Living In The Award Winning Greenest Building Of Ireland
The residence of Roebuck Castle I lived in at UCD was absolutely stunning! My room had marble counter tops, LED lighting, a beautiful real wood desk and that is just the start. Roebuck Castle was named after the historic castle on the plot it was built on was only one year old when I moved in but the most important thing to us GRS’ers was it was highly praised with numerous awards because it was the “Greenest Building” in all of Ireland! I did not even know this prior to moving in and was delighted to hear this during my first week. Each apartment was comprised of 12 individual bedrooms; each with their own full bathroom and fridge, there was also a massive kitchen, a TV room and a study room in each apartment. The kitchen was nice but as a breakfast and dinner was included each day it was not really hugely important. Continuing with the green theme the meals were served on the main floor of the building in our private restaurant. Since there were only 132 people in the building the chef who was stolen from a high end restaurant made everything with local and organic ingredients and the menu changed daily with a choice of two appetizers, three entries and two desserts. For the greenness of the building, the toilet water was collected from rain water and the showers so it was recycled, the heat for the building was entirely done by the solar panels covering the roof which was also planted with green plants to help the insulation. Also to add with the insulation in the rooms, all doors and windows were air tight so that the warm air could not escape. The stove was induction and would boil water in 20 seconds saving power and every single outlet and the stove itself had a little tiny light switch beside it which turned on the power to the outlet so that way even when something was not plugged in the outlet was not drawing power off of the grid. All of the windows were thermal and also drew heat into the rooms and there was an air circulation and purification system in every single room. Everything was well planned and stunning. It was also the worst building I have ever lived in.
Where should I start with what was wrong with it? How about the fact that the plumber for the building told me that the building was based on award winning green apartment buildings from Spain and Greece however, no one took into account the massive climate difference between Ireland and the Mediterranean and the fact that students would be residing and not people that work from 9-5. As a result the heating system could not possibly cope and I was freezing the entire time and everyone was always sick. One girl had a room so cold the building engineers were repeatedly in there trying to figure out what was wrong and she ended up getting pneumonia. The heating system was designed to only product heat for three hours in a twelve hour period which in Ireland in the winter was insane. They figured that all students would go to bed at 10 pm so that is when the furnaces for the entire building shut down! They also did not stop to think that not everyone would have class starting at 9am so the hot water for the shower system was only programmed to run from 7am-9am. Due to this everyone rushed to have a hot shower at this time and maybe 70% of the time did I have hot water in my showers. Likewise I never understood why on earth when I had people over the rooms got so hot or why we all became so sleepy after a little while. I found out in November when I was at a Q&A with the building designers that since our apartments were airtight (unless we opened a door or window) and they figured we would be the only ones in our rooms. Therefore, the exhaust and ventilation system was only designed to handle the carbon dioxide produced by one person and when I would have three of four people in my room to watch a movie or multiple people in the kitchen for a party we were essentially poisoning ourselves. So basically I was in the greenest building in Ireland which was brand new and I was also freezing the entire time, I didn’t know if I was going to get a hot shower in the morning and if I had company over we were poisoning ourselves simply by breathing. So the question is, is greener really better?
You can read more about Roebuck Castle below
http://www.archdaily.com/187581/roebuck-castle-student-residence-ucd-kavanagh-tuite-architects/