Henson Developments, WKK, and IBI Group have unveiled designs for a 60-story Passive House tower slated for downtown Vancouver. If completed as designed, the wavy tower could become the tallest Passive House building in the world.
The tower, according to renderings published by Narcity, is defined by billowing, double-curved geometries that frame a series of inset loggia spaces. Wrapped in repeating horizontal bands that alternate between solid cladding and glass, the tower is designed to produce no operating emissions and is proposed as part of the city's Zero Emissions Building Plan, a 2016 agreement that aims to eliminate operating emissions for all new buildings by 2030.
According to previously submitted documentation for the building, the tower's exterior facades are divided equally in terms of surface area between glazed and unglazed surfaces, with unglazed wall components made up of "super-insulated walls" that measure nearly 18-inches in thickness.
The tower's H-shaped floor plan features four inset sections, one along each of the four principal facades, that contain carved-out loggia spaces depicted in the renderings for the project as containing trees and other plants.
A recent re-zoning application for the project indicates that the tower will include 113 social housing units, 49 market-rate rental units, and 323 market-rate condominium units, as well as a whopping eight levels of underground parking for 299 vehicles and 1026 bicycles.
2 Comments
18 inches of insulation? is this just some loophole that lets you average the R value of multiple wall types? you could survive vancouver year round with a waterproof jacket and a comfortable sweater.
That's the sort of stuff Germany pulls too. Since it isn't the insulation stopping the thermal translation but delaying it. That means they are creating enough thermal mass to delay the outside temperatures in changing the inside ones.
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