students: Anastasia Fragkoudi
The concept of the diploma thesis is based on the issue of sustainability and how it is interpreted in daily life. Living in a sustainable way can’t exclude the basic element of people’s everyday life: the residence. Only by contemplating the microscale a concrete argument around the issue of sustainability can be made. The research started out by studying representative examples of contemporary and prefabricated dwellings around the world in terms of environmental impact, materials of construction, infrastructure, mobility, adaptability to environmental conditions, spatial organization, technology, context, spatial dimensions, etc. The aim of the research was to extract common elements and basic differences in both contemporary and prefabricated dwellings and to classify them.
Contemporary residencies are related to the way of life; nomads use portable dwellings, in third world countries people construct houses with materials that are inexpensive and are available in the area and so on. Some contemporary dwellings are related to a geographical context, they are adapted to environmental conditions, and some other are related to an intellectual context, they seem that they could be anywhere in the world.
Most of the prefabricated dwellings implement the latest technologies in an attempt to create the “zero energy” house; the residence that produces the amount of energy that it consumes. Some of them are built based on the minimum spatial dimensions needed to perform all the activities of a house unit. Others are built out of a prototype that can be customized depending on the needs of the customer.
The basic idea of the final project is to create a double skin; an exterior and an interior “cell”. The exterior “cell” provides all the needs of the interior “cell” (the house unit). The space in between becomes something like a threshold between the inside and the outside, the public and the private, the natural and the artificial environment. The exterior “cell” is equipped with photovoltaic panels, providing electricity for the house unit, and evacuated tube collectors, supplying hot water to the interior “cell”. Hot water is also used for underfloor heating and with the implementation of an absorption chiller hot water can also be used for cooling the house unit. The exterior “cell” provides also shading and ventilation since it can open up according to the environmental conditions and to the needs of the inhabitants. Grey-water treatment is another technology that was inserted to the infrastructure of the unit by implementing a wastewater recycling system.
The prefabricated house unit is constructed in parts that can be easily transported and mantled and dismantled on site. Flexibility of the design and adaption to environmental conditions is one of the qualities of the house unit. The inclination of the photovoltaic panels is a flexible element of the design in order to adapt to environmental conditions according to geographical location but also to the needs of the inhabitants.
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