Municipal Office

Built in between the water and a busy road this narrow piece of land set a difficult task; too small to for a traditional building system of concrete cast in situ. So RAU decided to build with prefabricated concrete slabs. This reduced building time and costs. With the ‘left over’ budget they were able to integrate sustainable facilities to bring energy consumption of the building down: a green elevator, photovoltaic cells on the roof, sun boiler, roof garden, sustainable developed wood, balanced ventilation and a bivalent heat pump. The interior climate is controlled by activating the concrete itself. A system of pipes regulates the temperature by transporting warm or cold water through the floors. The mass of the concrete slowly absorbs the water temperature and releases it. It also works the other way round: in winter, the people who use the building actually help to heath it: the heath produced by computers and bodies accumulates in the concrete mass, and warms the water inside.