The staff of Kildare County Council are lucky to work in a new, green, “intelligent” building. It’s in Naas, Co Kildare, and as SCOPE finds out, it has been designed with lots of unusual energy-saving features. The staff members don’t even have to turn on the lights.

“The building is designed to be environmentally friendly, making sense of the environmental conditions and therefore responding to them,” says architect Roisin Heneghan. She was on the team that designed the council’s new offices and she tells SCOPE why the building is intelligent and eco-friendly.

Light and heat

One of the first things you notice about the building is that there is a lot of glass. “In Ireland we don’t get a whole lot of sun, so we’ve a lot of glass to get lots of light in,” says Roisin. “We also need to shade it so in summer the temperature doesn’t go up very high.”

To do this, the architects chose to use screen-printed glass in the design. “25% of that glass is actually solid through the green, so we’re getting 25% shading,” says Roisin.

The building also has some bare concrete walls. It looks like the builders haven’t finished painting the walls yet, but actually the concrete is an important element of the design.

“We need it to absorb heat that’s built up during the day. Then at night, when the building is empty, it slowly releases that heat so that you get a very even temperature,” says Roisin.
“We don’t have air conditioning in the building - we don’t need to do it by using all that energy. We can do it by just designing the building to control the temperature.”

Solar powered water

For more energy efficiency, solar panels on the roof provide all of the building’s hot water between March and September. For the rest of the year, when there is less sun, the panels back up the hot water system.

Another unusual feature of the building is that the water for the toilets doesn’t come from the mains – but from the sky.

Rosin explains: “We take the rainwater off the roof, clean it up – filter it - and then we re-use it for toilet water flushing,” she says. “You’re not using treated water and to treat water takes a lot of energy, to make it safe for drinking. This water is treated to the level where it’s not a health hazard but it’s not drinkable water.”

No switches

Not having to treat the water saves more energy, but the staff’s energy is saved too as they never have to turn on a light. So where exactly are the light switches? “There are no light switches,” says Roisin. “There are light sensors in the office spaces that detect the light levels, so as the daylight goes down, artificial light gradually comes up.”

“What you’re really trying to do initially is maximize the amount of daylight,” she says. To get the most effective light, the designers decided to use high windows. The light from these windows is then bounced onto special aluminium reflectors and these then distribute the light down and make sure it’s evenly distributed.

All of these features are custom designed and the building really is at the cutting edge. Hopefully more and more buildings in the future will save energy in these ways. This will not only save us energy costs, but more importantly, help our fragile environment.

Learn more:

Read more about the design of green buildings

Find out how to be energy efficient at home

See some more of Heneghan Peng’s architectural projects