The Israeli Architects and Town Planners Association awarded its inaugural architecture award in the category of green building to Ron Rozen and Itai Linenberg of Linenberg Rozen Architects for their design of the American Associates Village in Sede Boqer. The awards were announced recently at the first Festival of Israeli Architecture in Tel Aviv.
At the inauguration of the latest stage in 2015, Ron Rozen explained that the design of the housing complex is based on two underlying principles adapting to Sede Boqer's specific desert climate condition. Six drainage basin gardens will be irrigated from the run-off of the village, while the specially designed windows make use of passive heating to heat and cool the buildings. By creating semi-private internal courtyards, they hope to encourage an atmosphere that fosters communal life, he added.
Prof. Isaac Meir, an architect and sustainable building researcher at BGU in Sede Boqer, who conducted a study of the AABGU Village with his students commented, “The new student dormitories incorporate a number of environmental principles, including “sun rights" (accessibility to sunlight in winter) for most of the units, solar passive heating elements, the potential to ventilate the units on summer nights that obviates most of the need for air conditioning, and of course thermal insulation and thermal mass. The surrounding land also blends in with the desert landscape and therefore lowers the buildings' profiles."
