The Future Of High-tech Housing- Popular Science Magazine features a Swedish housing complex that is ecologically sound and wired.

It Takes Tech to Tango

Way past Ikea lies a Swedish housing complex that is ecologically sound and wired for all sorts of remote-control fiddling with heat, power and security.

by Raul Barreneche Popular Science

Peter Söderholm pays two or three times the market rate for the 850-square-foot apartment he and his wife moved into last year in the Swedish city of Malmö, an apartment about half the size of their previous home. That’s quite a premium for a unit located on a contaminated former Saab factory site, even if it sits by the sea and on a clear day offers a view of the Danish coast 10 miles away. But Söderholm and his wife, Gunvor, are happy to pay: They live in Tango, a green-and-wired 27-unit complex that decontaminates its own soil, recycles its water into a rebuilt marsh ecology, generates power from renewable sources, uses roof space to put oxygen back into the environment and, through sensors and broadband Web access, allows owners to re-motely monitor and control everything from energy use to electronic key access. Söderholm can sit on his balcony, survey the Øresund like a sea captain, and know that he lives in a showcase for the convergence of home technologies that, piece by piece, are popping up in developments in Europe and the United States. Tango won an important building-of-the-year award in Sweden last year and in January won an American Institute of Architects award for its progressive integration of technology, sustainability and lifestyle-focused design.

"We put our money into where we live; that’s our priority," says Söderholm. "This green aspect was very important to us because for many years we’ve felt that we’re all wasting our natural re-sources. I think you can have a good standard of living and use energy responsibly. You don’t have to feel bad about living well."

Tango isn’t a technology showcase by accident: It was built for the BoO1 exhibition, one of a series of Swedish housing fairs, held in Malmö in 2001. Along with the residential units, BoO1 also featured offices, cafés, day care centers, a school and a library. Söderholm says that walking through it was a bit like wandering through a world’s fair, except that people were already inhabiting the pavilions—including the Söderholms. "During the fair, I was out on my balcony a lot," says Söderholm, "wanting to throw bananas at people."

European firms developed most of the architecture on display, except for Tango, which was designed by Moore Ruble Yudell Architects & Planners of Santa Monica, California. The company worked locally with FFNS Architects, a Swedish firm. MRY, known more for its cheerful, postmodernist approach to residential architecture than its tech focus, created an appealing, bright, courtyard-facing design whose units include floor-to-ceiling glass doors and windows framed in a rainbow of colors. But, says MRY senior associate and Tango project architect James O’Connor, "from the start, we wanted ours to be the most technologically advanced project at the fair."

Tango began with a brownfield site, the term applied to abandoned, usually polluted former industrial lands. Brownfield redevelopment often deploys barrier, venting and cleaning technologies to deal with soil and water contaminants, site instability and subterranean gas buildups. In this case, much soil was removed, and the landscape was replanted with species that extract pollutants—often heavy metals—from the soil, and others that immobilize them. (Some, like river birch, are metal accumulators that act like wicks, drawing metals into their trunks; grasses, meanwhile, trap compounds in their roots.) The site topography was shaped and planted to mimic, on the development’s east side, the marshy ecology of the sound, with vegetation fed by recycled rainwater. Grass planted on the roofs provides a layer of overhead insulation, slows flooding during heavy rains, and pumps oxygen into the atmosphere. Construction methods and materials hewed to ecological building standards that Malmö had set for the district.

The most striking part of Tango’s design is the floor-to-ceiling windows of the courtyard-facing units: superb for brightening a room during a gloomy Swedish day, but a potential energy sink during winter nights. Triple-glazed windows with a layer of inert argon gas between the two outermost panes keep the heat in: Their R-value (a measure of thermal conductivity) is about 6.5, compared with 1.5 to 2 for typical American double-paned glass. The units were tightly built, with wall-mounted ventilators to draw in fresh air and keep the rooms from getting stale or stuffy.

Vacuum-tube solar collectors on the rooftops convert sunlight into heat for the units; a nearby wind turbine, meanwhile, supplies electricity.

From the start, the plan was to optimize efficiency by taking advantage of information technology. Tango apartments are supplied with laptops that connect to the developer’s broadband network; through a portal called Frontyard, residents can access myriad monitoring and control systems. Söderholm admits that there was a learning curve for what he calls "the cockpit."

Frontyard allows owners to access a security camera to see who’s at the front door, book a guest apartment in the development, and scan an electronic weather station that displays actual and forecast temperatures and wind conditions. Electronic keys can be set to admit visitors during scheduled times— a housekeeper, an overnight guest or repairman. There’s an electronic bulletin board and a choice of how tenants can be notified—e-mail, text message, fax or voice mail—if the burglar or fire alarm is activated. These are the basics. But Frontyard also allows the Söderholms to turn lights on and off while away from home or to preprogram lighting schemes; set temperatures for every room and change them remotely (saving power if they’re delayed); or preheat a room for a late-night return. An alarm lets them know if the temperature is off-target. Windows can be opened and closed electronically. The guiding notion: An energy-aware user is a more efficient user.

None of Tango’s features are in themselves revolutionary, but together they represent a benchmark. "It’s the thoroughness of the application," says John Ruble, a principal designer at MRY. "Our building is a mix of highly ambitious sustainable measures—the green roofs, the energy-efficient glass—plus the electronics and information technology. We went very far with these things, but it’s still experimental. There’s a lot of stuff that needs to be studied."

Experiments are under way in the United States. A 44-unit single-room-occupancy housing project in downtown Santa Monica generates power via giant photovoltaic panels on its exterior walls and a cogeneration system that turns natural gas into electricity. Coffee Creek, a 640-acre mixed-use development in northwestern Indiana, is being built from ecologically friendly materials and will feature photovoltaics and wind-generated electricity.

Progress is slow—a lot slower than it would be, say, if energy prices in the United States were as high as those in Sweden. "Not very many architects are doing this kind of housing," says MRY’s O’Connor. "It’s very new and groundbreaking in a lot of ways."

Trained as an architect, Raul Barreneche is a contributing editor at Architectural Record and Travel & Leisure. His book Tropical Modern will be published by Rizzoli/Universe this fall.

http://www.popsci.com/popsci/hometech/article/0,12543,448268,00.html