ILC ECO Centre

Ken Down Architects has a long agreeable history with Immanuel Lutheran College. ILC’s most recent project, the ECO Centre, will start construction in December 2017.

The ECO Centre is the school’s newest teaching facility. Tucked up against the rainforest it will be built to touch the ground lightly preserving the root bases of existing trees. The open connections and vistas to the rainforest will suffuse students with an appreciation of environmental sustainability and ecological sensitivity.

The most exciting aspect of this project was researching and understanding different ECO products and the strategies and challenges of implementing them into the design, with a goal of a passive net zero building.

The foyer will include a real-time display that showcases the water collection and usage as well as solar collection and power usage. These realtime tools give students a fun interactive way to observe how the building preforms.

The doors to the ECO Centre are expected to open in the middle of 2018.