A community project in Highland Perthshire has won a top eco award.
The significance of the success of the Big Shed at Tombreck, Lawers, in capturing the award is underlined by the other major winner, the Scottish National Portrait Gallery in Edinburgh.
The Perthshire entry won the new-build category in the Low Carbon Buildings Awards 2013, while the Edinburgh gallery triumphed in the refurbished section of the awards.
“A low-key community hall in Perthshire and a nationally-significant institution in the heart of the capital couldn’t be further apart in terms of budget, function and setting, but what they share is a unifying embrace of low carbon principles as the foundation of successful design,” said John Glenday, editor of architecture magazine Urban Realm, which runs the awards with Carbon Trust Scotland.
“Sustainability as a word trips off the tongue with ready ease, but in practice it can be a far more nebulous term to quantify.
“The Low Carbon Building Awards are the perfect prism though which to view these concepts by drawing together the best exemplars the country has to offer.
“In life, as in architecture, true beauty isn’t faade deep, it reaches down into the guts of schemes such as the Big Shed and Scottish Natural Portrait Gallery, both of which have embraced sustainable principles early on in the design process to enormous effect.”
The Big Shed was submitted by ea ecological architecture, who said: “The choice of local materials and others with a very low energy content in their manufacture and processing (low embodied energy), resulted in a building with a low carbon impact.
“We are very pleased that this, together with high levels of insulation, the use of renewable energy technologies, and the way in which the community was involved in its construction, has merited the Carbon Trust award.”
Paul Wedgwood, manager of Carbon Trust Scotland, said: “Once again, the judging panel was greatly impressed across all the 2013 entries with the effort and energy-efficient processes that had been put in place.”