating to space and water heating to 60% below building regulations requirements, with 30% of space and water heating coming from renewable energy sources.

Wicklow County Council has recently followed suit and several other local authorities are looking to follow in their footsteps. Many councils may fear that introducing standards of this kind would add a cost burden that would stifle development and make new homes unaffordable for their constituents.

I talked with Dublin Architect Emer O’Siochru, who hopes to see the new building standards introduced by Fingal become adopted across the capital.

I first asked about the price of housing in Dublin 4 and how it was affecting the design of buildings with the average cost of a home now six times the average income, whereas in the rest of Europe it is more like three times.

“You can see that the price of property here has gone sky-high and its extremely difficult, if not impossible, for two people with decent salaries, say two teachers, to afford an apartment in Dublin. There are a number of reasons why this happened, there has been a great deal of money around and huge demand in Ireland so that with little or no property taxes, any money available got sucked into land.”

I asked what we should hope for in Dublin 4 to improve the environmental design standards of our buildings and encourage sustainability, bearing in mind the swathe of new apartments and offices in Dublin.

“There’s a lot that can be done. Most of the new buildings are very swish and very cool looking, a lot of steel, a lot of glass a lot of fancy detailing but if you go inside those buildings you’ll find that the apartments are still heated by electric storage heating in many cases.

Certainly you’ll not find district heating, which is the cheapest form of heating when building in that type of dense area, so a huge opportunity seems to have been lost in the Dublin 4 area, an area with the highest per capita income population you might find, and yet the standard of new houses and apartments purchasers are living in would be seen as second rate in European terms.

“Now what they could do in Dublin is to do what Fingal has done in certain areas. They have new area plans covering new parts and areas of remit where they demand much higher thermal insulation standards than the minimum standards in the Building Regulations. They want 50% higher in those standards and they want 30% of all the energy used in those areas to be locally generated from renewables.

“This is ambitious but in fact they’ve discovered that it’s perfectly legal. It can be done by local authorities, the councillors can organise together and instruct their own professionals to do it. It’s been checked by the energy research group in UCD to see if it can it done. There have been studies done on the cost– it does put the cost up a little for a construction yet it is surprisingly little in many ways, but the interesting thing is it won’t put up the cost of housing or apartments to buy as everyone is having to construct that way. You can get higher building standards in an area if a local authority bands together and decides it can be done without any significant increase in cost of housing.”

We talked about encouraging people to have solar panels and passive solar design in their buildings and how they would respond if their home was environmentally sustainable.

Emer says with enthusiasm “Passive solar design is all about designing a house that doesn’t even need any active heating, and that’s well established in Europe now, so the principles of passive solar design are that you build a compact house, not a sprawly house, not too large, well insulated and you make your big windows face south as much as possible and you keep your small windows on the north face so you plan your building with smaller rooms such as bathrooms to the north. Once you’ve insulated your house fully and taken any advantage you can get from the sun you must seal it properly so it’s not leaking air to the surrounding atmosphere; in Ireland this is important because the air pressure causes a lot of draughts.

Finally, we discussed the application by developers who want to build more of these Dockland-type apartments on reclaimed land from Sandymount Strand which is a Special Area of Conservation, a wild bird habitat with the Brent geese coming in off the Strand to graze on Seán Moore park alongside the proposed apartments that aren’t in any way environmentally friendly in themselves.

“I really don’t think we should be building on SACs and there shouldn’t be any exceptions made because in the city we need those lungs. I would like to see more gardening and even farming in the city. But we must keep our green spaces and we have to keep spaces open to species other than us because this is what enriches our soul. It’s not all about saving money on your heating bill– it’s about including the whole diversity of life where we live.”

Above: Emer O’Siochru and, left, a fine example of well-designed sustainable housing.