Green catastrophe?
Help me out here.
Will this be the ugliest and most ridiculous building in Britain? Or an exciting, world-leading innovation? 
The new UEA Enterprise Centre, part of Norwich Research Park, but situated in the UEA grounds, will be roofed and clad with pallets of straw.
Dr John French, project director and chief executive of the Adapt Low Carbon Group, who is overseeing the scheme said: “This is going to be the greenest building in Britain. When you come down the University Drive you will see this new ‘gateway’ building which is going to be quite stunning. It’s an important part of the UEA architecture – post modern, but it’s softer. This is the first time we have moved away from concrete. Not only will it be low carbon, but it shows that you can use bio-based materials.”
Straw, before anyone had anything better, has certainly a long history of being used for roofing. Straw also has some accredited use in modern building, packed into crates and used as a (very) thick wall insulation. But is this thin layer of straw all over the outside of the building anything more than dubious decoration, an expensive gimmick, claimed as innovative design?
Of course there are more innovations in this building than the misjudged outside, but that outside seems to be a betrayal of serious intentions, or even knowledge, about green issues. It looks more like laughable, expensive, window dressing. Is this building not the equivalent of a straw-covered iPad?
A contemporary building with cute little thatched roofs on top. And cute little thatched walls all round. Yip. Thatched walls.
What will it be like when it is finished? The glossy artist’s impression (where you can’t actually see that the walls have a veneer of straw), below,
or one of the ugliest, most ridiculous buildings anywhere in the UK?
MORE STRAW:
UEA seems to have some misplaced affection for straw. They have supported this generally considered non-viable and polluting straw-burning power station in Norwich.
A power station about which UEA have made wildly exaggerated claims over the availability of straw, how many it would employ, the CO2 saved, the trains needed to bring the straw every week, the extremely low level of electricity actually generated, and, most striking of all, the high levels of pollution emitted from, and generated by other aspects, of this supposedly green project.
I’ll let this very good letter from the EDP finish for me.
