Silver Award Winner in 2020 WAN Awards

WAN (World Architecture News Awards) announced the winners of this year's awards online on November 18-19. The work titled Zero House from Tianjin Tenio Architecture and Engineering Co.,Ltd won the Silver Award in the sustainable buildings. And Ren Jun, its chief architect, is a professor at the School of Architecture.

In accordance with China’s “Technical Standard for Nearly Zero Energy Building”, Zero House is the first one of this kind in the domestic market and has been accredited with a green material mark by CABEE (China Association of Building Energy Efficiency).

The goal of the house is to explore a low-cost assembled rural residential module with nearly zero energy.

The passive house is installed with color film photovoltaic as a climate buffer zone.

The central water courtyard delivers cool winds to the residential modules on the north side in summer.

The zero-carbon garden in the northwest corner is built with old bricks, tiles and other waste materials.

The timber-framed lobby connects the north living module and the south office unit.

The red brick with changing colors reflects the original style of the rural architecture.

The whole building is consisting of three systems---the transformed brick and wood structure, the newly light wood structure as well as the composite model.

The three modules, with the composite model completed in the factory, form a living unit with two bedrooms, two living rooms and two bathrooms.

The original timber frame system is remained and integrated as a part of display.

Zero House can merge into The Gleaners, a world-famous painting, without any violation in style.

The World Architecture News Award is one of the largest international architecture awards and has been successfully held for 11 years. With international leading experts as judges each year, the award has a very wide range of global coverage. (WAN magazine has an extensive readership worldwide, with more than 700,000 social media fans and over 800,000 readers. Its annual pages views reaches over 5 million, and 160,000-plus people around the world follow WAN’s events closely.) With such a sound evaluation system, it provides a fair competition platform for original designs.

The gold medal in the sustainable buildings goes to the 3XN-designed Olympic House, the new headquarters of the International Olympic Committee in Switzerland.

Pursuing environmentally sustainable development including eco-city, low-carbon community and green building, the working group with Professor Ren Jun as its core of Tenio is devoted itself into ultra-low or near-zero energy consumption building with green technology innovation and design methods, thus helping achieve the 2060 carbon neutral goal.

By Xu Kaiyuan from the School of Architecture

Editor: Eva Yin