Cleaner Buildings = Cleaner Air

The innovations in technology never cease to amaze us! One of the BrickStainable sponsors, Essroc Italcementi Group, has a product called TX Active that decomposes air pollutants as they react with the surface of a building. A natural chemical reaction, photo catalysis, results in self-cleaning and de-polluting. Talk about tremendous design benefits for the environment!

Martin Vachon, a returning juror to the BrickStainable Design Competition is a consultant to the producer making best use of the product in application. Martin has been involved with the research and reporting system efficiency.

After a decade of research at Essroc’s Bergamo, Italy plant TX Active came to market. There are numerous applications for this technology including vertical, horizontal, structural, and more.

To learn more about TX active, please visit their website or view their product data sheets.

Photo Credit: Dives in Misericordia Church (Rome, Italy), Richard Meier & Partners Architects. This was the first application of the photocatalytic principle, TX Active.

Reflections from a BrickStainable Competition Winner

“It seems really amazing that you have already launched the second BrickStainable Competition bringing back to us all the exciting memories from last year. Since we left Washington, DC we had the best impressions about the whole experience you have offered us and we felt the stimulus of being exposed to such a great amount of thinkers from different disciplines. We consider your competition the starting point for a very particular research that deals with the component of construction as its basic module. In this way we can explore more “bottom-up” systems of producing space, rather than traditional “top-down” methodologies. Inserting context to these systems like sustainability and bioclimatic design turned out to be really intriguing to us.

Once more we thank you for opening this competition to the design community, pushing our research to a level that promotes contemporary design and finds applications to the latest tendencies of architecture.

In this frame we decided to take our ideas to another level and felt confident enough to promote our ideas back to Europe. Through this process our winning entry has been selected with 46 more in its category, among 256 international entries, to participate in the 22nd biennial of industrial design in Ljubljana, best known from its acronym BIO. BIO is one of the few major international exhibitions that have a tradition of more than 45 years of pushing the envelope in contemporary design.” – Flora Bougiatioti, Maria Eftychi & Aimlios Michael, Cyprus

Congratulations to Flora, Maria & Aimlios, Technical Design winners from the 2009 BrickStainable Design Competition. More detail about the BIO exhibition is available at: http://www.bio.si/

A Brick That Powers Your Building?

It sounds far-fetched, but it could be a real possibility in the future and it came out of the BrickStainable Design Competition. Last post I told you about my trip to New Mexico to meet with one of last year’s winners, Eric Haskins to discuss an idea he had. Well now I can talk about it because his idea for photovoltaic brick is patent-pending. Several entries in the BrickStainable competition utilized this concept—marrying clay brick with new photovoltaic technology—and Eric is taking it to the next level. Obviously, this idea is in its infancy—much research is still needed to figure out exactly how it could and would be used on the exterior and link to the building’s systems on the interior. Still, through this competition, architects interested in product development are working on the innovative ideas they explored in theory in their entries, in the real world. BrickStainable could lead to energy efficient systems far beyond anything we imagined when we began this competition and to me there’s nothing more exciting!