Photos: courtesy of Autark Home
INTERNATIONAL SELECTION Picking from some of the best current sustainable design the world has to offer, we profile a floating passive house currently moored in the Netherlands, a ground-breaking timber hybrid tower in Austria, a multi unit passive scheme in Malmö, and an Enerphit upgrade to a brutalist Connecticut home originally designed by one of Frank Lloyd Wright’s colleagues.
Floating passive house, Maastricht Here's something a bit different — a floating passive house in Maastricht, the Netherlands. And not only does it float, but the 'Autarkhome’ produces its own electricity, collects its own drinking water and even cleans its own wastewater. Built from reinforced concrete with rigid foam insulation externally, the house has everything you'd expect from a passive house: triple-glazing, heat recovery
ventilation and exceptional airtightness. But this off-grid pioneer takes things way further: for a start, it can collect water right from the surrounding river and treat it for drinking with osmosis, sand and UV filters. Twenty four solar photovoltaic cells provide electricity, with a biodiesel generator acting as a back-up on cloudy days. Solar thermal collectors feature too, and the house even has its own wastewater treatment facility. This prototype was conceived by renewables
firm IBC Solar BV and Maastricht-based architect Pieter Kromwiljk along with a long list of partners, and it has proved so popular that IBC is now planning to mass produce it. Construction took nine months, but the company says once mass production starts Autarkhomes could be built in less than half that time. IBC Solar BV's Peter Meijers told Renewable Energy magazine last year that the design could be particularly popular in places where there are plenty of rivers and lakes but limited land space for housing.