The first people who will live to see the end of the century have already been born: our children and grandchildren. The buildings we are considering constructing or refurbishing will remain standing many times over. What kind of future, with what kind of global warming by the end of the century, are we planning for?

So we are changing energy sources: fossil sources of energy are being swapped for renewables. The sooner we cite examples of successful conversion, the sooner others can take them up and modify them for themselves. And vice versa: the sooner we find examples worth emulating elsewhere, the more smoothly we can decarbonize our way of life (construction, building operation, mobility).

This congress is about encouraging examples. We are looking for the exclusively new & disruptive: products, processes, projects, tools.

Components

Renewable energy sources require a different building technology, including the associated infrastructure (which already segues into the topics of building structure and neighborhood). We are looking for reports of completed research and building projects with new concepts, or reports of long-term experiences with earlier pioneering projects that deal with a combination of components and technologies.

• Heat pumps & chillers
• Geothermal probes
• Anergy grids, and how they can be implemented (incrementally)
• Synergies with district heating and local heating grids
• Photovoltaics
• Solar collectors
• Low-temperature heat dissipation systems, activated components, with a focus on refurbishment
• Heat recovery & energy storage systems
• Water-saving systems

We are not looking for: product presentations.

Building structures

Only a refurbished building is a good place for new building technology. Good new buildings are meant to be included. Because heating and cooling demands must not only be met via renewable energy sources, they must above all decrease substantially. We are looking for reports of completed research and construction projects that shed light on this aspect yet also on the following aspects:

• Refurbishment = reconstruction = architectural task!
• Refurbishment = improved reconstruction = serial refurbishment and prefabrication (gladly also to be referred to as architectural task!)
• Use of building storage capacity for feed-in, “wind peak shaving” (also possible in refurbishment, useful?)
• Use of plots of land, surfaces, thermal storage masses, and interior spaces even of structures that are not buildings, for energy generation and storage: all structures that enable or support human activity must be used in the future.
• Roofs and facades: energy generation, water retention, open spaces, multiple use
• Buildings and inner courtyards are inhabited by people, animals and plants. If you let them: human aided design, animal aided design, plant aided design …
• Low-carbon: building materials and components that exhibit short distances out of and into nature, and those that have been through a fair share of processes in previous buildings and are supposed to go through some more in additional buildings. Circularity Indicators.
• Building envelopes that act as passive energy systems, thus allowing for building services engineering to be brought down to a minimum.

Thermal comfort under dynamic conditions, with and without thermal cooling.

Neighborhoods

Energy generation with renewable energy sources, distribution and storage of energy take place in a decentralized manner in the neighborhood, the elementary building block of the “Climate Neutral City”. We are looking for reports of completed research projects and neighborhood developments that shed light on the following issues:

• What does the neighborhood have to contribute to future energy supply?
• To what extent does the neighborhood act as an energy store?

yet also on these aspects:

• Who is “the neighborhood”?
• The street space belongs to the neighborhood
• The ground floor zone belongs to the neighborhood
• The green areas and open spaces belong to the neighborhood
• Mixed use, home-based work, and a mix of different social strata are neighborhood concerns
• Public and community transport and traffic avoidance are neighborhood concerns

And after this enumeration, once again, who is “the neighborhood”?

And now the whole thing again in reverse, solution-oriented instead of problem-oriented:

Good neighborhood work or local development encourages the refurbishment of buildings. And then it goes without saying that contemporary building technology is also used.

Questions? We will be happy to answer them! kongress@ibo.at