Copenhagen,
24
November
2009
|
00:00
Europe/Copenhagen

VELUX House ready for COP15

Summary

Today, VELUX House was topped out. VELUX House will serve as the official exit building from the COP15 UN Climate Change Conference.

More than 20.000 COP15 delegates will pass through the building every day when leaving the conference. The intention is to give all the conference delegates a first-hand impression of how sustainable architecture and components can play an important role in tackling the challenge of climate change.

The concept behind VELUX House is to devise new sustainable and energy-neutral pre-fabricated homes.

The house is designed to replace the former closed roof construction of multi-storey buildings and demonstrate how energy renovation of older apartment buildings can be achieved by utilising daylight and natural ventilation at the same time as minimising the use of resources – and thus CO2 emissions. While serving as the COP 15 entrance building, VELUX House is placed at ground floor level.

"We need fresh air and daylight - also when we are indoors. It has a positive effect on our health and well-being as well as our ability to learn. Everything in VELUX House has been built to catch the rays of the sun and maximise natural daylight flowing into the rooms from the roof windows and the front facade of full-height windows", says Michael K. Rasmussen, VELUX Group Director of Branding & Communication.

The roof of VELUX House offers large areas for solar panels and is therefore a source of energy. The active roof will generate so much energy that the surplus can either be fed into the grid or used by other residents in the same building. In short, the surfaces covering the house will be energy-generating surfaces, power plants in their own right.