Blanketed in vegetation and energy-harvesting PV panels, the E+ Green Home doesn’t just get an E for effort – it deserves to be on the honor roll of sustainable design. Seen in Dwell Magazine’s April issue, the home, which is located about an hour outside of Seoul, looks almost unreal, like the fantasy rendering of an eco-obsessed architecture student. But the residence, a collaboration between Kolon Engineering and Construction and Unsangdong Architects, is not only real – it’s a showcase of sustainable innovation and it may very well be the greenest home in South Korea.
Located in Kyeong-Gi, the E+ Green Home is a decidedly unique-looking home which also behaves differently from most homes in South Korea. The house, which almost resembles a hill due to a large portion of its surface being covered in green roofs and vertical gardens, is a prototype built by Kolon and Unsangdong. The hope is that South Koreans, who’ve been growing increasingly less satisfied with concrete-clad apartments, will take a shine to the model home and decide they would like to live in a similar dwelling.
Though it’s certainly attractive, the E+’s walls are much more than a pretty facade. The solar panels, vegetated walls and other green technologies within allow the house to use just 27% of the energy that an average Korean home uses, and it also generates 38% of the energy used by the average Korean home. If those numbers don’t sound impressive to you, the house even lives up to super stringent German Passive House standards.
For now the E+, which is sited on the grounds of Kolon’s headquarters, doesn’t have actual residents but those who want to get a feel for what it might be like to live in it can book overnight stays. The hope is that the E+ will be the first of many similar green houses that Kolon plants to build across the country.
+ Kolon Engineering and Construction
+ Unsangdong Architects
Via Dwell
