#raft foundation Dublin

[squaredspaceie]

Get Insulated Raft Foundation In Cork For Passive House Development

Passive House or Passivhaus is a fresh approach towards energy-efficient building design and construction. The concept was pioneered by the German physicist, Dr Wolfgang Feist and Swedish structural engineer Bo Adamson. The first passive house was built in Ireland back in 2004, by architect Tomas O'Leary, he named his house, Out of the Blue. Today, there are nearly 50 such Passivhaus buildings registered in Ireland, according to the Passive House Association of Ireland, which is an organisation dedicated to promote, educate and facilitate such buildings in the country. Thanks to such efforts, there is a growing demand for raft foundations in Cork, Dublin and other parts of Ireland, as more and more homeowners are warming up to the importance of having energy-efficient homes.  

Background Of The Passive House Concept

Fundamentally Passive House started off as an architectural framework to have reduced carbon footprint for buildings. But eventually, it has become more of a voluntary standard, accrediting the energy efficiency of a building. Now, one of the key aspects of a Passive House is its foundation. An insulated raft foundation is the best match.

Squared Space, an offsite constructor and structural engineer in Cork, extensively works with Kore Insulated Raft foundation systems which are among the top developers of insulated foundations for Passivhaus buildings.

How Is Insulated Raft Foundation Different From Traditional Foundation

When insulating a building, thermal bridging occurs in the gaps between the insulating and non-insulating materials, such as the junctions of the floor and the wall. Additional roof or wall insulation can increase the warmth, but it won’t fix the thermal bridging, which will eventually get colder, leading to considerate heat loss. So it is more important to get rid of the thermal bridges at the time of construction. This requirement is substantially filled up with Kore’s insulated foundation system, which is much in contrast with traditional raft foundations.

For developing insulated raft-type foundations, the concrete slab is poured into a tub of insulation and filled up. Thus the insulation is evenly spread directly touching the ground. The edges of this ‘tub’ of insulation are usually continuous with the wall insulation, and the method is generally more amenable to ensuring the foundations are thermal bridge-free.

KORE Floor EPS100 White, KORE Floor EPS200 White, and KORE Floor EPS300 White are the three KORE EPS components that make up the Insulated Foundation System. To limit the heat transmission of ground concrete floors, the technology provides an effective insulating layer. On top of the KORE Insulated Foundation System, an in situ concrete slab is laid.

According to Square Space, the design of the insulation systems varies based on the type of wall loadings. The company that has been a key player in developing diverse steel frame houses in Ireland, explains that the foundations designed for timber or steel frame construction would have both an inner and an outer ring beam. One beam would support the frame and the other for an exterior leaf of block or brick. Both variants would be thermally isolated from the floor slab.

Square Space has not only delivered this energy-efficient design in Cork but has worked with different building projects using insulated raft foundations in Dublin and other parts of Ireland. So the building standard is evidently a growing prospect which is here to stay in Ireland, for NZEb and Passive rated homes.

[rawringthroughthetwenties]

If you were mad about the white water rafting then you should know Dublin City Council are partnering with Hubbub and the Coca Cola Foundation to sponsor an installation to raise awareness of new recycling infrastructure to recycle bottles and cans in Dublin.

This partnership is grossly inappropriate as Coca Cola is one of the most environmentally destructive companies in history. Some of their actions include:

Selling nearly 3,500 environmentally-damaging single-use bottles every second, that’s over 100 billion a year, producing a total of 3 million tonnes of packaging per year.

Being named the worst company for plastic pollution for the second year running by Break Free From Plastic

The company strongly opposes attempts to introduce mechanisms such as container deposit legislation. In 2013, the company was criticised in Australia for undertaking litigation that led to the invalidation of a bottle recycling deposit. Greenpeace also claims that Coca-Cola has actively lobbied against recycling and deposit return schemes in several European countries, while at the same time maintaining a green marketing facade with vague promises and false-solutions such as sizeable donations to schemes that put the emphasis of anti-littering on the consumer, instead of the producer of the litter itself.

Using up all of the already limited of water resources in poor communities to feed its own plants, drying up farmers' wells and destroying local agriculture.They have been particularly destructive in poor communities in India and El Salvador Mexico.

In 2003 the independent Centre for Science and Environment tested Coca-Cola beverages and found levels of pesticides around 30 times higher than European Union standards. Levels of DDT, which is banned in agriculture in India, were nine times higher than the EU limit. 

Coca Cola is associated with anti-union activities. In Colombia, paramilitaries have killed eight Coca-Cola workers since 1990. The main Coca-Cola trade union Sinaltrainal is seeking to hold Coca-Cola liable for using paramilitaries to engage in anti-union violence.

Coca-Cola is being sued on behalf of transport workers and their families for its part in the alleged intimidation and torture of trade unionists and their families by special branch police in Turkey. 

In Nicaragua, workers of the main Coca-Cola union SUTEC have been denied the right to organise and the General Secretary of SUTEC, Daniel Reyes, believes the objective of this ongoing and escalating campaign is to crush the union.

Guatemalan workers have been struggling against Coca-Cola since the 1970s. In the years between 1976 and 1985, three general secretaries of the main union were assassinated and members of their families, friends and legal advisers were threatened, arrested, kidnapped, shot, tortured and forced into exile. The violations of workers' rights continue and Coca-Cola workers and their family members, with ties to unions, have reportedly been subjected to death threats. 

In countries such as Peru, Russia and Chile, Coca-Cola workers have been protesting against the company's anti-union policies. 

By partnering with Coca Cola in this campaign, Dublin City Council are complicit in the greenwashing of the coca cola brand, legitimising coca cola as an organisation which cares about environmental issues when this is nothing but a front to conceal the true depths of their destruction. The coca cola foundation according to its own website only commits to give back 1 percent of the company’s annual income anyways. They claim what that the key areas that they fund are:

Empowering women: economic empowerment and entrepreneurship

Protecting the environment: access to clean water, water conservation and recycling

Enhancing communities: Education, youth development and other community and civic initiatives

It is clear that these goals are entirely insincere and nothing but a marketing ploy to make themselves look better given how they directly contribute to these issues with their exploitative practices. It is disgusting that Dublin City Council would want anything to do with them, much less partner with them on an environmental campaign.

[recentnews18-blog]

New Post has been published on https://shovelnews.com/i-always-felt-like-i-was-the-funny-friend-of-girls-that-i-fancied-chris-odowd-reflects-his-teen-years/

'I always felt like I was the funny friend of girls that I fancied' - Chris O'Dowd reflects his teen years

Dawn O’Porter and Chris O’Dowd attend the SAG-AFTRA Foundation Patron of the Artists Awards 2017 at the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts on November 9, 2017 in Beverly Hills, California. (Photo by Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty Images for SAG-AFTRA Foundation ) Dawn O’Porter (L) and husband Chris O’Dowd attend the red carpet premiere of EPIX original series “Get Shorty” at Pacfic Design Center on August 10, 2017 in West Hollywood, California. (Photo by David Livingston/Getty Images) Presenter Dawn Porter and fiance Actor Chris O’Dowd attend Fashion Kicks in aid of Macmillan Cancer Support, Beechwood Cancer Care Centre Stockport and the Chefs Adopt a School Project at Lancashire County Cricket Club on May 1, 2012 in Manchester, England. (Photo by Shirlaine Forrest/WireImage) Actor Chris O’Dowd and wife Dawn Porter attend “The Sapphires” after party during the 2012 Toronto International Film Festival at The Brandt House on September 9, 2012 in Toronto, Canada. (Photo by Todd Oren/Getty Images for Weinstein) Chris O’Dowd and Dawn Porter attend the Elle Style Awards at The Savoy Hotel on February 11, 2013 in London, England. (Photo by Mike Marsland/WireImage) Chris O’Dowd attends the “Juliet, Naked” New York Premiere at Metrograph on August 14, 2018 in New York City. (Photo by Nicholas Hunt/Getty Images) Chris O’Dowd in Get Shorty Actors Chris O’Dowd, Rose Byrne and Ethan Hawke attend the “Juliet, Naked” New York Premiere at Metrograph on August 14, 2018 in New York City. (Photo by Nicholas Hunt/Getty Images) Chris O’Dowd with his wife Dawn O’Porter Chris O’Dowd and Dawn O’Porter attend the launch party for The Pool, a unique multi-media platform for busy women co-founded by renowned editor and journalist Sam Baker and broadcaster Lauren Laverne, on April 23, 2015 in London, England. www.the-pool.com (Photo by Samir Hussein/Getty Images for The Pool)

‘I always felt like I was the funny friend of girls that I fancied’ – Chris O’Dowd reflects his teen years

Independent.ie

Chris O’Dowd ambles into a café to meet me a week before he turns 39.

https://www.independent.ie/entertainment/movies/i-always-felt-like-i-was-the-funny-friend-of-girls-that-i-fancied-chris-odowd-reflects-his-teen-years-37518598.html

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Chris O’Dowd ambles into a café to meet me a week before he turns 39.

But by his own biological calendar, that birthday is long gone. In O’Dowd years, he’s already 52. “It’s like, ‘Am I not f**king 40 yet?’ I turned 39 when I was about 26. I feel like I’ve been very old for a very long time,” he says, squinting his close-set eyes. “I was the youngest and last kid [of five], left at home as my parents were breaking up. As a 15-year-old, I took on the behaviour of the man of the house. I was a child-man. That’s why I’ve played a lot of man-children.”

His overgrown boys have included tech slacker Roy Trenneman, his breakout role in Channel 4’s cult comedy The IT Crowd, record label jerk Ronnie in Judd Apatow’s This Is 40, and an assortment of oafs (not least a bad boyfriend in Girls). But since his turn in Bridesmaids in 2011, O’Dowd has become a regular in Apatow’s Hollywood gang of everymen. It was Apatow who suggested O’Dowd for the role of his latest emotionally stunted male: Duncan, a narcissistic music nerd in the film adaptation of Nick Hornby’s Juliet, Naked.

This is the first of two projects with Hornby. “I’m starting to feel like his muse,” he says chuckling, but he’s keen to dis-identify with the Hornby-esque male. “I don’t have the arrested development of his characters,” he insists. “I was brought up in a matriarchal household. My mother is a therapist, so we had mature conversations about behaviour and identity. Hornby characters believe, ‘You are what you like’. That’s increasingly part of the male psyche as we are clutching for an identity. We were told for centuries that our identity was tied up with machismo and now we are seeing that machismo has a lot of drawbacks.”

O’Dowd’s public image as the affable Irish slacker who merely stumbled into breaking America does not exactly tally with his dynamic CV. But he’s still conscious that “today’s cockerel is tomorrow’s feather duster”. On his writing desk at home in LA he keeps a photo of a “spit bucket” full of 30 half-masticated burgers for an ad he once did, to remind himself that his success is “not just a given”. He admits to suffering less from impostor syndrome than “an Irish inferiority complex. The British can be a bit snooty about Irish people, even now. They’ve seen the danger of the Irish that the Americans haven’t. Americans just see the Irish as jesters.”

It doesn’t bother him, he says, that he’s still seen as a comic actor despite a raft of dramas over the last five years. But some things do. In fact he can get quite riled, for starters, on the subject of Catholicism. In 2014, in John McDonagh’s Calvary, he played a wife-beating butcher wreaking vengeance on the church for being sexually abused by a priest as a boy. O’Dowd didn’t track down historical Irish victims for his research, he tells me, partly because he already knew so many. “They are not that uncommon. I know many people who priests have exposed themselves to.” He is a vehement atheist, and says the “small turn-out” for Pope Francis’s visit to Ireland in August is “the shape of things to come. For hundreds of years, the Catholic Church provided an identity for Ireland at a time that we were suppressed. The need is no longer there. So if they are going to keep f**king kids, they are in trouble.”

Dawn O’Porter (L) and husband Chris O’Dowd attend the red carpet premiere of EPIX original series “Get Shorty” at Pacfic Design Center on August 10, 2017 in West Hollywood, California. (Photo by David Livingston/Getty Images)

Read more: Review: Chris O’Dowd is pricelessly funny from start to finish in ‘Juliet, Naked’

The state of oratory is another one of his bugbears: he once wanted to be a political speechwriter. “Theresa May is such a terrible speaker. There’s so much verbosity and such a lack of creativity. Obviously in America, it’s become so juvenile. Taking ideology out of it, the conversation is dumbing because it’s so poor in its execution.” And Brexit: “Increasingly I’m like, ‘F**k the People. F**k you, if you didn’t get that they were lying to you’. It’s like a clown told me a story and I chose to believe it… It’s such a low ebb of human civilisation, a really dangerous time for Anglo-Irish relations. Boris Johnson wants a bridge to Ireland? What’s that going to solve?” Suddenly he stops, worried about moaning.

O’Dowd was born in Boyle, Co Roscommon, to Sean, a graphic designer, and psychotherapist Denise. He was left to the tyranny of his three sisters at 11, after his older brother left home. They amused themselves by painting make-up on their sleeping brother before sending him to school. As a survival mechanism O’Dowd developed a “big personality” in tandem with his fast-growing body. “I was 6ft tall by the time I was 11. I was a looming, towering figure of ridicule”. He played Gaelic football for the county. But, he says, he was never a “Jack the lad”.

By 13, he was already helping raise his 17-year-old sister’s baby. “I always felt like I was the funny friend of girls that I fancied. I found a position of comfort in that.”

By his own account, O’Dowd stumbled into acting after he accompanied a friend to an audition at University College Dublin, where he was studying politics and sociology. He paid his way through drama school with hod-carrying: “It was a very odd time: I’d get up at 5am to work on a building site, then go to a flamenco f**king class.”

There followed breaks in theatre, Vera Drake (2004) and a three-year stint on Irish drama The Clinic. But it was his role in The Festival in 2005 that brought him to the attention of Graham Linehan, who was casting for The IT Crowd.

Since the series began in 2006, the image of “techies” has gone from basement to virtual rock stars. “Our perception of what IT guys are has changed from Bill Gates to Elon Musk.” He’s not entirely sorry that Musk and Mark Zuckerberg have been “getting their comeuppance” recently. “I just think that it’s odd that people who seem so socially stunted have got so much control over our lives.” In 2009 he took a one-way ticket to Los Angeles, where he stumbled upon the “naturalistic” comedy creator Judd Apatow backstage at a Louis CK gig. “I said, ‘F**k me, that’s Judd Apatow. I think he’s the reason I came over here.”

Read more: Dawn O’Porter says she was too proud to come home after her US series was dropped

Chris O’Dowd in Get Shorty

The other life-altering encounter in Los Angeles was with Scottish TV presenter and writer Dawn Porter; she changed her name to O’Porter when they married in 2012. There were only brief bachelor days before then, with co-star Jason Segel as his wingman. They once tried to pull the same girl with “verbatim the same text. It said, ‘Why don’t you swing over and we’ll pop open a bottle of vino on the deck’. We’d been hanging out and drinking a lot, so we must have started sharing a vernacular.”

Segel is godfather to O’Dowd’s first son Art, three, brother of one-year-old Valentine, and is a regular at the O’Porter’s weekly Sunday roasts for 20 in West Hollywood. O’Dowd has little tolerance for British cliches about LA. “People think that everyone in LA lives in Beverly Hills and has surgery. It’s the same as when Americans talk about the British as if everybody knows the Queen.”

He’s currently in pre-production for Hornby’s State of the Union, a TV series co-starring Rosamund Pike, following a couple in marriage counselling.

He was reminded of the salad days of his own marriage while unpacking boxes at their new London home. “We found some tea towels printed with a picture of us dressed as bridezillas for Halloween, and Paul Newman’s saying, ‘Keep the arguments clean and the sex dirty’. Now everything else is dirty.” Perhaps, despite two kids, Hollywood stardom and twinkling charm, O’Dowd is discovering you can’t have everything.

Juliet, Naked is currently showing

Chris O’Dowd attends the 2017 Tribeca Film Festival After Party For Love After Love At Up And Down at Up&Down on April 22, 2017 in New York City. (Photo by Nicholas Hunt/Getty Images for 2017 Tribeca Film Festival)

Indo Review

Source: https://www.independent.ie/entertainment/movies/i-always-felt-like-i-was-the-funny-friend-of-girls-that-i-fancied-chris-odowd-reflects-his-teen-years-37518598.html