Lightness and use of waste materials as a sustainability strategy

The ReVolt house, being a hybrid between a house, a boat, and a transportable product, requires a specific design approach that draws the attention to issues usually neglected in standard housing projects, such as lightness and high durability in water environment. The solutions that make the realisation of this building possible are not limited in the building sector but need to be sought in other scientific fields such as in the shipbuilding or the chemical industry. This project introduces therefore techniques and materials in the building construction that are not yet fully explored, but are certainly showing a new path towards sustainability.

In that sense, the attention is focused on the minimization of the mass and of the used material, and the improvement of the performance of the structure, until the optimal ratio between mass and performance is achieved, in a demanding procedure that is imperative in aerospace or maritime engineering but yet unfamiliar in the architectural practice. Outcome of this effort towards lightness is the minimization of the required energy and CO2 emissions for transportation, assembly, and rotation of the house, as well as the reduction of the house’s draught.­

Achieving maximum efficiency means that the structural materials are not catalogue products with fixed properties but materials designed specifically to meet the ReVolt House’s needs in terms of strength, lightness, thermal behavior, water resistance and durability. 

This quest for optimization is linked with the effort of transforming waste products into suitable building materials. The extensive use, for example, of PET bottles in the project - either in their primary form or recycled into PET foam or self reinforced PET resin, clearly states that the building industry can successfully absorb materials that for years were ending up in the landfill,  adding to the environmental burden.