Interdisciplinary development of a modular façade system with decentralised building services

The current discussion about energy saving measures in the built environment and the forthcoming new European guidelines “Energy efficiency in Buildings” mo tivated an aluminium facade company (Hydro Buildings Systems) to set up an interdisciplinary team for the development of a new facade. Therefore around ten partners from different backgrounds joined to create innovative and energy efficient solutions. The University of Dortmund was asked to do the architectural design and the project management as well as the basic environmental strategies. Multiple firms pro vided the technical components and expert consultants were included to work on thermal and air flow simula tions, the balancing of energy production and consumption and to set up innovative control strategies. The basic idea was to design a high quality modular facade with enough freedom for individual expression of buildings. It had to include all building services to run an office building and which should produce the energy needed for running the systems itself. Within only nine month a first prototype called TEmotion has been presented at the fair “Bau 2005” in Munich, Germany.