PIXEL BUILDING, CARLTON

Melbourne’s Pixel Building is the first carbon-neutral office building in Australia and has set an impressive environmental benchmark by achieving the highest ever Green Star score awarded by the Green Building Council of Australia. Melbourne company Grocon’s ambitious project achieved a perfect score of 100 points under the Green Star rating system for building design, with 75 points being the benchmark for a 6 Star, Green Star rating. LEED is the environmental rating tool of the United States Green Building Council. Pixel has achieved a Platinum score under this rating system.

Situated on 205 Queensberry Street, Carlton, the Pixel Building has renewable energy sources on the site that are generating all of the energy that Pixel requires to run, plus surplus energy to be fed back into the grid to offset all of the energy that was used and the carbon that was generated in the manufacture of the materials and equipment that enabled Pixel to be built. Pixel has also been designed to be water balanced. This means that on the basis that Melbourne returns to the 10-year rainfall average 1999-2009, Pixel could be disconnected from the mains supply and would be self-sufficient for water supply.

The building features Pixelcrete – a type of concrete which halves the embodied carbon in the mix – as well as wind turbines invented in Bendigo, a Melbourne University designed ‘living roof’ which re-introduces Victorian grassland species to the Melbourne area, and tracking photovoltaic roof panels. The sun shade system on the exterior of the building provides the maximum amount of daylight into the office space, protecting it from glare and heat in the summer, while smart window technology ensures windows will open automatically on cool nights to enable air flow into the building.

This post is part of the Skywatch Friday meme.