From the Construct Ireland archives

Green architect Minka McInerney profiles six unique green buildings including a cardboard school building, a globe-trotting recycled museum & the tallest timber building in the world

Building a visitor centre at such an evocative site as the Cliffs of Moher, one of Ireland’s greatest tourist attractions must have been something of a challenge. By attempting to cater for visitors, the centre could so easily have ruined the rugged, barren landscape which makes people visit in the first place. John Hearne visited the new interpretive centre to discover a building which addresses this problem by becoming part of the landscape, whilst using eco technologies to reduce the building’s strain on the broader environment.

An energy conscious renovation and extension in south Dublin breathes new life into a typical semi detached home — the house is now wrapped with external insulation and boasts breathable and ecological materials too.

Few words in the vocabulary of Ireland’s built environment come with more baggage than ‘bungalow’. For many people, it embodies a total disregard for good architecture and the environment, in part due to its association with isolated one-off housing. John Hearne visited a house in Mayo that mixes considered design with a host of modern technologies to breathe new life into the form.

In the fourth part of a series of articles on the condensation risks associated with insulating single lead dwellings, Joseph Little of Joseph Little Architects & Building Life Consultancy reveals serious problems with the approach taken by regulators, standards authorities and suppliers on the condensation risks associated with insulating single leaf walls.

Little did we know when campaigning for the Fingal energy standard in 2005-06 that Construct Ireland would have a direct impact on Ikea’s first Irish store. Driven by a combination of Fingal’s requirements and their own renewable energy policy, the Swedish retail giant has invested in the largest ground source heat pump installation in Ireland and the UK, along with a well-thought biomass system fed by an onsite waste stream and a host of other green measures, as John Hearne reports

Construct Ireland Journalist Frank Coles investigates the impact posed by the Energy Performance of Buildings Directive

Jason Walsh visited the Green Building, a pioneering sustainable development built in Dublin's Temple Bar in 1994, to find out how one of Ireland’s most ground breaking eco designs has been performing over the last decade.

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Lenny Antonelli visits a new residential development in rural Carlow that boasts only the second and third certified passive houses in Ireland, and encouragingly, finds that meeting and exceeding the coveted passive standard wasn’t as difficult as expected.

Martin Murray, chairman of the Passive House Association of Ireland and founder of Martin Murray Architects, explains why the world’s leading energy efficiency standard is on the up in Ireland