Dan Rawlins and his partner Chloe Meyer set themselves an ambitious target when they decided to build an off-grid house made from hempcrete and rendered with a horse manure mix, all without ever having built a house before. And while that might sound like a recipe for disaster, the couple had experience weathering difficulty —…
According to the European Environment Agency, 85–95 % of today’s buildings will still be standing in 2050. As a result, there is an urgent need to renovate existing buildings to reduce energy consumption and improve their energy performance >>> Barone, G., Vardopoulos, I., Attia, S., & Vassilliades, C. Energy Reports 12, 2933-2945 (2024) Recent related articles…
Natural building materials, including bioaggregates and biocomposites, have been making a comeback in recent years, in an attempt to minimize the Embodied and Operational Energy and Carbon (EE, OE, EC, OC) related to construction. This paper presents monitoring results of three buildings (two residential and one educational) built with such materials in the Mediterranean climate…
For as long as scientists have studied trees, we have categorised them into two types based on the sort of wood they make. Softwoods include pines and firs and generally grow faster than hardwoods, like oaks and maples, which can take several decades to mature and make a denser wood. However, our recent research has…
Hempcrete is a bio-based building material helping to power the drive to net-zero, but how can a product developed a millennia ago help tackle today’s environmental challenges? Euronews Culture gets down and dirty with a material that has Europe’s eco-conscious architects high with excitement. It really doesn’t look like much, but hempcrete is the green…