ZEN Architecture — Graduate Showcase Coming Soon

In response to our current climate emergency and urgent need to decarbonise the built environment, this studio theme investigates approaches to the integration of sustainability and strategies to decarbonise the built environment. Architectural education has tremendous potential to shift the entire industry towards zero carbon architecture and built environment. Architects play an important role particularly in the early design phase when he / she has the greatest opportunity to make design decisions that directly lead to a reduction in the GHG emissions. However, it is not easy for architects to easily understand and visualise how their design contributes to the overall GHG emissions for the built environment. This lack of fundamental knowledge is a result of the traditional lack of integration of sustainability in the mainstream architectural curriculum.

The studio will use an integrated research and teaching approach to facilitate the development of concepts and strategies for the design, planning, construction and management of climate resilient, net zero emission buildings and communities centred on our new Belfast campus, with strong interest in improving stakeholder engagement and improving the health and well-being of the citizens, users and neighbouring communities. Such an innovative, challenging, integrated sustainable teaching and research approach in studio will further enhance and build upon our existing vibrant cross-disciplinary community of knowledge, skills and research and encourage transfer of knowledge to the next generation of practitioners.

To achieve this, the studio is front loaded with research in the first month to arm the students with knowledge on concepts and strategies for smart cities and zero emission neighbourhoods by working in all-year groups on a chosen smart city and ZEN concept. During this phase, the students will be exposed to, and participate with researchers involved in ‘live’ research projects and activities, such as, The Research Centre for Zero Emission Neighbourhoods in Smart Cities (ZEN) in Norway, University of Limerick participation in the EU CityxChange project and Synikia — Sustainable Plus Energy Neighbourhood project. They will also be involved in partnerships with The Climate Commissioner Grainne Long, Belfast City Council; Nuala Dualcz, Greater Belfast Development; Future Campus projects and Belfast Resiliency Strategy with our Provost Raffaella Folli, as well as, knowledge sharing experiences with invited guest such as Mark Hackett who has done considerable work on the York Street interchange and Belfast Campus area.

In the second phase in the Fall semester, the students apply this knowledge gained to the proposed site at the new Belfast Campus and surrounding neighbourhood and communities. The objective being to develop concepts and strategies for a sustainable plus energy neighbourhood involving, and surrounding biomass plant, to feed into their proposed ZEN neighbourhood concepts which could developing energy synergies between the proposed PV system on the new Belfast campus with other RE technologies in the immediate surroundings. The students will develop a range of sustainable transformation strategies including citizen involvement and local communities. 

In the spring semester, the students will develop the project at building level with a focus on the 10 Steps for ZEN including some life cycle analysis consideration and the use and reuse of materials, appropriate to the respective learning outcomes. The results of the project will deliver concepts and strategies for sustainable plus energy neighbourhood proposals to be integrated into the Belfast Future Campus project, as well as, providing input to potential policy change to shift to a low carbon built environment through partnership with Belfast City Council and senior leaders through the ‘Architects of Change — An Architectonics of Education to bridge the Green Agenda generation gap ‘.