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BUILDING PROJECTS
INTEGRA HOUSE ABERDEENSHIRE
Green house effect
Nestled into the Scottish highlands, a new kind of sustainable house design makes a simple, repeatable and inventive structure from abundant local materials to yield big cost savings. Sébastien Reed speaks to architect Gokay Deveci about Integra House
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ntegra House is a new home built for a client that’s also the product of a research project at Robert Gordon University to improve provision of energy efficient, sustainable, healthy and genuinely affordable housing. Prefabricated truss construction used for the entire house construction is claimed to be a potential way to not only eliminate fuel poverty, but also address capital and life cycle costs and indoor air quality, in a fully repeatable model. “The client specified a budget for a two to three bedroom house, and she wanted it to be environmentally friendly,” so says Gokay Deveci – professor at the university and the designer behind the pioneering, all-timber house. The architect has made a name for himself over recent decades for his contributions to affordable eco-housing, of which Integra represents one of his latest iterations.
Excluding the foundations, the project’s budget was set at £140,000 – around £1,000 per square metre – posing tight financial constraints to an already isolated plot which was challenged further by the often aggressive Scottish weather. Deveci continues: “The client came from a granite cottage before and was very concerned about the running costs. So, I had a very limited amount of money to build a new house that was also energy efficient.” The slightly sloping rural site, located in
Tyrie, near Fraserburgh, Aberdeenshire, consisted of a farm building and derelict sheds, served by single-track access. Early proposals made attempts to integrate a house inside one of these pre-existing
ADF JUNE 2019
buildings. “There were some existing stone walls,” says Deveci, “but their structural conditions were so bad I had to abandon that.” Regarding planning, Deveci notes that the project received encouragement from planners: “They were comfortable with us being a little experimental.” Given these circumstances, a saving grace for the architect was that the client had no particular fixed idea in terms of the architectural identity of the new building. So, partnered with the generous size of the site, the design was allowed more space to breathe in certain areas. Unknown at the time of the brief, these parameters would serve as a platform for innovation in affordable green living.
Plan & provision In plan, Integra house is long, simple and rectangular – roughly 18.2 metres by 7 metres – for practical structural reasons, as Deveci explains: “It’s to do with the gable ends and the way the roof trusses stand side by side.” It’s an extremely windy site and as a result the building gables were located facing the prevailing wind.
The building is almost as simple in form as
in plan, featuring a pitched roof which combines 60 degree and 25 degree angles, serving to displace the roof’s peak to the eastern side of the house’s mass: “It came entirely from the materials, the structure, and the way that things were put together.” The entire structure, skin and insulation is comprised of timber.
The architect explains that a flat roof was considered early in the design process due to
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