Wales Institute for Sustainable Education

The building was designed by architects Pat Borer and David Lea and inaugurated in June 2010. It contains a 200-seat lecture theatre, offices, teaching rooms and 24 en-suite bedrooms. WISE was designed to demonstrate the use of ecological building principles such as passive solar building design and heat recovery ventilation and uses building materials which have a low embodied energy. The main materials used in constructing the building were wood, hemp, lime and rammed earth. The external walls of the building are made from 500mm thick hempcrete, and the 7.2m high walls of the lecture theatre consist of 320t of rammed earth. A building management system is used to monitor a wide variety of…