Loadbearing strawbale daycare centre

Project

298085

Status

Submitted

Award category

You want to submit

NEW EUROPEAN BAUHAUS AWARDS: existing completed examples

Project title

Loadbearing strawbale daycare centre

Full project title

Description

Let's put straw instead of sand, steel and gravel in 21st century buildings !

What was the geographical scope of your project?

Does your project address mainly urban or rural issues?

Does your project refer to a physical transformation of the built environment or other types of transformations?

Has your project benefited from EU programmes or funds?

Has your project won an EU prize?

Your project is fully completed?

When was your project implemented?

How did you hear about the New European Bauhaus Prizes ?

On whose behalf are you submitting the application?

Please provide a summary of your project

The Jacques Chirac daycare centre is a facility built by the Rosny-sous-Bois city council within the perimeter of an existing school to cater for 180 children aged from 3 to 11 while they are not at school. Working parents use the service provided by the municipality early in the morning, at lunch time, after school and during the school holidays. 

Part of the city council itself, our department “Direction de la recherche et de l’innovation” has the dual mission of building schools for the increasing population as mandated by French law and to do it maintaining the commons (air, water, biodiversity, our climate, etc…) of the people of Rosny-sous-Bois and beyond. 

After an objective analysis of the different options to get us toward such an ambitious objective, we have decided to choose natural building materials (straw, adobe, timber), while encouraging participation of local people and explaining to the children why their building is different and kinder to the earth than the others surrounding them. 

Please indicate the main themes of your project with 5 key words

Please give information about the key objectives of your project in terms of sustainability (including circularity) and how these have been met.
Please highlight how the project can be exemplary in this context

It is next to impossible to build without deleterious effects on our ecosystems as many materials need to be extracted and it is very hard to do so in a responsible way. We have been exploring the best ways to build while accepting that only buildings that are absolutely needed should be built. Our planet is our ultimate common good that we have to share and use with the lightest touch. To respect it we need to build damaging our environment as little as possible and we even have to try to regenerate it.

Therefore we carry an analysis of the different building methods available to us for each new project and we have reached the following conclusions :

• It is easier to experiment outside the scope of commercial architecture
• Not all materials are equal and we should limit to the strict minimum the use of concrete, steel and petrochemical products
• While bio-based materials (straw, wood etc…) tend to be more virtuous choices, using them is not a guarantee of success and we need to ascertain that these have been grown adequately while benefiting people locals to the fields and forests
• Plants that grow quickly should be prioritised to maintain our organic resources
• Technology installed in our buildings should be as low-tech as possible to make their manufacturing and maintenance as low cost as possible for our planet and the city council finances.

To reach our goals, we have implemented innovative techniques such as load-bearing straw walls to keep timber quantity to a minimum, sawn-timber carpentry to allow the procurement of local wood which doesn’t need to be heavily processed nor glued, low-tech natural ventilation to limit machinery, seasonal thermal stocking to use summer heat during the winter, rain water storage, composting toilets to preserve water, a mass heater stove and a green roof that acts as a biodiversity reserve. We have used straw from organic farming, the straw bales walls were plastered with mud and plaster and rendered with lime and sand.

Please give information about the key objectives of your project in terms of aesthetics and quality of experience beyond functionality and how these have been met.
Please highlight how the project can be exemplary in this context

When building for children we felt necessary to provide them the best indoor air quality as well as comfortable spaces that will let them experiment, play and think.

The use of natural materials such as straw, sawn wood, plaster and earth for plasterwork and the generous natural light creates spaces of high visual, hygrothermic and acoustic quality.

The aesthetics of the exposed natural materials contribute to the creation of a space where the children feel well. Other materials used such as linoleum for flooring, wood based ceiling panels, cotton insulation upcycled from discarded denim clothes also contribute to the aesthetics and the overall air quality while having a light impact on our environment.

To further the indoor air quality and the aesthetic feel of the building, some of the industrial high VOCs furniture normally associated with these buildings have been replaced with easily repairable sawn wood furniture, desks, cabinets and chairs that were manufactured locally.

The architecture/aesthetics of the building is the result of our ecosystemic design rather than an architect statement, thus achieving a new vernacular architecture.

Please give information about the key objectives of your project in terms of inclusion (equal opportunities, public participation, citizen engagement, co-design, universal design, accessibility, affordability, etc.) and how these have been met.
Please highlight how the project can be exemplary in this context

Our buildings are not being imagined by the design team alone in its office. All along the way, we think about how to integrate citizens, children, users, construction workers to our projects.

During the design stage, we organize workshops (adobe bricks, traditional carpentry) to educate people on regenerative architecture. We opened the building site and hosted several visits to a range of professional and non-professional visitors, children from the surrounding schools, local city councillors.

The building industry is not always good at training skilled workers and at offering employment locally so we realised that we needed to worry about the social impact of our buildings. We have done our best to make sure that the invested public money reached as much as possible local people who need it.

We search continually for contractors with a social and a professional integration scheme as they are those who share our concerns for the well being of all things living.

We only found a few of them and this made us realise that the education and the professional training system need to be improved to meet the future needs of a virtuous construction industry.

Co-design is also facilitated by being both the client and the designer. It allows us to work very closely in a limited amount of time with our colleagues from the planning to the maintenance stages. To reinvent communal architects and engineers is definitely a way forward to shape tomorrows cities.

Please explain how these three dimensions have been combined in your project.
Please highlight how this approach can be exemplary

Through the design and the construction of the project, our aim have always been to optimised sustainability, aesthetics and social inclusion. This meant constantly assessing our possibilities and assessing possible solutions in light of this. It also meant riding ourselves of common thinking on best ways to build.

These three objectives converge toward the choice of natural materials with low embedded carbon and to expose them as these materials are pleasing to the eye when well treated.

Using ecosystemic design, ie taking into consideration local resources (human and material) and limiting waste, is a powerful way to combine sustainability, aesthetics and inclusion. This is our goal with every project and the Jacques Chirac Daycare Center one example of it.

We have come to the conclusion that local bio-based materials not only can be produced sustainably but are also a vector for social inclusion as workers need to acquire precious know-how that is a source of pride and a feeling of being useful to society.

Please give information on the results/impacts achieved by your project in relation to the category you apply for

We have achieved the construction of a loadbearing strawbale structure for a public building demonstrating the possibility to build with a truly renewable organic material and we have generated lot of interest in the process. Straw grows every year whereas it takes at least a generation for a tree thus we need to use timber with parsimony and we’ve shown that it is possible. 

We have also demonstrated that it is possible to ventilate a public building in France with a low-tech solution which is desirable as manually operated systems are very resilient. 

We have disseminated the benefits of eco-buildings to hundreds of children and adult who participated in our open workshops and building site visits, increased awareness of our impact on our environment while dealing with contractors, the daycare centre staff and other users. 

We have built a day care centre that can operate even during an electric blackout thanks to the mass heater stove, manually operated ventilation and the abundance of natural light. 

Please explain how citizens and civil society were involved in the in the design and/or implementation of the project.
Please also explain the benefits that derived from their involvement.

Whereas we did not have the opportunity to involve citizens during the design phase due to lack of time, we have invited them to participate in hands on workshops during the construction and we have organised regular visits of the construction site taking time to explain our choices, their reason and to answer every question.

Through these workshops and visits, our actions travel outside our city and the numerous workshops participants help us spread our ecosystemic design.

On a larger scale, our action based research is freely available, we do not register patents and our techniques can be duplicated by anybody so that more citizens can benefit.

Please explain what kind of global challenges the project addressed by providing local solutions

We address the global challenge of living in a limited resources world in offering next generation an ecosystemic thinking on the act of building.

By offering young children the opportunity to use a carefully designed building made mostly of natural materials in an environment where concrete has taken over from nature, we hope to make them think that man can reconnect with his environment.

Although we have isolated ourselves from the natural environment, we need it to sustain healthy lives. There are huge challenges ahead to tackle the climate emergency and the sixth mass extinction and, beyond the technical aspects, we need to reassess our relation to the natural environment and we believe that showing alternatives help people think that they can act at a local level to help solve big issues which might first appear out of reach.

While thinking locally with this project, we address many global challenges : climate change, biodiversity, equality, citizen empowerment. Let's do it together !

Please highlight the innovative character of the project as compared to mainstream practices in the field of the project.

The project has two aspects which are really innovative, the first is the use of loadbearing strawbale structure in a public building and the second one is to ventilate naturally a french public building.

To justify the loadbearing nature of straw, mechanical and fire resistance testing had to be performed. We showed that the wall could performed beyond regulatory requirements (2 hours vs 30min fire resistance under load).

Equally testing of a bespoke ventilation system was performed.

You can view more pictures of the leisure centre under construction on our blog https://regenerative-architecture.tumblr.com/.

Please explain to the potential of transferring the projects’ results or learnings to other interested parties and contexts.
Please provide clear documentation, communication of methodology and principles in this context.

As a public service we aim to share our processes, researches and user feedback.

In a partnership with ADEME (French agency for ecological transition), we are carrying two state funded research projects, the first one is on the use of loadbearing strawbale walls for public buildings and the second one the development of natural ventilation with heat recovery. The daycare centre has been open for nearly two years and we are still in the process of writing those reports.

The reports will be published once completed and available freely to interested people. In the meantime we answer as many as the questions put to us as time allows.

Is an evaluation report or any relevant documentation available?

If you would like to upload additional documentation, please upload it or write it below

By ticking this box, you declare that you are not in in one or more of the exclusion situations foreseen under Article 136 of the Financial Regulation.

By ticking this box, you declare that all the information provided in this form is factually correct, that you assume sole liability in the event of a claim relating to the activities carried out in the framework of the contest, that the proposed project has not been proposed for the New European Bauhaus Prizes 2022 in any other category or strand and that it has not been subject to any type of investigation, which could lead to a financial correction because of irregularities or fraud.

By submitting your application, you guarantee that you are the author or have the rights to proceed with the application and to authorise the use of the project, concept, idea, and that you have obtained any necessary consents, licenses or assignments from third parties and included copyright notices when necessary.

By submitting your application, you understand that all the applications that meet the eligibility requirements will be shared for the purposes of the selection processes, and notably published on the secured platform https://prizes.new-european-bauhaus.eu/ and for the purposes of the promotion of these on the New European Bauhaus website and/or other European Commission communication channels. In this sense, the applications would be widely available. Applicants should ensure that they present their ideas, concepts, projects, in such a way that they could be shared without giving rise to intellectual property related concerns. If your submission is selected as one of the finalists, it will additionally be shared for the purpose of the public vote that will take place. The European Union is granted a licence to use and share your application with the general public and the official external experts for the purposes of the selection process, including the voting. The European Union has the right to use the images and visual materials and the description provided in the application for communication purposes related to the contest and beyond. Rights granted comprise the right to store, reproduce, display, publish and communicate or distribute copies in electronic or digital format, including, but not only, through the internet. Unless you have disclosed your name, the European Commission has no obligation to share your name when using or disseminating your contribution to the public. The European Union cannot be held responsible in case any submitted idea, project, concept is found to infringe third parties rights. The European Union shall be neither responsible for the use that third parties may do of the applications or related content.