We have to convince users

Matthias Sauerbruch is an old friend of Hager Group, just last year, the Berlin architect completed Hager Forum in Obernai. Reason enough to ask what moves architects and builders.

Mr. Sauerbruch, when as an architect you talk with builders about building planning today, what are the most frequently asked questions about energy efficiency?

That all depends on who we are talking to. For home builders, energy efficiency is usually a secondary issue. Unless the customer has already dealt with the issue, they might ask about fuel cells or a photovoltaic system on the roof at a later stage of planning. It’s quite different for institutional customers. Their facility managers are usually extremely knowledgeable when it comes to energy efficiency. It is also not unusual to have management goals such as CO2 neutrality or sustainability certification. And of course the low operating costs of energy-efficient commercial properties are an aspect that any owner or operator is interested in. Many may already be building on experience from with other buildings.

Mike Elbers, Senior Vice President for Hager Europe, enjoys every opportunity to talk with planners, technicians and users. His credo: “…even the most sophisticated market research cannot replace face to face discussions.”

But the bottom line is that energy efficiency is not a top priority for your customers.

No, mostly they are primarily concerned about a building’s organisation and functionality. That’s also how it was for Hager Forum that we designed and built for you. Our most important task was to create a space where employees, partners and customers can meet. Nevertheless, the environmental performance of the building was an important criterion.

How do you explain the fact that we have been using the latest technologies for our cars or phones for some time, but our buildings are still technologically stuck in the last century?

We humans are creatures of habit. We appreciate the things that we know and have to be able to see some real benefit before we accept something new. And in the past, some building controls were launched to market that were neither ready nor easy to use. If you need a degree to understand how to use a technology then it will never catch on.

On the other hand, we absolutely accept that we can’t service our own cars, and that it has to be done by professionals.

Over two hours Matthias Sauerbruch and Mike Elbers discussed sustainable technologies and user-friendly building automation. Their conversation took place in the architect’s office in Berlin-Moabit.

True, as a young man I could even replace the fan belt on my car with a stocking. And in the winter I was glad if my car could manage a good distance without breaking down. Today I expect my car to work perfectly and have no desire to take matters into my own hands. However, this trust is also the result of my own experience.

It is precisely this understanding, in my opinion, that we have to apply to our properties; knowing that we achieve tangibly more efficiency and comfort in buildings with intelligent technology. Here we can learn a lot from Apple – a brand that combines highly complex technology with simple, intuitive operation.

I’m afraid that’s a poor analogy because your house or your workplace, unlike your car or mobile phone, are not machines. For the users of buildings the functionality of technological components is not the top priority; hence the technology should not become the main focus. Apple may be easy to use but the disadvantage of the operating system is its seclusion; there are hardly any interfaces to other brands or systems. On a building site we need as many simple interfaces between different technologies and manufacturers as possible. So far there just isn’t a simple plug and play system from one manufacturer that covers all technology components.

Matthias Sauerbruch, together with his wife Louisa Hutton, is one of Germany’s most successful architects. Their most famous buildings include the Brandhorst Museum and the ADAC building (both in Munich), the Dessau Federal Environment Agency and Cologne’s Oval Offices.

Which building technologies would you want to see?

As an architect I want flexible systems that require little space, that are easy to understand, easy to customise and inexpensive. Naturally that sounds like a magic panacea, but you did ask what I really want (laughs).

We have a lot of that in our portfolio already. Today you can already check and manage your energy consumption by app.

To save energy, building users need to know how much they will actually consume doing what. Non-intrusive monitoring of their own behaviour can, if they so wish, help users to reduce their ecological footprint.

This is a point that we keep coming back to, will a mere visualisation of consumption be enough, or should building technology also give users recommendations on how to further reduce it?

Here I can refer to our experience with our new building for the Dessau Federal Environment Agency, which we designed at the start of the new millennium with very ambitious energy savings targets for the time. According to our calculations, the building should consume 73 kWh of primary energy per square metre per year. In actual fact, in the first year the figure was almost double.

Why was that?

Firstly there were teething problems with the power engineering and the drawn-out process of calibrating all the control components. Secondly there were the users who just needed some time to warm up to the building and how it works. In the first few years it was like this; if a person was too warm in winter, they simply opened the window – not really knowing that the heating system was designed redundantly. And later people would then complain about the cold.
So we learned that even the best technology will only work when users get used to it. Everything that contributes to a mutual understanding is welcome.

What does that mean for you, the architects, and for us, the manufacturers?

We mustn’t forget what people actually need in our planning. At the same time, though, we also have to try to make users complicit in innovative solutions. It is not just about technology and how it is communicated. Quality of life is a function of well-being, and therefore of the subjective sensory perception of a building, which includes its shapes, colours, surfaces and light. And the more welcoming a building seems, the more likely its users will be to pay attention to and, if necessary, identify with it and its features. The task for us as architects is therefore to design buildings so that people are happy to set up in them. In case of doubt you should definitely be able to fall in love with a building.

Do you see any differences between living space and the workplace?

Yes, I do. When dealing with a private home or private residence, the emotional bond is much stronger and therefore so is the willingness to take responsibility. By contrast, you expect a working environment to work without you having to do something about it.

What do you think, will it become the standard for future building users to have their properties maintained by experts?

Yes, unfortunately. It is not for nothing that facility management has become increasingly important in recent years. It used to be caretakers who supervised buildings. Today, we have some highly specialised technicians. This sense of distance is not helpful; I think a certain ‘empowerment’ is a part of well-being. In my opinion, it should be the job of these specialists to help users deal intelligently with their properties themselves.

That would bring us significantly closer to the goal of conserving resources and reducing CO2 emissions.

I think so. At the same time, the objective decline in energy consumption per square metre in our homes is currently being more than offset by the growth in the demands we make. Of course we can think bigger, in terms of city systems, for instance. We could design mixed neighbourhoods with short distances between home and workplaces, with on-site production of food and distributed power generation. But the bottom line is that we are most likely to achieve our goals by changing our habits.

Buildings are still our biggest energy consumers, in future they could advance to become self-sufficient energy producers. Do you think that home and building owners are willing to get involved in terms of energy production?

Sure. There’s certainly something to the idea of a private power plant on the roof or in the cellar. And for that we need smart grids.

The trouble is that many old buildings are prepared for neither their own power generation nor intelligent energy monitoring. A recent study has shown that the electrical installation in 70 percent of Germany’s building stock is more than three decades old.

There is a tremendous opportunity in the upgrading of old existing buildings. We recently renovated an office building from the eighties for Munich Re in the north of Schwabing. Because we used the ‘embodied energy’ built in to its shell, the building hit the ground running with an enormous lead in terms of its energy use. We also saved costs and around a year of construction by recycling the shell.

Sustainable building usually requires greater initial investment. Does this ultimately present an unsolvable dilemma: that energy efficiency first costs at least more than it brings?

Yes. For the additional expense of a building designed for energy efficiency, you have to have an amortisation plan that goes beyond the current expectations of the financial market. This too is a learning process – builders today need to develop a longer-term view for their buildings. Architects in turn need to design so that their buildings not only survive in physical terms, but so that one day they can also be adapted to changing usage requirements. And society must learn to maybe stop tearing down the fine buildings of earlier generations and instead reuse them intelligently. Energy efficiency is therefore not just a question of technology, but also one of culture.

www.sauerbruchhutton.de