Riverside Primary School is currently under construction with the aim of being the first Passivhaus Primary School in Scotland. The new school will replace the existing North Muirton and Balhousie schools to provide primary, nursery and ASN education for almost 600 pupils.

As with every ‘first’, this project provided an opportunity to challenge preconceived ideas on how a Passivhaus building of this scale could be constructed and offered the team the opportunity to ‘go back to the drawing board’.

Through innovative design and thoughtful structural detailing, we were able to successfully demonstrate that Scotland’s well established supply chain and construction methods could be used to deliver a Passivhaus building. This opening up of the supply chain allowed the main contractor to provide a financially feasible scheme whilst meeting the requirements to gain Passivhaus accreditation.

This project also demonstrated that the inclusion of Passivhaus principles does not mean you have to fundamentally change the way we design our structure.

It was important to establish the requirements from each member of the Design Team and adjust our detailing to suit the needs of the project. From there, we were able apply our problem-solving skills to the questions of cost, material & skills availability within the market. The solution we arrived at champions clever detailing in collaboration with the wider project team.

All in all we achieved a successful outcome by delivering Scotland’s first Passivhaus Primary School, and the first steel framed Passivhaus Primary School in Britain.

Finally, whilst there was no specific embodied carbon target set for this project, through our internal sustainability initiative ‘Green Goodson’, we embraced Riverside Primary School as an opportunity to assess the project using the IStructE carbon tool and to provide benchmarking for our future projects.