Award-winning building opens its doors (and windows) at Hamburg main station

Surrounded by yellow taxis, a dual carriageway and in front of the squat brick building that is Hamburg main station, there’s a wooden hut. From the ‘wrong’ side of the piazza, it looks like building works. Get close to it and you see it's not. It is a house. However, it is so far from the stereotypical image of an English home, that I didn't realise I was entering through a window through the balcony (below) rather than the front door.

This is a Plus-Energie-Haus (here's what the Bundesministeriums für Verkehr, Bau und Stadtentwicklung - BMVBS - says about it in German). In English it's called an Energy Plus House. It could be the house of the future, or at least, as far into the future as our imaginations and technology lets us think.

It’s a copy of an award-winning building. The original won the 2007 Solar Decathlon. The biannual Solar Decathlon is competition run by the American Department of Energy. It attracts entries from teams of students from around the world, all motivated by the challenge to design, build, and operate a solar-powered house that will be voted the most attractive and energy-efficient of that year’s entrants.

Why ‘decathlon’? In addition to being powered exclusively by solar energy, the buildings have to ‘compete’ in 10 areas. The houses are rated in terms of:

· being attractive and easy to live in
· their ability to maintain comfortable and healthy indoor environmental conditions
· featuring appealing and adequate lighting
· supplying energy to household appliances for cooking and cleaning
· powering home electronics
· providing hot water
· balancing energy production and consumption.

In 2007, the winners were….. the team from the Technical University of the German city of Darmstadt. And, the same University did it again in October 2009!

I had the good luck to arrive at the Plus-Energie-Haus when there were no other visitors. The chap 'on duty’ was enthusiastic and knowledgeable. He volunteered information as well as answering my naïve questions patiently and, if he’d been asked the same query 40 times already that day, he didn’t let on.

My second piece of good luck was that just when I ran out of questions, a group arrived to watch the film (shown daily at 4pm as part of a tour of the premises), and then had the opportunity to put their own questions. Judging by the depth of technical detail they wanted, I think they might have been architects, or perhaps people wanting to build their own homes.

The difference between a Plus-Energie-Haus and a PassivHaus is that the former creates more energy than it uses – which it sells back to the national grid for a higher price than it pays for the electricity it buys from it. Since January 2009, the building has contributed 10,0000 Kw to the German national grid.

The example in Hamburg (it’s already been to Munich and Berlin and I believe it will next go to Frankfurt, and from there to Stuttgart) comprises two large rooms, with a bathroom in the ‘core’ and a ‘kitchen’ on the outside of the core walls. Of course, as this is an exhibition piece not a real house, there’s no shower and the cooking area is what the Germans call a ‘niche’ kitchen rather than a 'built-in' (ie complete) kitchen.

Another aspect that might be different if it were your average home, is the glazing. On the southern side, it is three-layer glass. On the north side, it is four-layer glass. Heck, I’ve only just learned you can get triple-glazed windows, and now I’m introduced to the concept of double the amount that’s standard in English homes. Can you even get these items in the UK?

I don’t look at these installations with the eye of an architect, but from the standpoint of the resident. The low energy use, the selling electricity back to the grid, the warm walls (achieved by inserting capsules of paraffin into the building materials, that take up excess heat when the building warms up and release it when the internal temperature falls, but which contain so little that even the container were to break and spill the ‘wall’ could absorb it), the huge windows, the covered balcony… It looks good. It feels good. But there’s a lot of wood to paint, repair or replace, and an awful lot of glass....

Those scenes from comics where the schoolboy with a cap, shorts and one sock round his ankles, hiding behind a wall when father or Mr Jones from next door comes home to see a star-shaped hole in his shed window or his greenhouse, will be a thing of the past… With the amount of glass required for photo voltaic cells, coupled with the solar panels, if these houses become standard, footballs will be banned from residential areas.

The Plus-Energie-Haus is in front of Hamburg main station (Glockengießerwall junction with Ernst-Merck-Strasse) until 25 January 2009.

It is aimed at developers, investors, planners... to show them that energy efficient buildings can be attractive and that they work. It is a prototype for buildings for the year 2015. My guide explained that it cost 1.2m Euros to build this version but by 2015, the technology and materials should be in general production and buying a version in that year should cost rather less - 300,000 Euros.

For more information about the building and the events taking place there see the Zebau site.

(Images courtesy of Zebau.)