Duncan Baker-Brown is proving wrong the old adage that putting rubbish in means getting rubbish out.

At the end of April, the architect will start work on the construction of an environmentally benign house on the Grand Parade campus of the University of Brighton.

“We’re talking to large local builders who are kindly offering to donate what used to be called waste but is now called resource,” he says.

The house is a replica of The House That Kevin Built, the UK’s first pre-fabricated house made entirely from replenishable, organic materials, created by television presenter Kevin McCloud at the ExCel Centre in London for Grand Designs Live in 2008. The house was also the country’s first A+ rated house, meaning the lowest possible environmental impact, as judged by the Building Research Establishment (BRE). It took six days to build and during its two-day lifespan had 4,000 visitors.

“It was mayhem,” says Duncan, who was involved in the project. “It was an amazing one-off experience. We designed the house in a week, were in production for two months and built in less than a week.”

At the time, Duncan wanted to dismantle the house and bring it down to Brighton but plans were already afoot to move it to an innovation park owned by BRE near Watford.

“I wasn’t keen for it to go there,” says Duncan. “I thought it would be great to have it here to play around with and take measurements from. It would be perfect for Brighton, we’ve got a heritage of this kind of thing, there are so many networks here to buy into this stuff.”

All did not go to plan, however, and the top half of the house ended up being turned into compost and the bottom half was shipped to the University of Bath.

Duncan began planning ways to reproduce the project on the University of Brighton campus. He was granted planning approval from Brighton and Hove City Council last autumn, the university gladly donated the land, and he is currently in the process of raising the funds necessary to complete the build. Kevin McCloud is expected to visit in order to break the ground when construction begins.

Duncan says: “It’s taken so long to get it to Brighton for one reason or another so we’re going to be starting again really. Technology has moved on since then so it’s an opportunity for us to do it a different way.”

The build schedule has been significantly slowed, doing it over a period of three or four months rather than six days. Schoolchildren and students will be involved and architecture students from the university will be designing a new structure.

Building firm The Mears Group has donated manpower and will be putting in all the ground work such as drainage and damp proofing. The house will be built using engineered timber frames stuffed with straw bales for insulation and finished with lime render. A solar roof will have a number of different designs, allowing panels to be easily clipped and unclipped, adjusting the amount of hot water or photovoltaic panels depending on different uses for the building.

When complete, the whole thing will be monitored and measured by both BRE and students at the university, giving vital data on low-carbon living to help meet the Government target of building nothing but zero-carbon homes by 2016.

Visit arts.brighton.ac.uk/thtkb for more information.