Zerofootprint Building Re-Skinning Competition

The largest emission of greenhouse gases in our cities comes from the operation of our buildings - commercial and residential. For example in New York it's 79%, London 52%, Hong Kong 72% and Toronto 63%. Add to this list Beijing, Rome, Madrid, Los Angeles, Mumbai and Paris and the average is likely to be between 60% and 80%.

Any solution to climate change must include innovations to the built space in our cities. Rebuilding is not an option and traditional retrofitting is inadequate and invasive. There is another option - re-skinning. Usually necessary because a thermal barrier needs to be created to gain any significant energy efficiency, re-skinning has many other advantages such as:

• It can be used to hide a cost-effective retrofit;
• It is potentially non-invasive;
• It can turn a dull building into a handsome green role model;
• It can be used to reduce energy consumption by as much as 70%

Skinning isn't new, but it has never been done on the scale required to address climate change. To change that, Discovery 09 will host the world launch of the Zerofootprint Building Re-Skinning Competition on May 12, 2009.

The goal will be to develop a methodology that meets five criteria: a "smart", reproducible, aesthetically pleasing, cost-effective, energy-efficient solution for the re-skinning of buildings. Zerofootprint has assembled a distinguished group of architects, designers and engineers to guide the competition.

The Z-Prize

Multidisciplinary teams made up of architects, engineers, and environmental scientists from anywhere in the world are encouraged to enter this competition. The top five entries, as selected by the jury, will receive a cash prize from Zerofootprint, and will then execute their planned retrofits. These buildings' energy consumption will be monitored for a period of three years, and their performance will be displayed online to demonstrate the effectiveness of retrofitting. The project displaying the greatest energy savings over the course of the competition will receive the Z-Prize, the year's largest architectural award. After the winner has been selected, a traveling exhibition of the most innovative ideas from the winning design and other finalists will tour large urban centres around the world in need of large-scale re-skinning initiatives.

Competition Timeline

• May 11-12, 2009: Competition launches at the Ontario Centres for Excellence's Discovery 09 Event
• September 1, 2009: Deadline for submission of designs
• September 30, 2009: Judging completed; five finalists selected
• March 31, 2011: Finalist project construction completed; energy monitoring and reporting begins (Monitoring on projects completed before this date will not begin until March 31st)
• March 31, 2014: Energy monitoring completed; Z-Prize winner announced.

For more information, visit http://communities.zerofootprint.net/building-re-skinning-comp