The Circular Off-site Challenge for social housing

Together with Bast, Inhout and Furnibo, we enter the Circular Off-site Challenge of social housing company Dimensa to design and build three circular homes in Zulte.

Advice sustainable & circular building| Innovation & Research| Architecture

Architect: Bast i.c.w. Bureau Bouwtechniek
Partners: Inhout, Furnibo
Client: Social housing company Dimensa
Status: Design phase

The Circular Off-site Challenge is a tender that aims to provide ample opportunities for circular solutions with off-site manufacturing in social housing projects.

Three circular construction methods

The starting point is to build each of the three dwellings in question in a different off-site way:

timber frame construction

a post-and-beam method of choice

timber massif construction

Opportunities

Dimensa sees this project as an opportunity to learn what opportunities and challenges circular construction and off-site construction present in social housing in general and in the realisation of its future patrimony in particular.

It explicitly allows innovative systems and techniques in the tender, challenging the market.

Forward-looking

Besides speed of realisation or construction cost, the following criteria also played a role:

embodied carbon: the tenderer with a project with the lowest embodied carbon will obtain the most number of points on this criterion. It is probably the first time in Belgium that the embodied carbon of the building is a criterion in the awarding process;
environmental impact: it is groundbreaking that an environmental impact calculation according to TOTEM is requested for a number of main building components. And that these are quoted on. The tenderer who does 20% or 40% better than the business-as-usual solution for floors, intermediate floors, roofs, walls ... scores a corresponding number of points on this criterion;
more tolerance on construction costs and attention to maintenance costs. Innovative solutions are often stifled by overly tight budgets. That is why Dimensa is significantly raising the usual price ceiling - the so-called FS3-tables of Wonen In Vlaanderen - and will also put no more than 30% of the points on the construction cost. Maintenance costs will also receive attention.

Monitoring and knowledge dissemination

Dimensa wants to learn and will therefore - in a separate tender procedure - have the three different building methods monitored in terms of comfort (temperature, humidity, overheating), energy consumption, acoustics, rainwater consumption ...

The housing company will share the learning lessons with the widest possible audience. This will be done on a European scale, through the European Federation for Living or EFL network