One of the most important experiences of living in Valldaura is the relation between the building location and the opportunity to have access to water. Here in Valldaura green lab, there is a huge problem with the access to fresh water and a truck every 2-3 days have to come from the city to bring here water, moreover, as the Barcelona tap water is “not recommended to drink”, another truck has to come to bring here drinkable water. Because this makes Valldaura quite unsustainable, in this course it has been pointed out the importance to think about three aspects before choosing the water system with a less footprint impact: location, function and economic.

CALCULATION AND LIMITATION OF WATER CONSUME

An important effort to estimate and to imitate the consumption of water of the studied building has been done in order to have the complete picture. This was important to understand where and how to work to improve the reuse of the water which will help in the fight against worldwide water pollution.

WATER TREATMENT SOLUTION

As the studied building is huge, there is a great opportunity to treat an important amount of greywater and in this course, it has been calculated the maximum capacity of the building without changing the design and it has been discovered the huge chance this building gives to the city. As the previous idea was to limit the consumption of water through design choices, the amount of greywater generates from this building is around 2% of the total opportunity of water treatment which gives the building the chance to be connected with the city and clean water from other buildings.

WATER ROOF STORAGE AND GREEN ROOF

It has been designed a raining water storage included in the roof structure. This was done because of the chance of watering the roof garden only with raining water. To do this is important to understand that here in Barcelona the time of the year when the garden requires more water coincide with the time of the year with less raining days, by contrast when the monthly raining days increase the need for watering strongly decrease. By calculation and graphs, it was discovered that it will only require a tank of 200’000L to provide water during the entire year, by collecting on the months with more raining days and using in the driest months.

Barcelona CLT factory is a project of IaaC, Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia, developed at Master in Advanced Ecological Building and Biocity 2019/20 by:
Filippo Vegezzi & Rafael Abboud

Faculty: Jochen Scheerer