Stay at ITER in Tenerife

On September 20th, Play Arquitectura spent 4 days at the facilities of the ITER in Tenerife to deepen knowledge of bioclimatic architecture and zero-energy urban planning. 

The ITER facilities consist of a wind turbine park with an installed capacity of 8.33 MW, a 4 MW photovoltaic plant, a reverse osmosis seawater desalination plant and a housing estate containing a total of 25 bioclimatic houses. The bioclimatic houses are the result of an international architectural competition held in March 1995, to which 397 teams from all over the world participated. The competition resulted in 25 completely different models of bioclimatic houses of great architectural quality, which solve in very diverse and imaginative ways the issues of using passive systems, renewable energy and construction with local, modular and recyclable materials. Overall, this is an exemplary public action to move towards a more sustainable world.

The Play Arquitectura team stayed in the Geoda house and spent 4 days experimenting with different strategies for natural ventilation, solar protection, thermal inertia of heavy walls and thermal stability of the ground in the semi-buried bedroom area that the house offered. The results of the permanent monitoring of the house reflected great internal thermal stability and very acceptable conditions of internal comfort.