Green Building
Learn more about how changing our approach to housing can help us reduce carbon dioxide emissions and help us tackle climate change.
Wander around and check out some of our interactive displays to learn more about the changes that you can make to help increase energy efficiency and reduce the environmental impact of your home.
Build Better
Learn more about how we can design and build more energy-efficient homes. We have displays on renewable, biodegradable building materials, the different techniques that you can use, and advice on how we can use the sun to passively heat our home.
Retrofitting and Heating
We don’t always need to start anew. There are loads of changes we can make to our existing homes to make our homes more energy efficient and more comfortable to live in.
Ask at the visitors centre and learn more about insulating your home, or check out some of the more energy-efficient, environmentally friendly options available for heating your home and water, from biomass burners, heat pumps to direct solar heating.
The Buildings of CAT
On site, we have some stylish and comfortable examples of buildings designed and built in an environmentally friendly way.
When CAT was founded, there were many old stone buildings left over from when the site was a slate quarry. Many were in a poor state of repair and needed to be rebuilt using local slate.
As CAT expanded, these buildings weren’t enough to fulfil our needs. As a result, we decided to use this as an opportunity to experiment with various environmentally friendly building techniques and to look at how we could design more energy-efficient homes and buildings.
Types of Buildings
Over the years at CAT, we’ve experimented with using a wide variety of building techniques and materials. Where possible, we have built using locally sourced materials, while also using materials that are readily available across the country so that others could learn from our experiments.
From the Walter Segal Home, designed to enable those without much experience to build a home, to the Straw Bale Theatre, to various rammed earth buildings, to the impressive and award-winning WISE building, the buildings of CAT are well worth a look.
