Sustainable architecture is a trending topic nowadays, when a growing number of people are concerned about helping the environment. This way of building can help to reduce the impact against the ecology and the energy waste.
Costa Rica represents 4% of Earth’s biodiversity. Costa Rican government invests over U.S. $100 million a year in environmental protection, according to information provided by the Ministry of Environment and Energy.
SARCO is truly aware of these efforts, so we are an environmentally responsible firm. We use techniques during the design process to reduce the ecologic impact and to increase the energy efficiency.
Costa Rican entities provide diverse strategies to help reduce the carbon footprint. The Costa Rican Green Building Council organized a communication and education strategy that was developed to organize the International Sustainable Cities Congress. It has been hosted in Costa Rica during six times.
Topics on sustainable architecture, resource efficiency, eco-design, and more, are part of the International Sustainable Cities Congress (CICS). A three-day congress, that was held during the last month in Costa Rica.
This important event included plenaries, scientific sessions, workshops and training sessions.
It gathered all the Americas Regional Network leaders for their annual meeting of Green Building Councils (GBCs).
Sarco Architects Costa Rica and our environmental responsibility
Our firm supports sustainability and environmentally-responsible design. Therefore, Sarco Architects Costa Rica prides itself on building environment-friendly projects and paying careful attention to ecological features. Sustainability is one of Sarco Architects Costa Rica’s interests during the project’s development.
The majority of our designs are made for hot tropical climates. This means that a sustainable strategy for temperature regulation has to be achieved. While always considering the environmental characteristics that will surround your project.
For example, temperature can reduced considerably with a good sustainable-design strategy to elaborate the cooling of the building.
Casa Aramara is one of SARCO’s sustainable architecture projects. Located in Guanacaste, Costa Rica. This luxury home includes multiple eco-design attributes.
Sustainable design
There are different strategies to build the house’s cooling. Above all, the passive cooling strategy is the one with the purest sustainable characteristics. However, there are many approaches and forms of working on cooling strategies that are part of sustainable design.
Passive cooling consists on techniques that are used to naturally take advantage of cool and heated air. In other words, building the home with several open areas. This allows cold wind to travel around the structure. The usage of different openings and spaces that make the heated air escape from the house, helps in the temperature’s stabilization. As a result, the use of air’s natural behavior develops a ventilation strategy and reduce the high temperatures.
For instance, the control of solar gain, window design and bringing the heat upwards the structure will help the natural cooling.
Every strategy used in sustainability has to be combined with various methods to make it work. That’s because when put together, they will work more effectively to reduce the heat indoors.
Casa Aramara features several sustainable architecture elements to enhance its interior comfort and reduce energy needs.
Reducing energy
Another sustainable architecture factor is the resource efficiency. To reduce costs and ecological impact, the architects must use materials of special quality in the project, like the ones used by Sarco Architects Costa Rica. This will help improve the design characteristics and benefits. And it can enhance the different aspects of the building’s eco-design.
Roderick Anderson, CEO at Sarco Architects Costa Rica, clarifies the energy-efficiency topic on another blog’s post:
“The architectural design plays a huge role in using sustainable design techniques to effectively lower solar heat gain. Sometimes small variations in the architectural design play an even bigger role (at maybe lower cost) than choosing very high-end windows and doors, for example. Things like extensive overhangs, precise solar orientation of the structure and building mass, proper design and location of window surfaces can provide huge gains in the building’s energy efficiency”.
Sustainable technology
We can’t talk about sustainability without mentioning the relevance of high-end tech. Sarco Architects Costa Rica is always using the best technology applications and programs on every design. The variations of the design can really influence. For example, having the correct solar orientation of the structure, location and quantity of windows and doors, materials used, proper positions of the spaces and diverse characteristics.
The use of BIM (Building Information Modeling) is one key to the sustainable design of the environmental process. Due to the multiple options it brings to the architects, it can bring the proper tools to improve the eco-friendly and sustainable control.
One of SARCO Architects Costa Rica’s sustainable projects is CASA ARAMARA. To learn more about this Sustainable Architecture Luxury Home design, you can click here:
And if you want to read more about sustainable strategies in SARCO you can enter this post:
Helping to save the planet is in our hands and in SARCO we believe that sustainable architecture and energy-efficiency processes can make a big difference.