This season's image/house of the month is the exemplary low-energy house in Sisimiut, Greenland built by the Knud Rasmussen Foundation of Denmark. This building is a million dollar building designed to be an example, with an internal display of energy efficient features, some of which are shown in the subsidiary photos at the House of the Month portion of our website. The house will be occupied by a family from the craft school at Sisimiut where young craft laborers are trained to build houses of this sort.

The exterior sheathing is redwood. Some of the interior photos show the very effective use of daylighting. The house is partly solar heated and partly supplied with solar hot water by a solar collector located directly southfacing at about a 45o tilt. Between the two sections of the house, one section being the inhabited portion by the family of the director of the craft school and the other portion being the display area of the energy-efficient building technologies is the solar collector.

The house has upto 30 cm (12 inches) of fiberglass batts in the walls, and is extremely durable construction. The location of Sisimiut is about 70 miles north of the Arctic Circle on the west coast of Greenland facing the Davis Straight.