JO Magazine

An architect and a consultant design the model house for a hotter, flatter, but greener world. As a bonus, it looks fantastic.

Words by Nicholas Seeley.

TODAY, AQABA'S 9TH DISTRICT remains little but desert. Turn off the main road at the power station, and then you're driving through it. Around you, empty highways and cement curbs slice trails through torn-up red earth: not pristine, but not developed either. A few skeletal buildings are going up, surrounded by construction debris.

Most of the district is land that's been marked out for the city's planned expansion: by 2025, Aqaba's population is expected to grow from its current 80,000 inhabitants to around 270,000. The demand for housing will triple, from 10,000 units to 30,000, and middle-income suburbs will sprawl out across the area.

Slideshow: How the Eco-House Works

In the middle of this, Tareq Emtairah's house is a little piece of the future. It sits lightly between the town and the mountains, a compact structure of rose-colored rectangles, surrounded by a small garden of bamboo and rushes.

It is also one of Jordan's first ultra-energy efficient buildings, estimated to use only 28 percent of the power of a normal house its size. Its creators hope it will inspire others, so that when the rest of Aqaba finally spills out into the 9th District, it will be it will be in a wave of new, greener houses.

The project started in 2005, when Emtairah, a consultant with the International Institute for Industrial Environmental Economics at Lund University in Sweden, was working on a strategic assessment of the Aqaba Master Plan, which lays out a program for how the city's expansion would be managed.

Aqaba has one of the most progressive building codes in the country, Emtairah said, but from the beginning he was worried about the environment.

In developed countries, buildings typically use up about 40 percent of the total energy supply, and give off an equal proportion of the CO2 emissions that cause global warming. In Jordan the figures are similar, but unlike the United States or Great Britain, Jordan is a small country that imports nearly all of its energy. If Aqaba's future growth is dominated by the current style of energy-inefficient, un-insulated stone-and-concrete construction, the energy debt will be tremendous. A low- to medium-income family could end up spending one third of its total income for cooling in the summer months, according to Emtairah.

From the beginning, he advocated for adding more environmental regulations to the building codes, but regulators were skeptical, worrying that putting energy efficiency requirements into law would increase the cost of building too much.

“I said, ʻI can do it,' Emtairah explained. “I can actually do a building with the average price per square meter that you find in Aqaba, but I can do it with energy efficiency.

So with his own money, he set out to create a house that would demonstrate the possibility of green building in Jordan. With assistance from Lund and the Center for the Study of the Built Environment, he put together a competition to find someone who could design the building he wanted. The prize went to Dutch architect Florentine Visser. Simplicity, Emtairah said, was one of the major reasons for selecting her design.

“The two other architects came [up] with a very fancy building, more of an architectural statement than what I was looking for, he explains.

The house is meant to be a statement, of course, but not a stylistic one. In fact, one of the major goals is to stay as close to “normal” building practices as possible, while still finding ways to improve energy efficiency.

In Aqaba, the biggest area for energy saving is figuring out how to keep cool during the long, hot summers, without relying on air conditioners. Jordan's Royal Scientific Society prepared computer models of how the proposed house would heat up during the day, and how it would need to be cooled. These simulations allowed Visser to work out the most energy efficient wall constructions and materials. She compared them with models of more traditional construction in order to work out how to reduce the “heat load.”

Sitting on one of the house's many shaded balconies, Visser and Emtairah explained how nearly half the structure's energy savings come from simple changes in design and materials.

“People [builders] are familiar with the cement block? OK, stick to the cement block,” Emtairah said—but change the cement in the block, to make it retain heat better. The most insulating cement blocks include a silicate mineral called perlite, but that has to be imported from Greece, so Emtairah decided to go with blocks using a volcanic aggregate from Madaba.

Other alterations were more technical, like identifying and insulating parts of the structure that would let heat leak in or out. Reinforced concrete columns and floor slabs, Visser said, were particularly likely to be “thermal bridges that transmit heat into or out of a building. But you can't do without the concrete in Aqaba, because it's a seismic zone, so extra work had to go into repositioning concrete columns or insulating them with polystyrene. There were changes to many other materials, like better insulation and all double-glazed windows.

Visser and Emtairah estimated that the structural and material improvements alone could create energy-cost savings of 32 percent, while adding only 18 percent to the cost of the house (see breakdown below).

The rest of the energy savings will come from a high-tech solar cooling system, paid for by a grant from the European Commission-funded energy efficient construction project for the Mediterranean, MED-ENEC. Electronics maker Philips is also providing a high-efficiency indoor-outdoor lighting system, to reduce electricity use.

Having three different levels of energy savings—design, construction and materials, and energy efficient technologies—makes it possible for people at many different income levels to adopt some of the project's solutions, Visser said.

About one-third of the €78,000 MED-ENEC grant has gone towards the solar cooling system, the rest will go into public information and monitoring equipment.

Once everything is completed, the house will be used for a year as a display center to promote sustainable building, and a research station. An electronic monitoring system will carefully record the indoor temperature, the energy consumption of the cooling system and the house's energy use, to see how it lives up to the estimates.

In addition to energy efficiency, the house includes a number of other green features. The design was planned to reduce excess material use and waste, Visser says. (Construction debris takes up a huge amount of space in the world's landfills). Again, the measures were simple, including things like putting all the bathrooms above each other to reduce piping, and making sure the walls were the right length to use complete cinder blocks, rather than cutting them.

Amman-based interior design company Indoor Home Furniture has designed a selection of simple, material-efficient furnishings for the house, made partially from recycled wood and finished with environmentally friendly paint.

Perhaps most important in Aqaba's dry landscape is water recycling. Gray water from sinks and showers is directly reused in the house's gardens, after passing through a three-part filtering system pioneered in the Salt area by the Jordan Hashemite Fund for Development. The reclaimed water is distributed through subsoil irrigation, to reduce evaporation, and the plants themselves are all drought-tolerant varieties.

Due to its importance to a wider public, the Aqaba Special Economic Zone Authority sponsored the gray water system and water-efficient garden.

BUILDING THE HOUSE OF the future hasn't been easy, while living in the present.

Numerous delays have kept construction going far beyond the estimated completion date in December 2007. For example, there were the locally-made volcanic aggregate cement blocks: halfway through the order, the supplier of the volcanic aggregate suddenly couldn't deliver anymore. The workshop making the blocks had to import perlite from Greece in order to finish them.

Costs are also running high: it was originally hoped that the design and construction changes would only add about 12 percent to the cost of the house; the real figure is edging closer to 18 percent, according to preliminary numbers provided by Emtairah and Visser.

By the time of writing, the construction was almost fully completed, but the local supplier working on the solar cooling system is having trouble getting it to work up to specifications. Some of components are under embargo, because they also have nuclear applications. If the problems continue, a complete unit may have to be imported from Germany.

None of this is unusual for a market that is still very much in development, and needs to grow the capacity to build green.

“We have every bit of technology today,” said Michelle Moore, the Senior Vice President of the United States Green Building Council, speaking at a conference on sustainable cities held at the Dead Sea in October. “As there's greater and greater market capacity in the engineering and technical professions, the savings ... will eventually bring the cost of the green building down. Green buildings could become cheaper than today's “conventional” structures, she said. Other conference participants suggested that in more developed markets, buildings could already be made green with only 12 percent extra investment, possibly even less.

“Prices drop with cycles of learning, Emtairah agreed—but governments can help encourage the process. “Regulators can push and create markets,” he said. As an example, he brought up the boom in solar power in Germany: “It's huge because the government is encouraging it.” Building code regulations that would require houses to be more energy efficient would be a huge step in that direction, he added.

The government of Jordan has just recently removed taxes and tariffs on renewable technologies; although judging by comments at the recent conference, builders are still holding their breath to see how usably those changes will be implemented.

Moore's advice to governments was to pick a environmental goal and focus on attaining it. It could be greening municipal buildings, or partnering with private industry in a sector with consolidated ownership, like hotels, to make greener structures, but the end result should be to create a case study that will build momentum for change. And that change has to be measurable, she added.

“If we don't make metrics for what a sustainable city means, how will we know when we're achieving it?” she asked. “How will we build a business case that shows that economics can and will be compatible with our environmental goals?

That advice sounds remarkably similar to what Emtairah has already done. When his eco-house opens to the public in 2009, it will be a model that others can choose to follow or adapt. Greening one house won't stop global climate change, but, as Minister of Environment Khaled Irani told attendees at the recent conference, having a vision has to come first.

“We should dream of building the model eco-city, he said. “We should have this dream that is implementable ... and get the goodwill of financial institutions to actually go and do it.

Cost/Efficiency Estimates

"Traditional" house
= JD107,000

House with energy efficient measures:

I
Design + Construction
= JD127,000

Additional Investment: 18%
Energy Savings: 32%
Payback period: just under 5 years

II
Design + Construction
+ Solar Cooling Installation
= JD155,000

Additional Investment: 45%
Energy Savings: 72%
Payback period: about 10 years

III
Design + Construction
+ Solar Cooling
+ Photovoltaic cells
= about JD179,000

Additional Investment: 67%
Energy Savings: 93%
Payback period: about 13.6 years
Not feasible at current prices