AWARD YEAR
2023
CATEGORY
Community
GOALS
No Poverty
KEYWORDS
Energy Poverty, Energy Efficiency, sustainable cities, Low Impact, creating green vertical spaces
COUNTRY
Italy
DESIGNED BY
Ece Nur Temel, Lorenzo Longieri, Mirjam Höchst, Iwana Raydan, Yanqianfang Sun, Zhiben Zheng.
WEBSITE
https://www.uncertaintimes.polimi.it/energia-2023/
Brease
Brease is a modular vertical garden for building facades. Saves energy through insulation & shading.
How does it work?
Brease offers an innovative solution for improving the energy efficiency of buildings. Its vertical greenery shading systems are made of ceramic modules that can be easily mounted on the wall with a metal structure.
The shading panels prevent direct sunlight from entering the house, while also allowing cool air to enter through the balcony and windows. Additionally, the panels become a vertical garden over time with the help of climbing plants, contributing to the shading and cooling of the surrounding air.
The use of clay as the main material for the modules is relatively low-impact, and waste clay bricks can be recycled into grain particle sizes and used as sand replacement in concrete, reintroducing waste products into the construction industrial chain.
Brease's technical and organizational solutions are designed to be highly adaptable to local contexts, ensuring its replication and accelerating the Italian house system transition to greener.
Why is it needed?
By 2030, the global temperature will exceed the warning threshold of 1.5ºC in comparison with the pre-industrial era. Heat waves will become recurrent in the Mediterranean area, specially in southern Italy.
In 10 years the Italian society will become aged, environmentally conscious, and digitized. Italians from many urban areas will not be able to leave their homes during the summer days. Staying at home will raise the domestic energy consumption of Italian families, and many households will be forced to adopt solutions that do not utilize energy powered sources to ensure their domestic thermal comfort.
In this scenario, the building sector will transform as the EU collaborates to achieve the goal of being climate-neutral by 2050. Building renovation is strategic because it will reduce energy costs and urban heat island effects and indirectly change energy usage habits. Home renovation will be a way to combat energy poverty by improving the energy efficiency of dwellings.
How does it improve life?
We envision a product-service that accelerates the Italian house system transition to greener, which will help Europe to achieve the goal of climate neutrality by 2050.
Our goal is to offer a system to deploy faster house energy efficiency, by offering an affordable solution to reduce the consumption of powered devices for domestic thermal comfort especially in hot urban areas.
The intensification of energy poverty due to global warming is a problem that will affect most nations and we want to ensure that our innovation can assist diverse contexts around the globe, not only in the Mediterranean area. We believe that collaborating with local agents and benefiting local systems has a great potential for escalation, in order to impact communities beyond the individual sphere.