DGNB Klimapositiv Award for Freiburg Town Hall, 2019

The German Sustainable Building Council [Deutsche Gesellschaft für Nachhaltiges Bauen, DGNB] presented the DGNB Climate Positive award [DGNB Klimapositiv] in honor of Freiburg Town Hall on 8 October 2019 during the EXPO REAL in Munich. Following an all-round monitoring by our long-term cooperation partner Drees & Sommer, the DGNB established that the building had been used environmentally friendly and had lived up to the standards of their climate-neutral buildings and locations-framework. This illustrates that our supergreen®-principle makes a difference.

The DGNB evaluated how much energy the building itself generated over the course of a full year of operations compared to its actual use. The data showed that the building’s ecologically sustainable energy generation, set off against its consumption, allowed for a CO2-reduction of 9,828 kilograms – more than nine tons.

The DGNB was founded in 2007 and constitutes the largest European sustainable building network with over 1,200 member organizations and 500 volunteers. Members subscribe to ecologically sustainable architecture, raising building quality and supporting related research. The network consists of not only architects, but of representatives of all construction phases: Engineers, consultants, planners, investors and project developers are all under the organization’s umbrella. Together, they are continuously working on an evaluation system and constitute the official German representative in the World Green Building Council. In order to further awareness regarding sustainability, the DGNB publicizes its work with events and various publications.

The project was realized as part of a town hall expansion and is an incentive for an urban regeneration of the city’s Stühlinger quarter. Openness and transparency were key to ingenhoven architects’ design, which won an international design competition in 2013. The so-called ‘green campus’ is the project’s core and unites three buildings and a daycare center. The world’s first public zero-energy building unites around 840 city workers at a central location.