Solar Cities

As part of my current project, renovating an old Victorian house in a sustainable and environmentally friendly way, we visited a demonstration house that is owned by Dundee City Council in partnership with SCARF and Solar Cities Scotland. Together they have renovated it in a way that the house maintains itself and uses renewable energies. Here we were given a tour of the house and educated about each aspect of the energy efficient equipment within it; from the solar panels to the insulation. This house provides a focus for education, advice and information about domestic scale renewable energy and sustainable construction to households and the general public in Dundee and throughout central and the north east of Scotland. The aim is to showcase technologies, materials and methods of construction that can be integrated into existing housing. One of the main points that was emphasised today was the fact that before you start remodelling and installing energy efficient technologies into any building, you need to first understand how efficient it is as it currently stands. Then from here it is easier to improve its weaknesses, harness it’s strong points and incorporate new technologies.

Solar Cities Scotland aims are to develop and promote the use of renewable energy in all of its forms ; sun, wind, water, the earth and trees; to generate energy for Dundee. They have a campaign to “make Dundee Scotland’s green energy capital city with every citizen a green citizen”. The campaign is called ‘Dundee Sun City’.

To find out more information about this campaign you can visit www.dundeesuncity.org.uk

Sustainable Renovation Project

After completing the sustainable book project it was time to get my new project brief. My current project is to renovate and refurbish an old, ruined house. It is situated in Dundee on Seafield Road, currently surrounded by rows of old Victorian buildings. The house front is extremely old fashioned but has an attractive quality to it, however, the rest of the building is very uninspiring.

39 Seafield Road (The Building to Renovate)

We have also been given a client to aim this build in a certain direction. Our client Emma, is currently a book conservator working for the University of Dundee but is also part of a private practise. She has a nine to five job working with books, her weekends are free and she enjoys quite a lot of hobbies including snowboarding, yoga and Thai Chi. She had also told us that she spends a lot of her time outside of work entertaining friends and family including cooking dinner for everyone and having dinner parties.

This is only her social aspect of things, the studio also has quite a lot of items that need to be incorporated and a number of problems that need to be resolved. Certain areas will need to be created to make this environment practical and the large equipment that Emma works with also needs to be integrated within the design.

All in all, it is needless to say that she has a very long list of requirements for her building come studio. However, not only do I want to meet all her studio and personal needs; I want to create an exciting and inspiring design. I don’t want it to be plain old straight walls everywhere and ordinary. The other thing that needs to be thought carefully about near the end of the design process is Sustainability. Our final design has to not only be sustainable and as energy efficient as possible.

I currently feel quite bogged down with a lot of information, research and ideas and as this is our first major interiors project, it is daunting but I am also excited by this. In some aspects I am quite nervous as this is something I would love to pursue when I finish my years at university and this is kind of a sink or swim situation. But here’s hoping I’ll be swimming by the end of it!