SITING
ADRÉRE AMELLAL
Siwa, Egypt
The sustainable thinking behind this lodge may be as
ancient as the 12,000-year-old desert community where it’s
located. To build it, the hotel’s founder, Mounir Neamatalla,
restored and extended century-old homes using the traditional building material kershef—a mixture of rock salt and
mud—which he studied under the guidance of the region’s
oldest master builders. A natural insulator, kershef keeps
the hotel’s 40 rooms at moderate temperatures during hot
desert days and cool nights. The lodge is tucked discreetly into Siwa’s mountain base, Neamatalla says, “properly
nested in a way that allows it to blend in with the mountain rather than detract from the beauty of the landscape.”
It conserves arable land and draws off a nearby spring
that supplies the water for the lodge as well as irrigating
the surrounding palm and olive groves. Neamatalla has
capitalized on all the benefits of Adrére’s siting, particularly with respect to recycling the hotel’s waste back into
the complex oasis ecology. “Wastewater is first settled in
sedimentation tanks,” he says, “allowing the supernatant
to flow through perforated pipes into a sealed wetland,
where indigenous papyrus plants are grown to complete the
biodegradation process.” Because of their long subsistence
in the desert, Siwans may be some of the world’s oldest
sustainable designers—a fact not lost on Neamatalla, who
says the lodge connects “the rich past of the oasis with an
experience of living happily, without consuming much.”
—Marya Spence
Local Siwan craftsmen help run
the lodge (above) and also contributed to the design of its traditional interior elements. Left:
The ceilings are made of palm
beams; and the doors, windows,
and fixtures are crafted locally
from olive-tree trimmings. Oil
lamps and candles illuminate
the rooms at night.
ENERGY
PROXIMITY HOTEL
Greensboro, North Carolina
During construction, the hotel sourced 40 percent of materials
locally, recycled 87 percent of construction debris, and restored
700 feet of a stream bordering the hotel restaurant.
Proximity is one of the greenest hotels in the country, incorporating more than 70 sustainable practices. Although certification is still pending, the hotel’s developer and CEO,
Dennis Quaintance, is confident that the 147-room building will achieve LEED Platinum
after less than a year of operation. “We currently have 54 points, and it takes 52 to make
Platinum,” he says. The U.S. Green Building Council’s Marc Heisterkamp calls the hotel’s
green strategies “intelligently thought through.” Combining geothermal and solar-energy
technology, Proximity uses 41 percent less energy and 33 percent less water than conventional hotels of a comparable size. One hundred solar panels line 4,000 square feet of the
roof, providing an expected 60 percent of annual hot-water needs for the hotel and restaurant (or enough for 100 homes). The restaurant’s refrigeration system draws from geothermal
wells. Guest rooms feature units that recover energy from the air the hotel exhausts, heating
or cooling it by as much as 15 degrees and thus minimizing the load on the HVAC system.
But the most innovative eco-feature is probably Proximity’s regenerative elevators: compact, gearless machines with a special drive system that captures energy normally released
during braking. After feeding those forces back into the building’s grid, the energy usage
is reduced by up to 50 percent when compared with typical elevators. Proximity’s are the
first of their kind to be installed in the United States. —Marya Spence
Top photo, Cyril le Tourneur d’Ison; center photo, TuAnh Nguyen;
bottom photo, Mark File/courtesy Proximity Hotel
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