Passive House Fontainebleau Fontainebleau, France

House in the forest of Fontainebleau: Construction of a passive house

Mission : Analysis, Feasibility, Programming, Competition Organization

Analyse, étude de Faisabilité, Programmation architecturale, Organisation de Concours architecture maison passive

Mission : Analysis, Feasibility, Programming, Competition Organization

The genesis
Context
Programming
Concours d’architecture
The winning project & the finalists

By combining two adjoining plots of non-constructible land that are not suitable for building, Shelle and Xavier are fortunate to have one of the last remaining plots of constructible land in the Croix Saint-Jérôme area of Noisy-sur-Ecole (Seine-et-Marne). This sparsely populated wooded area adjoins the Massif des Trois Pignons, a particularly wild western part of the Fontainebleau forest.

Faced with the challenges of climate change and the increasing scarcity of raw materials, every tonne of CO2 emitted and every kWh consumed counts and brings us a little closer to an uncertain future.

Aware of the opportunity they had, but also of the responsibility they bore, the owners wanted to create a project that was exemplary in both environmental and aesthetic terms. The entire project had to meet the Passivhaus Institute’s Passive House certification requirements and achieve the lowest possible carbon footprint in the E+C- experiment launched by the French government.

Hello BAM,
I'm planning to build a house in Fontainebleau. I'm very active in passive house construction in France and the USA. I'd like to challenge architects on this type of construction, and a competition seems appropriate.
Hello Xavier,
Great approach! We look forward to working with you on your project. Do you have any architects in mind?
Yes, I'd love to check them out and discover new ones.
No problem. We can include these architects in the competition and suggest others! Let's do a video to discuss the project!
With pleasure !

Context

A forest, a clearing, a house.

The rocky chaos, sandy expanses and vegetation that make up the terrain served as backdrops for the Barbizon school of painters. This massif is the most original natural area in the Paris basin, and an internationally renowned hiking and climbing area.

In this wooded setting, the owners wanted to build a single-storey house on an 8310 m² plot. The project also included covered outdoor spaces, the conversion of an existing basement and the construction of a guest house at basement level.

The program

A passive house

The project had to be in tune with the times and the issues. It had to be sufficiently emblematic to serve as an example of Passive House and low-carbon construction, while respecting the client’s wishes. The project did not have to undergo the bioclimatic devices and characteristics of a passive house, but had to be a coherent architectural work, conferring comfort, practicality and harmony with the living environment.

In imagining the renovation of this house, we focused on 2 key factors:

Energy Exemplarity: As part of the project, the main house was to achieve Passive House certification by meeting all of the following criteria, validated with the Passive House Planning Package (PHPP):
- Heating requirements had to be less than 15 kWh/(m².a) or heating power less than 10 W/m².
- The house had to have less than 10% of overheating hours per year (i.e. T >25°C). In the case of mechanical cooling, requirements had to be less than 15 kWh/(m².a) and room dehumidification requirements or cooling capacity less than 10 W/m².
- Total primary energy requirements (including household appliances) had to be less than 120 kWh/(m².a).
- The airtightness of the envelope should be n50 ≤ 0.6 h-1.
Resilience:
Climate change, water scarcity, energy, smart tech, vegetable gardening. All of these elements were key to programming the house for the next 50 years.

Architectural competition

Passive house experts, but not only.

Once the programming phase is complete, the competition and specifications will be published. Backed by an extensive network of national and international architects, the competition was a great success, with over 60 entries.

After an intense selection process, our customers decided to select 3 teams for the final stage of the competition.

Two intermediary juries and a final jury later, stages of the competition that proved to be exciting in their enrichment of the project’s potential, it was the Karrawitz architectes team that was chosen.was the most convincing, with a project that was both elegant in its simplicity and ingenious in its ability to find concrete solutions for optimizing the site.

The winning project

Karawitz Architects

KARAWITZ's project perfectly meets our customers' specifications, striking the right balance between contemporary architecture and adaptation to an important local context.